This year marked the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), but despite the age of the game, it’s never been more popular. With the rise in D&D ‘actual play’ content, like Critical Role, Dimension 20 and DesiQuest, it shouldn’t be at all surprising there’s been a renewed interest from players keen to get into the game for themselves.
In fact, there’s a cavalcade of new players starting to dip their toes into the water – even though historically, it’s not been the easiest game to dive into. Complex rulesets and specific mechanics have often been a deterrent for newcomers, and so it’s often easier for newbies to simply watch from a distance, at least, at first.
This separation allows newcomers to scope out the game from behind the safety net of their computer, narrowing the distance between ‘scoping out’ and ‘diving headfirst in with reckless abandon once you discover the joy of the game’. But while ‘actual play’ content leads the charge in this particular arena, there’s a new kid on the block of the D&D world – and it started on the boards of the theatre.
With a focus on making D&D accessible, laugh-out-loud funny, and immersive on a whole new scale, Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern is an interactive theatre experience that blends elements of improvisation and performance with the mechanics of D&D, amplified by a technology that allows for audiences to be directly involved with the direction of the show.
Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with Broadway producer and creator of the show David Carpenter, to discuss how the project came to be, what it’s like adapting D&D for the stage, and why it’s so important to celebrate bringing people together in shared experiences.
If you build it, they will come
Carpenter is no stranger to the stage. With over twenty years of production experience, including Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, his understanding of the relationship between audience and story is impressive. When it came time to develop something new, he went in search of a challenge.
“Back in 2016/2017, I was trying to figure out a way to bring a branching narrative style experience to the live stage,” he told GamesHub.
While there were software options that allowed for basic audience polling (à la Jackbox audience votes), Carpenter couldn’t find an audience engagement tool that really satisfied the level of interactivity he was seeking.
“What I realised is that there wasn’t a mechanism that allowed for collective audience choice during a live stage production – and that is effectively where Gamiotics, my software platform, was born.”
Gamiotics is a browser-based interface that allows for a significant degree of audience input, which – with the right cast and story – can create an interactive theatre experience that feels collectively immersive. In the early days of development, the team created an array of use case options and case studies, but there was one very specific use case that stood out above the rest.
“The software platform lent itself to a D&D game, and the D&D game lent itself to the software platform,” said Carpenter.
Uniting the pair made sense. After collective perceptions and cultural opinion shifted during the pandemic, D&D had become far more prevalent in the mainstream sphere – with a positive reputation for being something people could do safely over Zoom or Discord.
“Part of the [renewed interest in the game] is how important of a role it played in keeping people active mentally and creatively during the pandemic – especially when we were on lockdowns,” said Carpenter. “It became such a force of good, and then people didn’t want to stop doing it on the other side.”
From there, Carpenter’s focus sharpened, the beginnings of a homebrew campaign were sketched out, and the foundations for The Twenty-Sided Tavern were laid.
Adapting D&D for the stage is not for the faint-hearted
Set in the very heart of the Forgotten Realms, the story of The Twenty-Sided Tavern is an ever-changing blend of wild encounters, unexpected roadblocks, high-stakes manoeuvring and a dash of delightful comedic moments.
An experiential theatre show, the production features three actors/players, alongside a DM (dungeon master) who will help guide both the players and audience along, as the story unfolds differently each and every night.
There are inherent challenges to adapting a D&D campaign for the stage, even before you consider the level of audience involvement. Sure, shoving a cast of improvisers onstage to play around will certainly be entertaining, but technically that would be closer in tone to actual play than it is to experiential theatre.
So how do you make an interactive D&D stage show feel authentic? How do you replicate the feeling of being held to the whims of a DM? Of finding bizarre and unconventional methods to problem-solve your way out of an encounter? Of trying desperately to prevent your party’s bard from seducing everything that moves?
While technology and structure play a significant part in the logistics of the endeavour, above all things, a show like The Twenty-Sided Tavern requires adaptability.
“I’m really obsessed with agency of experience and branching narrative storytelling, [with the idea that] you can go to something and have the ending could be completely different night to night, depending on the choices that were made during it”, said Carpenter. “And so what I set out to do, was to build a show that was never the same show twice, ever.”
It’s a big claim, but there’s a method to the madness. Each performance will follow a series of benchmarks that delineate the story. These are set in stone, no matter what choices or suggestions arise over the course of the night, but they aren’t intrusive in a way that makes audience choice feel irrelevant.
In crafting story beats like so, the performers have a baseline to refer to and, critically, the story doesn’t find itself getting rapidly out of hand before the closing curtain.
“We know we’re gonna go from here, to here, to here, to here, and we’re gonna get to this place by the end,” said Carpenter. “[But] everything that happens in between, and what happens at the end, is always different. And that, to me, is really exciting from an entertainment perspective.”
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For director Michael Fell (pictured below), a big part of the success of this format comes down to the cast, and their willingness to take on whatever the audience throws at them. There’s an element of improv, of course, but taking on this gig also requires a solid enough understanding of role-play itself.
