Summary
- Honor Among Thieves incorporates both obvious and hidden Dungeons & Dragons class abilities, adding to the cinematic effects and engaging storyline.
- The film showcases unique abilities of various characters, such as Edgin’s Bardic Inspiration, Holga’s Rage, and Simon’s Metamagic, among others.
- Lesser-known abilities like Holga’s Unarmored Defense and Holga’s Improvised Weapon Proficiency are also displayed, adding depth to the characters and their actions.
While Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves included several of the more obvious Dungeons & Dragons class abilities, it also had some of the game’s hidden powers as well. Dungeons & Dragons is full of cinematic effects, making it easy to see when and why they were incorporated into the movie. For example, the instances when Doric (Sophia Lillis) wild shapes into a deer or Simon (Justice Smith) causes gravity to reverse are all memorable and make the film engaging. However, not all the abilities found in Dungeons & Dragons are as easy to see.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves follows a colorful cast of characters throughout its story, each with unique abilities that are displayed throughout the film. Between Edgin the bard (Chris Pine), Holga the barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), Simon the sorcerer, Doric the druid, and Xenk the Paladin (Regé-Jean Page), some of the most recognizable aspects of Dungeons & Dragons appear in the movie, and could appear in Dungeons & Dragons 2‘s story as well. However, the game has many other abilities that aren’t as easily seen, such as the Lucky feat or a rogue’s Evasion feature, which have saved many a player while in-game.
10 Edgin’s Bardic Inspiration
In the TTRPG, bards can typically cast several spells and create other arcane effects with their music. However, Edgin is not that type of bard in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Instead, the character leans into the social abilities inherent to the class, including the feature Bardic Inspiration. This allows a bard to give another player an extra die to roll during an ability check, attack roll, or saving throw, potentially allowing them to succeed when they might have otherwise failed. Edgin does this when he encourages Simon before their final attempt on the vault at the end of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
9 Edgin’s Song of Rest
Another lesser-known bard ability is the Song of Rest, but it still comes to play in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. With this feature, bards can play music while their party takes a short rest, allowing those who can hear them to regain extra health while they recuperate. Edgin displays this feature when Holga returns after visiting Marlamin (Bradley Cooper). By playing his lute and encouraging her to sing along, Edgin helps Holga recover and cheer up, displaying a more subtle use of his bardic skills.
8 Holga’s Rage
While it’s commonly known that Holga, as a barbarian, is a strong and hardy character, there are many other abilities inherent to her character class that she displays throughout the film that are not as obvious. One of these is her barbarian Rage, which allows her to take less damage than she should during fights while dishing out more hurt than normal. Holga displays this in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves on several occasions when she takes on several guards at once, absorbing blows that would knock back anyone else while dropping her opponents with ease.
7 Holga’s Unarmored Defense
Another facet of Holga’s barbarian class abilities comes in the armor she wears, or rather, does not wear in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. While Xenk is adorned in plate armor, Holga appears to wear little more than a leather tunic with minimal plating on the chest and no sleeves. While this might be dangerous for some, for barbarians, less armor is often a good thing due to their Unarmored Defense feature. This allows barbarians to calculate their armor class as 10 plus their dexterity modifier plus their constitution modifier, instead of the singular dexterity modifier usually applied when wearing armor.
6 Holga’s Improvised Weapon Proficiency
Finally, one of the last lesser-known class abilities Holga uses in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is her improvised weapon proficiency. Usually, characters in Dungeons & Dragons are more limited in the damage they can do when using a weapon they have not trained with, including unorthodox weapons such as bar stools or stones. However, with Holga’s special proficiency, she can wield improvised weapons such as potatoes and bricks with great efficacy, such as when she threw a potato at Forge (Hugh Grant) or used a brick to save herself and Edgin from execution.
Another subtle class ability is Simon’s metamagic. While Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves showcased Simon’s wild magic when he accidentally reverses gravity, another sorcerer feature is called metamagic. This symbolizes the sorcerer’s innate connection to the arcane and how they can manipulate spells in a way that others can’t, partly through a mechanic that Dungeons & Dragons calls sorcery points. Sorcerers can spend sorcery points to cast extra spells or create special effects, an element which is displayed through the sheer versatility and amount of magic Simon can do throughout the movie.
4 Simon’s Tides of Chaos
Another ability unique to Simon in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is because of his access to wild magic. When a player in Dungeons & Dragons chooses to be a wild magic sorcerer, they can use an ability called Tides of Chaos, which lets them roll with advantage on an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw. While it’s impossible to “see” when Simon is using this ability to help him get out of scrapes, he likely used Tides of Chaos when escaping the barn after his failed performance, allowing him the luck to catch the rafters and fall into Holga’s arms.
3 Xenk’s Aura of Protection
While Xenk did not use one of the hallmarks of paladins in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, he was unconsciously using another ability of the class. In Dungeons & Dragons, paladins exude an Aura of Protection, which lets those standing close to the paladin add a number to their saving throws to avoid traps and magical effects, and even stave off death. Again, while this isn’t a visual ability in the movie, it’s likely that Xenk’s aura helped protect the party while escaping Themberchaud in the Underdark.
2 Doric’s High Wisdom
Another subtle ability that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves highlighted is Doric’s high wisdom score. In Dungeons & Dragons, druids typically have a high wisdom score because this is the ability that powers their spell casting. But as a result, a druid’s ability to read body language and spot small elements in the environment are often heightened as well, because the wisdom stat and the perception skill are mechanically related. This explains how perceptive Doric is throughout the movie, such as when she spotted the ledge for the party to portal to when escaping Themberchaud and when she discovered the chest with a weapon in the maze.
1 Xenk’s Divine Health
One more hidden ability in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is Xenk’s Divine Health. While Xenk ages much more slowly than a normal human, it’s surprising that he has not been significantly impacted by illness in his century of life. However, all paladins in Dungeons & Dragons have a feature called Divine Health, which means that they are immune to all diseases. This likely helped Xenk live to such an advanced age, as he can still be killed even if he ages at a slower rate.