Two Minutes' Traffic: Tabletop Roleplaying Games in Performance, and a peek ahead

 It's been a big year for the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons. Inspired by the game and using a set adventure with room for improvisation and modified game mechanics for performance, The Twenty-Sided Tavern opened Off-Broadway production in May 2024 and with a current rotating list of guest players and a tour that's coming to the Kennedy Center in late summer 2025, doesn't show signs of stopping yet. The show is an interesting amalgamation of some of the qualities of what makes tabletop games like D&D so popular (the unpredictability of dice rolls at crucial turning points, characters that are inventive twists on archetypes) and frameworks that are imposed to both give structure (the same adventure scenario has been used throughout the NYC run at every show) and invite the audience into the experience (voting by cell phone for actions taken by characters or helping to shape the final villain form for the climactic showdown through written suggestions). Having seen the show for a few times, it's an interesting artifact, most memorable for me as an exploration of how to blend consistency with the fluidity tabletop games are beloved for.

There's another mode of performance for tabletop roleplaying games, of course, known most frequently these days as Actual Play, where RPGs like D&D are played for an audience. It's a form with a long history, and these days might include live or prerecorded streamed video, podcasts, live stage shows, or combinations of the three. Just two weeks ago, Dimension 20 (a popular actual play from the streaming service Dropout) sold out Madison Square Garden for a live show that brought back a popular team of characters from previous seasons of the show and featured all the rolling dice, silly voices, villains galore, and pyrotechnics you could wish for. Sitting in the audience, was I having a whale of a time? Yes. Was I also considering the ways in which Aristotle noted the ways in which spectacle contributed to the impact of theatre in his Poetics as sparks rained down onto the stage at center court? Obviously yes.

It's a fascinating time to be a theatre nerd who likes playing make believe and telling stories with friends at the table, and it's therefore particularly notable that the Folger Shakespeare Library is getting in on the action. 

On February 27, the Folger is hosting actor Luis Carazo, who has amassed a number of actual play credits across multiple actual plays and using quite a few different tabletop roleplaying systems, for a talk about the these games and what their storytelling can accomplish in the world. The following night, the Folger is launching its own adventure for D&D 5th Edition with "A Night at the Library," a scenario designed to be played in a single session and which incorporates elements of the Folger's collection. More information, as well as a free download of the adventure, can be found here on the Folger website, and personally, I can't wait to share about the experience after the playthrough later this month. After all, two great tastes must surely taste great together, right?