My dad used to play dnd. The best game he ever played in was a lotr skinned rewrite of the classic book, The Guns of Navarone. Set in WW2 the story was reskinned into a fantasy seeing. The party snuck onto a fortified island guarded by flying dragons that dropped fire eggs on the party, traversed bunkers and trenches, and delivered a world saving device into the heart of the facility. 

Anyone else have experiences with these kinds of games? I am beginning to work on one that is a rewrite of the movie Casablanca - suggestions appreciated. But yeah, if you have a moment, tell a story, ask a question. Muse a little. Perhaps your next game will benefit more directly from the work of the masters who wrote before...

The trouble I've always had doing this is railroading.  A war movie is pretty easy to reskin.  You have an objective that everyone agrees to.  No one's going to fireball Private Ryan for a laugh.  

OTOH, when your Rick decides "To hell with Lazslo, I'm getting on the plane with Ilsa," or your Louis goes over to the Vichy French because the Germans pay better, there's a lot of temptation to nudge things back the way "they're supposed to be."  Especially if a big set piece is dependent on certain things happening earlier to set it up.  And then, of course, if your players recognize the source material, it can seem corny or even a temptation to deliberately mess things up.  

Spy movies and mystery movies are both surprisingly hard to make work as well, for the same reason.  Players are chaos agents and they eat plot for breakfast.  

You would think horror movies would be a natural, but you're dealing with characters who have their own chainsaws and are itching for an excuse to use them.  The real trick in horror scenarios, to me, is getting the party to split up.  Things automatically get realer when they suddenly realize they're alone.  Mostly I mine horror movies for scenes and images rather than plots, though.  For example, a character being attacked by a night hag in their dreams looks to the rest of the party like a scene from Nightmare on Elm Street, where they break through the door and the character is floating up on the ceiling, being thrown around by an invisible assailant.  Being chased through Barovia by a random encounter table revenant is actually surprisingly like Friday the 13th if you do it right.

I've tried to adapt caper films by introducing a Danny Ocean-style NPC who actually comes up with a plan and feeds it to the party, just because it takes FOREVER for people to come up with a plan on their own.  They're always visited by the Good Idea Fairy, who gives them so many good ideas that their simple functional plans become unwieldy nightmares that they can never stop tweaking and actually execute.

I guess what I would boil all this down to is that unless it's a real straight-line of a story (and war movies are good for this), you'll find it challenging to reproduce a particular story.   The way to approach it (IMO) is instead to ask yourself what you really love about the story, what scenes, lines, images, vibe, characters, and try to reproduce that instead.

Oh gosh that's an awesome reference! I've always encouraged my players to use the magic system from those books - the Will and the Word. Sadly, I am usually the best read at my table, so a lot of references fall flat.

Horror stories as source material is super useful for sure. I once ran an overly long one shot where the boogieman chasing the party was the Shrike from the Hypersion Cantos by Dan Simmons - a 9ft tall, four armed sculpture of chrome and razor wire, hands like scalpels extended in a bladed embrace. Also, it could control time freely and was functionally indestructible. 

Yeah, the plan for the Casablanca adaptation is definitely more about atmosphere than literal recreation. The players are probably going to be given individual sets of goals based on their character. Most important will probably be a kind of chase element where the party is actively trying to keep the exit visas out of the hands of the bad guys. For sure, though, the players will figure it out eventually, but hopefully not till about halfway or so. I'll definitely be putting in a lot of creative energy into figuring out what to tell the players, what to adapt, and what to cut. The "play it again, Sam" scene, for example, is iconic but probably impossible to pull off organically. The "shocked to find gambling in this establishment! (Your winnings, sir)" however, isn't too hard to do, especially if the police chief is in on the source material.