“Role-playing and improvisation share a lot of the same DNA, but they do have subtle differences,” said Fell. “If I’m directing an improvised scene, I always ask the actors to ‘follow the fun’ – meaning if something seems funny or interesting and it’s getting a reaction from the crowd, continue to explore that thing. With role-playing, I’d ask an actor to ‘follow their character,’ which might have them actively working against the best interests of the other characters.”
Blending the two methods is what creates the perfect intersection of character fidelity and audience satisfaction – which is all the more important when it comes to grounding an experience that is fantastical by default. By virtue of the technological involvement, audiences get to feel a rare degree of ownership over the story – but that means nothing if the characters don’t feel whole and real.
The same goes for the stakes. It’s one thing to put your fate in the hands of the audience, but that doesn’t negate the importance of high-pressure dice rolls and escalating tensions. So for shows like The Twenty-Sided Tavern, it’s important to consider the audience as an extension of the cast, as a conduit for the game itself.
A bridging point for D&D newcomers
As exciting and immersive as it all sounds, there’s still one very clear sticking point that The Twenty-Sided Tavern had to address in order to make its mark on both theatre audiences and the mainstream population.
While shows like Stranger Things have gone a long way in garnering mainstream interest, when it comes to explaining the actual mechanics of D&D to a complete newcomer, there’s still an inherent gap of learning that needs to be bridged, especially when you’re trying to encourage them into the theatre of the mind for the first time.
In recent months, a video of actress (and notable D&D dungeon master) Deborah Ann Woll teaching Jon Bernthal to play D&D went viral. In the video, Woll skipped the typical preamble and deposited Bernthal directly into a scene.
“You’ve got a bow strapped to your back, a sword and a dagger at your hilt,” she begins. “You’re walking through the woods – it’s dark, it’s at night, almost no moonlight is coming through. You hear a crack, off in the distance, something large stepped on a branch… what would you do?”
Immediately, without any complex discussions of rulesets or mechanics, Bernthal is playing. He’s invested, he’s involved… It clicks in a way that makes the game feel accessible, achievable.
That click is vital to getting someone on board, and it’s not always easy to manufacture. You need to put someone in a position where they’re actively involved and immersed in the fun side of the game, without overwhelming them with details and minutiae too early. And that is exactly what The Twenty-Sided Tavern seeks to do.
“A challenge for us in any market that we go to, is saying you don’t have to know anything about D&D in order to come in,” said Carpenter. “In fact, we want you to come in and learn about what this is, and see why your friends are so excited about it.”
Personally, I’ve had countless conversations with family members and friends who can’t quite click – maybe they “don’t get” the appeal of a collaborative make-believe session, or don’t quite get how you can be emotionally invested in something that is unseeable.
“That’s what D&D players have trouble explaining to their friends – we’re like, ‘look, we’re in a battle, and it was the elf and the druid, and we were trying to kill the bad guy, and everyone’s like, ‘the fuck are you talking about?'” said Carpenter. “But you know how important that was, and you know what the tension was at that moment, and it’s real.”
It’s why shows like The Twenty-Sided Tavern can be so valuable in giving newcomers a kick-off point. More often than not, new players need something visible, something tangible. Live shows, actual plays and interactive theatre experiences provide the most important thing: an IN.
The easiest analogy, per Carpenter, is to compare watching a D&D live show to watching a sports game. Imagine a football match – it’s tied, and there’s a penalty kick to determine the winner. Tension is palpable, the crowd watches in anticipation. If the goalie reads the play right, it’s all over… but if the kicker nails the shot, the entire crowd goes wild. That unleashed torrent of emotion and tension is not altogether different to the feeling of rolling a natural 20 in the context of The Twenty-Sided Tavern.
“We’re in a collaborative game space, so it’s never about one person against the other… But then you get that moment where it could go either way, and it goes your way at the show,” said Carpenter. “The feeling in that room of 500 people is the same as a stadium of 30,000 screaming – it’s that same thing, and that’s really, really extraordinary.”
Joining the party
Whether you’re a complete newcomer to the game or you’re simply in-between sessions of your own campaign (because as we all know, the biggest bad guy in D&D is coordinating time to play with everyone), The Twenty-Sided Tavern is shaping up to be a fun way to scratch your D&D itch.
With 93 shows on the cards between opening night (tomorrow, the 18th of December) and the end of run in early March, there’s a wild amount of role-play, improv and immersion to get into at the Sydney Opera House, especially given the promise of a different show every night.
Personally, as a theatre tragic and enthusiastic D&D player, I find the intersection between experiential entertainment and collaborative play a really fun space to explore – and after speaking with Carpenter about what it takes to pull this off, I’m keen to check it out myself.
“[At] the heart of it, it’s just a really fun D&D game that you as an audience get to sit and participate in,” he said. “You get to enjoy and have stakes in the outcome that you won’t get in any other type of the experience, anywhere in the world.”
