Dimension 20’s sold-out show at MSG shines a light on decades of TTRPG performance
A brief history of role-playing games played in front of live audiences.
If you’re drawn to the vibe of sitting among hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people screaming their heads off at a roll of the dice, 2025 is your year. The calendar is currently full of live, in-person role-playing game performances with a scope and scale that’s bigger than anything that’s come before. Critical Role looms large of course, and is celebrating its first decade with a series of sold-out live shows in the US and Australia that are sure to draw big crowds. Meanwhile, Dimension 20 has plans for touring the West Coast. But first, the prolific troupe of improvisors at Dropout is mounting the single largest D&D live show in the history of the genre, with a sold-out show for nearly 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden. And while these live shows are setting new records, it’s important to note that they’re actually part of a much longer tradition of live role-playing game performance that is, in many cases, a fair bit older than some of its current fans.
As an academic who studies the history of actual play, I’m usually encountering the difficulties of tracking modern digital shows, which now number in the tens of thousands each with dozens or potentially hundreds of hours of content. When I turned to look into the offline prehistory of people playing role-playing games for live audiences, I found a new set of challenges: while some fans of actual play likely know that shows like Dungeons & Daddies and Not Another D&D Podcast have mounted their own tours of growing size since the early 2020s, and that Glass Cannon has toured since 2018, they are just a part of the latest generation of the offline version of performed play.
An important part of the prehistory of modern actual play online is the prior decades of people playing role-playing games offline, for audiences in theatres, bars, convention halls, and college campuses across the globe. Finding information about those performances presents new challenges: hunting down old convention programs, shaking my fist at dead websites, keeping an ear out for those who remember and can tell me what it was like to be at those shows.
So far, the oldest example I’ve been able to trace is Hampshire College’s Deathfest, a battle royale-style event described as “Dungeons & Dragon’s weird cousin” that slowly accumulates an audience across the experience, as defeated players become part of the audience. The annual game has been organized for over three decades. It’s almost certain that other college campuses put on some kind of role-playing games for audiences in the 1990s and 2000s (and let us know about them in the comments!).
Similarly, conventions were an early site for audiences to watch other people play. Game designer Allan Goodall recalled in a message to Polygon a Call of Cthulhu game at the first Necronomicon in Danvers, MA, in 1993. Set during Boston’s Big Dig, the adventure features 12 players which Goodall noted included “NPC ghouls.” Tracy and Laura Hickman’s Killer Breakfast was a long-running Gen Con tradition that ran from the late 1990s to the early 2020s, sending hundreds of players to their doom in the span of just two hours.
Convention live shows met early actual play when the Acquisitions Incorporated series began performing live shows at Penny Arcade’s PAX conventions in 2010, starting with annual installments at PAX Prime until adding PAX East in 2014, West in 2016, and South, Australia, and Unplugged in 2017. The loosely-connected narrative now sprawls over a decade, but never demands too much of its audiences thanks to animated recaps helmed and narrated by Kris Straub.
Critical Role’s early live shows in 2016-2020 were primarily main campaign episodes performed in conjunction with various conventions, though the logistics of livestreaming from theatres not used to such a complex production lift meant technical issues often thwarted the troupe. By the time they returned to live shows in the 2020s, they were able to create more sophisticated recording setups for their shows, though like the rest of the company’s content the shows are now aired after recording.
In a similar way, Dimension 20 only had limited chances to perform live before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the core cast of Intrepid Heroes playing at Chicago’s C2E2 convention in 2018 and Brooklyn’s Bell House and RTX in 2019. Aabria Iyengar ran a special one-shot of Misfits and Magic at Gen Con in 2022, but the core cast didn’t play live again until April 2024, when they played six shows in four cities in a sold-out UK & Ireland tour.
