Asger Risom
While the Netflix series is best known for its 1980s setting, the Duffer brothers say the storytelling logic behind the closing chapter owes as much to role-playing games as it does to nostalgia.
The final episode of Stranger Things may feel bigger and more coordinated than anything the show has attempted before, but its structure didn’t come from television tradition alone. According to the series’ creators, the finale draws directly from Dungeons & Dragons — with a modern video game helping translate those tabletop ideas to the screen.
While the Netflix series is best known for its 1980s setting, the Duffer brothers say the storytelling logic behind the closing chapter owes as much to role-playing games as it does to nostalgia.
Dungeons & Dragons first
Dungeons & Dragons has been central to Stranger Things since the beginning. The show’s young protagonists are D&D players, and they consistently use the game’s language to understand threats they don’t yet fully comprehend.
The monsters themselves are not literal D&D creatures. Instead, the characters name them after D&D enemies because it gives them a shared framework to describe the unknown.
Vecna, the Mind Flayer and other threats take their names from the game, even though they exist entirely outside its mythology.
That approach extends to the finale, where the logic of facing an overwhelming enemy mirrors how a tabletop campaign works.
A modern game lens
Speaking to Variety, Matt Duffer said that while Dungeons & Dragons remained the core reference point, a contemporary role-playing game helped shape how those ideas were executed onscreen.
“We were thinking about Dungeons & Dragons and I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 at the time,” Duffer said. “We felt it was very important that the only way for them to defeat it was for the entire party to work together.”
He explained that by the final episode, each character has resolved their personal conflicts, leaving them fully prepared to function as a unit rather than individuals acting in isolation.
The party system
That sense of a “party” — a defining concept in Dungeons & Dragons — is what guided the staging of the episode’s central conflict.
Each character brings a distinct strength, and success depends on coordination rather than a single heroic moment.
Duffer said that idea was reinforced by role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate 3, where progress depends on combining abilities to overcome enemies that would be impossible to defeat alone.
“That’s how you take down these monsters that seem otherwise unstoppable,” he said, adding that multiple video game ideas fed into how the sequence was built.
From tabletop to screen
The finale ultimately reflects how Stranger Things has always treated its influences: not as strict lore, but as tools for storytelling. The show borrows names, structure and logic from Dungeons & Dragons, while modern games help visualise how those systems translate into action.
Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke later acknowledged the reference on social media, sharing Duffer’s comments and calling the connection “pretty cool.”
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For a series rooted in the 1980s, the ending shows how old ideas — tabletop collaboration, shared rules and collective problem-solving — can still feel fresh when filtered through modern gaming design.
Sources: Variety; Netflix interviews; public social media posts from Larian Studios.
