Why thousands are paying to watch people play Dungeons & Dragons live

There is no script, no fixed ending and no guarantee the heroes will make it out alive.

Onstage, performers build a fantasy world together while dice rolls and split-second choices can send the story to places nobody planned.

On Sept. 10, nearly 2,800 people will fill Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre for a sold-out performance of Endless Dungeon, led by comedian and game master Brennan Lee Mulligan. The Vancouver date follows a sold-out May performance at Toronto’s Coca-Cola Coliseum.

Endless Dungeon is part of the growing world of “actual play” — tabletop role-playing games performed for an audience — a genre combining improvisational theatre, collaborative storytelling and game mechanics, with dice helping determine whether characters succeed or fail.

For performers and scholars, the appeal lies in uncertainty, intimacy and collaboration — and in knowing that no two performances will be exactly alike.

Mulligan told CBC News that part of the attraction is simply “the joy of live theatre.”

“It’s happening in front of your face,” he said, adding that the audience reactions become part of the draw. “You are there, your gasps, your laughs, your groans at a bad D&D pun.”

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A roller coaster with no track

The term “actual play” is recent, but the practice is a longstanding one according to Emily Friedman, a professor of English at Alabama’s Auburn University who studies the format.

Online shows such as Critical Role, Mulligan’s Dimension 20 and The Adventure Zone helped bring actual play into the mainstream. Live performances are often self-contained, with clearer character goals and story beats designed to reach an ending in a few hours. That makes the action “heightened and brightened and made sharper and quicker and faster,” Friedman said.

She compared its appeal to being on a roller coaster where “the track is being laid in front of you at high speed.”

Vancouver comedian Jess Lupini, who is joining Endless Dungeon for this stop, compared it to another form of unscripted entertainment.

“Watching actual plays is exciting in many of the same ways that watching hockey is exciting,” she said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

A woman and a man sit at a table on a set with triangle shapes in the background. — Emily Friedman, left, and Brennan Lee Mulligan on an episode of Adventuring Academy, a series on the streaming service Dropout. Friedman says live actual play is like a roller coaster whose track is being laid as the performers race forward. (Submitted by Emily Friedman)

‘The feeling of being in the room’

But that unpredictable nature only partly explains why people pay to see a format they can watch online.

Abdul Aziz, a Vancouver comedian joining Mulligan for this Endless Dungeon performance, says the attraction is “probably the feeling of being in the room.”

Aziz also performs on the actual-play podcast Spout Lore, which has tried to preserve the atmosphere of friends playing together even as those conversations became entertainment for strangers.

“We sort of are more focused on each other while playing than we are focused on the audience,” Aziz said.

Friedman says audiences are watching two things at once: fictional characters and the real people creating them reacting genuinely when another player’s choice surprises them.

Mulligan says performers have to make the audience feel included without sacrificing their connection to one another.

“The best part of live theatre is the preservation of authentic connection between performers and feeling totally invisible as an audience member, even as everything has been arranged to include you,” he said.

“Whatever you do to delight your players will delight the audience.”

A man with a tie and vest stands on stage with a microphone. — Abdul Aziz, a Vancouver comedian and actual-play performer, says tabletop role-playing games let people put parts of themselves into their characters, creating an authentic connection with audiences. (Submitted by Abdul Aziz)

A place to imagine differently

For Aziz, fantasy also offers room to question rules that can seem fixed in the real world.

Aziz, whose parents are from Egypt and who immigrated to Canada as a child, says growing up in a mainly white community gave him an outsider’s perspective on cultural conventions.

That carried into Spout Lore. While building his barbarian character’s homeland, Aziz drew heavily on Middle Eastern cultures.

“In a very literal sense, the outsider’s perspective was immediately useful in our show,” he said.

A man with his arms crossed sits beside a smiling woman with long hair, while another man faces them from behind a game-master screen at a table covered with miniature terrain. An illustrated fantasy village forms the backdrop. — Jess Lupini, centre, a Vancouver comedian and actual-play performer, appears with fellow BlackwaterDnD cast member Sean Depner, left, and game master Tim Carlson. Lupini says role-playing gave her a safe way to explore her gender identity before transitioning. (Submitted by Jess Lupini)

For Lupini, who is also a recurring cast member on BlackwaterDnD, an actual-play show streamed on YouTube and Twitch, taking on different characters became a way to explore herself.

Lupini, who is transgender, says tabletop role-playing games give people a chance to try on different identities, pronouns and personalities.

Before transitioning, she played characters who used she/her pronouns.

“That was really liberating and felt like a safe way of exploring a piece of myself that I had been conditioned to be really afraid of exploring,” she said.

Friedman says women, gender-nonconforming people, 2SLGBTQ+ people and disabled people have always been part of tabletop gaming as players and creators, but were not always visible in traditional gaming spaces.

“It’s just the shift of the spotlight in a lot of ways,” she said.

Mulligan agrees, saying actual play didn’t create those experiences, but made them easier to see.

“Actual play provided visibility for a reality that was always there,” he said.

A smiling person with shoulder-length dark blue hair, facial piercings and tattoos across their neck and chest wears a black top and jacket against an olive-green wall. — Em Carlson, CEO and creative director of the Vancouver-based actual-play show BlackwaterDnD, says audiences want stories that make them feel included in the narrative. (Submitted by Em Carlson)

A safe place to play

That kind of exploration depends on trust, says Em Carlson, CEO and creative director of BlackwaterDnD and another performer joining Vancouver’s Endless Dungeon.

Carlson, whose professional background is in mental-health therapy, says the group does extensive preparation around safety and collaboration and notes that “play can’t happen if you’re not safe.”

Tabletop role-playing culture still hasn’t fully achieved its ideals of inclusion, Carlson says, but the stories reaching audiences have broadened as people want stories that help them feel included in the narrative.

“They can be a part of that joy that the players experience at the table.”

For Carlson, Endless Dungeon offers something increasingly uncommon in an era of endlessly replayable media: a story created once, for the people present.

“It’s a one-night experience where a fantastic, amazing audience gets to come in and laugh with us and cry with us and feel big feelings and cheer.”