In addition to colleges and conventions, comedy clubs, bars, and other nerdy event spaces have been used for improvised gameplay. This analog tradition still continues on stages like Los Angeles’ semi-scripted show Dungeon Master, which has run since the early 2010s, and Seattle-based Dungeons & Drag Queens, which has toured across the country since 2021. But the richest as-yet unexplored part of the history of live performances including role-playing games is the connection to various Fringe festivals. Fringe festivals spotlight performances created outside of theatre institutions, often small-scale, low-budget, or experimental. Fringe festivals bring together thousands or tens of thousands of shows across dozens of venues or more, and so records can be spotty or even non-existent.
DnD Improv began at the 2006 Winnipeg Fringe Festival and has run ever since. Polygon heard from comedians Ben McKenzie and Richard McKenzie (no relation), who first put together “+1 Sword,” an improvised show including D&D the duo performed for a dungeon-like basement bar at the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival and 2010 Melbourne Comedy Festival. The two would then create a fully-improvised comedy show Dungeon Crawl, with Ben as DM and a guest cast of comedians and improvisers, with lots of audience input. The show would run with various settings monthly until 2014, and has been performed intermittently since, including at PAX Australia. The show somewhat resembles The Twenty-Sided Tavern, now an off-Broadway show with a planned mounting in Australia, which appeared at Edinburgh Fringe. Also at Edinburgh, last year Chaosium, the National Library of Scotland, and University of Edinburgh’s History and Games Lab collaborated to sponsor a live Call of Cthulhu game.
This is still very much work in progress. There’s far more recovery work to be done to trace the history of role-playing games in live theatrical performance – whether you’re a fan, a player, or just found yourself at an improv club at just the right time, please let us know in the comments if you remember live shows that we shouldn’t forget!
‘Dimension 20’ Star Brennan Lee Mulligan Teases Audience Plans for Madison Square Garden Show: ‘We Will Need People to Be on Their Toes’
by Jennifer Maas
As the team preps for the sold-out event, dubbed “Gauntlet at the Garden,” Mulligan breaks down his game plan for their first live show of this scale and how he’s constructed a new storyline within the New York City-set “Unsleeping City” season of “Dimension 20” that will involve the audience. What’s your prep plan for the show?
Be with my wife and kiddo. I’m going to open up my laptop, go over notes, get my little D&D Beyond campaign open, go over my encounters, make sure all my stat blocks are good. They’re all made already, but I’m just gonna review them. Oh, I gotta do a review of magic items to make sure that magic items are lore-correct, because there are some Season 2 magic items that I don’t want to delete from the character sheets, but I have to de-level the character sheets and then move the Season 2 items into a different inventory. Is this what your readers want to know?
Yes.
Incredible! And then just go over the flow tree for where things are gonna go. My biggest fear is that there’s too much story, because live shows go fast, like, it takes 10 minutes to say hello. I know the show is gonna go by so fast, and I can’t wait. I’m so excited. So it’ll be a nice, long night of prep, and then I’ll do my best to get to sleep and then be there early. We’re not called until later in the afternoon, but I’m gonna be there bright and early in the morning, just to be on deck in case anything comes up.
What’s the plan for if the show is running over?
It’s to start trying to land the plane by X, so that it’s definitely landed by Y. And if we really get down to the wire, I can always take legendary action to have an NPC show up and do 100 points of damage. “Ah, you won! Hooray, goodnight!” I don’t think it’ll come to that, but it’s always nice to have a little fictional ace in the hole. I’m very excited. We’ll see how it ends. How will the audience be incorporated into the show?
All I will say is that we will need people to be on their toes. This will not be a purely passive experience on the audience’s part. So we need people to be ready. And I would say, come with a fully charged phone.
The show is going to be long, and viewers can pause an episode of “Dimension 20” if they need to go to the bathroom or grab a snack. So, when is a good time during this live performance since we can’t pause it?
I would say when Zac’s talking, that’s a good moment. No, that’s a joke! Don’t go to the bathroom. You got an intermission, hang tight. But also, there will be enormous speakers. And the show’s gonna go up on Dropout! So if you miss even a minute of the action, you’ll be able to catch it later on Dropout.tv. There’s gonna be concessions. There’s gonna be merch. And we’re doing a coat drive. So make sure, if you’re reading this, bring your new and gently used winter coats. It’s cold as hell in New York, so let’s bring those coats.
