The D&D movie captures one of the best parts of gaming

polygon.com:

About midway through Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Michelle Rodriguez’s character, Holga the barbarian, visits her ex’s house to get some closure on their relationship. The scene is played pretty straight, with Holga and Marlamin (played by Bradley Cooper) having a heart-to-heart about where their marriage went wrong. But it’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie, since the two actors are having this deep, emotional conversation while one of them is a tiny, fancy man in a regular-sized chair, and the other is a gruff, ax-wielding, fur-clad barbarian who just beat up a whole team of guards.

This sequence particularly tickled me because in my opinion, having an ex floating around is such a fun mechanic to integrate into a role-playing game. It’s a reminder that even in this fantastical world of dungeons and dragons, the characters still mean something to each other. That goes beyond past romantic dalliances and backstory — I just love having personal, one-on-one interactions within game settings, because it makes the characters feel real, like they exist in this world beyond their quests and adventures. They have an impact on other people, beyond slaying monsters and seizing loot.

There can be mechanical benefits as well as personal ones. One of my current D&D characters has a long list of exes that I’ve woven into his backstory. Only one of them has made an appearance in our game so far (with more amiable interactions than Holga and Marlamin), but my character constantly references his long string of exes. It’s a telling detail about his history, but I’ve also used it to argue for knowledge of certain languages and historical details, because of all the things he’s picked up from his wide variety of past