When I started playing “Dungeons & Dragons” as a teenager, my friends christened me with a new friendly nickname: gamer geek. While we could spend hours in front of a screen with the latest “Zelda” title, the dice-centric tabletop role-playing game was viewed with suspicion, a '70s-era invention that belonged to a certain subset of nerds.
Times have changed.
Today, “Dungeons & Dragons” enjoys mainstream recognition, and live gaming sessions from the likes of Critical Role and Dimension 20, the latter of which last summer enjoyed a date at the Hollywood Bowl, have only further cemented its broad appeal. Now a heavily improvised stage production, “Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern” has arrived at the Montalbán Theater in Hollywood.
The show, which will debut Off-Broadway in 2024 after years of development, is a celebration, a victory lap for a game that has lasted more than half a century. It invites participation, with actors performing the action inspired by dice rolls and allowing the audience to influence the direction of the show by making decisions via a smartphone.
Alex Stompoly, left, and Anjali Bhimani in “Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern,” a production that invites audience participation.
(Andromeda Rodríguez)
“Twenty-Sided Tavern” brought me back to the days and nights huddled around my family's living room table. My father was an executive at TSR, Inc., the company that created “Dungeons & Dragons”: there were glass dragons on our mantelpiece, pewter dragons on our bookshelves, dragons painted on our walls, and even a metal dragon hanging from a necklace that I wore a little too often (and that probably didn't help me get dates). As a high school kid, gaming was a refuge, a creative tool where I could imagine fantastical characters, worlds, and settings.
There was also a lot of math and quite a few rules, not to mention the additions to the rules and the fine print of those rules, but I discovered early on a key to its personal appeal, one that probably makes many hardcore fans of the game cringe: the story comes first, the rules a distant second. In fact, I threw out any directives that would get in the way of a more fanciful story.
I was glad “Twenty-Sided Tavern” did it too. When my presentation the other week began not with spectators and battles but with a story about trying to flirt and seduce a dragon, I couldn't help but smile. Because the best “D&D” games, no matter how serious, tense or dramatic they may be, are always a little silly, or at least they are for me.
“I know we hear about toxicity in games all the time, but when I bought my first 'D&D' set that my brother gave me when I was 8, what opened up to me was not just a world of storytelling,” says Anjali Bhimani, co-producer of the production and a regular actor in it. “It was a world where a halfling could slay a red dragon, where it didn't matter where you came from. There was always a seat for you at the table.
Anjali Bhimani in a production of “Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern.” The actor sees the game as a tool for telling stories.
(Andromeda Rodríguez)
“I think the sense of belonging that tabletop role-playing games and 'Dungeons & Dragons' can provide is very, very powerful, and I think it's really a means of bringing people together in a way that a lot of other mediums can't,” he adds.
The “Tavern of Twenty Faces” has some limitations. After all, it is being performed in a theater. But it also leaves aside the traditional rules of theater. Expect, for example, to be on your phone for most of the show. We will slightly direct the production, voting, for example, to explore the catacombs of a castle or the mysterious forests. Many will applaud a good roll of the dice, and it was not out of the ordinary at my matinee for the audience to shout suggestions or requests. When, for example, said story about romance with a dragon got a little risqué, one woman kindly reminded the cast that children were present. It was toned down, but not before an actor made a joke about the show being educational.
“This doesn't have to be a boring, fourth-wall drama,” says Michael Fell, the show's creative director. “We can create a sense of community. As much as there is a script (there sort of is), our goal is to have interaction with the audience every two pages. That means they're shouting a name, asking to come on stage, or it's just a choice on your phone where you make a decision or play a little mini-game. No interaction on the phone lasts more than nine seconds.”
In “Twenty-Sided Tavern,” there are three main actors who play and act out the game, a dungeon master and a sort of tavern keeper who helps keep score and follow the story. There's a bar setup and a mission that involves a threat to the city, but each show is unique. The cast can swap roles, the audience can invent a monster (my group imagined a giant, destructive slice of pumpkin pie), and the setting will change based on the audience's vote, done via smartphone.
It's a bit like theater as a sport.
“This is gamification of live entertainment. Part of what I'm doing is mirroring what happens in sports entertainment, but in a live theatrical environment,” says David Carpenter, founder of Gamiotics, which co-developed the show and powers the smartphone technology behind it. “This show has surprised me for years, but one of the first surprises was that the entire audience lost their minds when someone rolled a 20. It's like someone scored a touchdown. The audience goes crazy because they didn't see it coming.”
Anjali Bhimani, left, Will Champion and Jasmin Malave look ready for battle in a production of “Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern.”
(Andromeda Rodríguez)
Like the game, “Twenty-Sided Tavern” theorizes that stories can be most powerful when they are not passive, when we, as audience members, have a role to play and an invitation to interact.
Carpenter is curious about how far audience choice can be taken to change a narrative. Talk about experimenting more with moral or ethical decisions in the future. There is none in “The Tavern with Twenty Sides,” where occasionally the audience can influence an action in a way similar to a roll of the dice. We'll tap, for example, to fill a meter on a screen, and where it lands can indicate success or failure. Here, smartphone gamification is used to drive a narrative rather than define it, a reminder to me that “D&D” is in some ways a story-creation tool.
“There are stories we've told in board games I've played that I never would have imagined telling in the writers' room because the dice told the story they told,” Bhimani says.
'Dungeons and Dragons: The Tavern of Twenty Faces'
The large-scale audience participation at “Twenty-Sided Tavern” naturally invites a jovial and party atmosphere. It manages to reach out to the audience and welcome us into what can be a complex and daunting fantasy world. He argues that “Dungeons & Dragons” is for everyone, just as I did as a high school kid who set out to convert my insulting friends in the hopes of showing them the joy of coming together with little more than paper, pencils, dice and imagination.
“It's still kind of intimidating for a lot of people because they think, 'I have to know all these rules, learn all these spells, and read all these books,'” Bhimani says. “Coming to the Tavern of Twenty Faces is about telling a great story. Yes, we roll dice. Yes, there are spells. But ultimately, that's just scaffolding for telling a beautiful, improvised story.”
I remember when I played weekly games in high school, my friends used to joke that I, as the dungeon master, would “lose” because I did everything in my power to keep everyone's characters alive and playing, wanting to see a narrative with a conclusion that didn't end with anyone dying. They wondered if I was running the game incorrectly because they always succeeded. However, I saw “Dungeons & Dragons” as a completely collaborative effort, and I felt that way again watching “Twenty-Sided Tavern,” an ode to the idea that “Dungeons & Dragons” is better when shared.
And also a reminder that there is no wrong way to play it.