Do you foresee audience reactions affecting what you’ve planned for the campaign in real time?
In a live performance space, the electricity that is felt between the audience and the performers rarely changes it, but instead spurs on and encourages. I’ve very rarely felt pulled in another direction by the audience. I have often felt from an audience, “More, more! Go deeper on that, go deeper on that.” So I do not fear the audience pulling us in the direction of a sudden change, but you can feel it when the audience is like, “Stay here for a second. We like this,” which is really delightful and fun.
How do you prepare for something unexpected happening?
By basing your entire professional career on the concept of improvisation. I think it’s very funny, because my dear, dear friend Matt Mercer is an incredible dungeon master and so richly prepared and I’m constantly flabbergasted at the level of meticulous and precise preparation. I see the packages behind his DM screen and I go, “Holy shit, that’s really well done.” Your boy is a lot of bullet points in Google Docs, and we kind of stay light on our feet. So I think it’s fair to say that things can go wrong, things may go wrong, things will go wrong, and that’s the point. That’s why you come to see a live show, is the thrill of seeing it happen and unfold before you.
There are gonna be elements to the show that are happening for the very first time; we’re doing a stadium show in the round with music underneath. So the live shows we did in the U.K. and Ireland were kind of how a lot of actual-play is set up, where it’s a panel seating. And I like panel seating, and the idea is that you can see everybody equally — but you’re also seeing everybody’s chest. They’re fully in profile looking along tables at each other. And there was no music accompaniment to those shows. So if there’s a moment of silence while someone’s doing math, you hear silence, and then someone in the audience goes, like, “Gilear!” And then you go like, “Oh, OK!” So it’s gonna be a lot of things that we are doing for the very first time. There is no trial run. There’s no ability to test it out, other than very technically as you’re building it. So this is going to be everyone’s big learning experience altogether. And I think that you have to experience the chaos joyfully. Something unexpected will happen, and we will participate in it together and move through it together in a spirit of exploration and fun.
What do you do if something technical goes wrong?
We have a lot of amazing artistry and craft going into the show, as long as there’s a light on us where people can see us, and there’s a microphone where they can hear us, we will do the show. It’ll be like the end of “Pippin,” for any Broadway fans that are there, the players will take all of the sets and costumes away, and we’ll just be there singing. And I promise you, we’ll perform that entire musical number in flesh tone leotards if all the tech breaks.
At a higher level, what does this MSG event mean for the future of “Dimension 20” and the live-events business at Dropout?
It’s unbelievable. It means a tremendous amount to be able to go to our fans, the people we love and care about, and give them a show, and give them that experience. And it means a tremendous amount to share space with them. My favorite part of the U.K. and Ireland tour, and I think my favorite part of tomorrow night will be, not anything to do with our performance, but actually when the lights come on at intermission and you look out the curtains and you see people seeing other people in their favorite characters’ cosplay, and they’re doing dice swaps and they’re meeting up with their friends. I get emotional talking about it, but it really is the degree of creating community around something, whether that’s a show or a hobby or whatever it is, watching people be brought into fellowship and community with each other in something that we have worked on is the biggest possible reward.
This moment serves as a mile marker for us. There is so much about doing the show at MSG and doing a stadium and having all these fans that makes me very happy that a lot of our long-time crew members and cast have taken this creature of the internet, which is Dropout, in this brand new media ecosystem, and you can go to your family and they go, “Don’t you work on that internet board game show?” And you can go, “Yeah, but we just went to Madison Square Garden.”
So it’s a huge thank you to everyone who’s worked so hard to make this opportunity possible, that the hard work and dedication and talent of our cast and crew can be recognized in a way that can be shared with people that are maybe hearing about what we do for the very first time. That, to me, is really worthwhile. So it’s the community that’s created by fans of the show, and it’s the ability for our amazing cast and crew to hold up this laurel to the people that they care about and the people in their lives and say, “I was a part of this.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.