Ale and well met!
May. 27th, 2024 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxSaw Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty Sided Tavern in NYC last weekend, which was a blast— it's an interactive improv comedy show built around D&D mechanics, drinking game rules, and polling the audience to determine what happens next.
THE CAST: a GM, a Tavern Keeper (basically the assistant GM/audience-participation technology wrangler/on-stage bartender), and three players, loosely classed as a Warrior, a Mage, and a Trickster. One of the first audience choices is to pick from one of three character options for each class/player; at our show, we ended up with a "peacocking paladin," a breakdancing bunny artificer, and "a 'real' wizard," respectively. (Everyone in the audience is assigned to one of the three character classes via a sticker as you walk in, and some polls/interaction were class-specific; I was on Team Mage.)
THE GAMEPLAY: most, if not all, actions are driven by audience survey (via a browser you pull up with the QR code in the playbill) followed by rolling the dice; e.g., the player-actor comes up with two undefined but funny-sounding moves (memorably, "I can give 'em a bird in the hand or two in the tush"), the audience votes on which to use, the player rolls to see if the hit lands, and then they act out their move. The "Drunk Shakespeare"-esque twist was that if a player or the GM rolled a nat 20, they drank a beer; if they rolled a 1, they drank a "punishment shot" (the poor GM's choice of poison was Malört; apparently the sober option is pickle brine). Each player got one (1) re-roll, by team vote; this involved the player doing some sort of minor physical challenge (push-ups; balancing a cup of beer on their head while standing on one leg) and a giant cardboard D20.
THE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION: as well as the audience-choice-driven plot/gameplay, there were a few times when the audience was given their own puzzles/challenges that impacted the game: the chance to solve a riddle that gave "your" character a boost; at one point, a few audience volunteers were pulled onstage to play darts, with the winning team's character receiving a boost to their next roll and the losing team getting a handicap. At another point, they brought a volunteer onstage to play an NPC (they had a great way to handle this, imo: the survey on your phone asked if you wanted to volunteer or not, and one willing volunteer was chosen at random). There was also just a lot of shouting of suggestions, e.g., to pick names for NPCs. Lots of shouting/cheering in general; this was D&D as a spectator sport! Oh, and before the show, they had everyone write a noun or an adjective on a slip of paper, which is how our heroes ended up fighting a "sour, gregarious water buffalo."
THE PLOT: our brave heroes (recently converted from a life of crime, in two of the three cases... or, well, mostly converted) are recruited by a wizard to find magical artifacts for and participate in a ritual to re-bind an evil chaos wizard trying to break out of his magical prison. (I'm not sure how many plot scenarios they have to work from, but apparently this also differs from show to show.) A series of unlucky rolls towards the end resulted in a bittersweet ending: they stopped the wizard, but his accomplice - and a certain amount of chaos - escaped, and the paladin accidentally killed the artificer because he rolled a 1 during the final boss battle. (The Mage finished the show as a ghost.)
THE CAST: a GM, a Tavern Keeper (basically the assistant GM/audience-participation technology wrangler/on-stage bartender), and three players, loosely classed as a Warrior, a Mage, and a Trickster. One of the first audience choices is to pick from one of three character options for each class/player; at our show, we ended up with a "peacocking paladin," a breakdancing bunny artificer, and "a 'real' wizard," respectively. (Everyone in the audience is assigned to one of the three character classes via a sticker as you walk in, and some polls/interaction were class-specific; I was on Team Mage.)
THE GAMEPLAY: most, if not all, actions are driven by audience survey (via a browser you pull up with the QR code in the playbill) followed by rolling the dice; e.g., the player-actor comes up with two undefined but funny-sounding moves (memorably, "I can give 'em a bird in the hand or two in the tush"), the audience votes on which to use, the player rolls to see if the hit lands, and then they act out their move. The "Drunk Shakespeare"-esque twist was that if a player or the GM rolled a nat 20, they drank a beer; if they rolled a 1, they drank a "punishment shot" (the poor GM's choice of poison was Malört; apparently the sober option is pickle brine). Each player got one (1) re-roll, by team vote; this involved the player doing some sort of minor physical challenge (push-ups; balancing a cup of beer on their head while standing on one leg) and a giant cardboard D20.
THE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION: as well as the audience-choice-driven plot/gameplay, there were a few times when the audience was given their own puzzles/challenges that impacted the game: the chance to solve a riddle that gave "your" character a boost; at one point, a few audience volunteers were pulled onstage to play darts, with the winning team's character receiving a boost to their next roll and the losing team getting a handicap. At another point, they brought a volunteer onstage to play an NPC (they had a great way to handle this, imo: the survey on your phone asked if you wanted to volunteer or not, and one willing volunteer was chosen at random). There was also just a lot of shouting of suggestions, e.g., to pick names for NPCs. Lots of shouting/cheering in general; this was D&D as a spectator sport! Oh, and before the show, they had everyone write a noun or an adjective on a slip of paper, which is how our heroes ended up fighting a "sour, gregarious water buffalo."
THE PLOT: our brave heroes (recently converted from a life of crime, in two of the three cases... or, well, mostly converted) are recruited by a wizard to find magical artifacts for and participate in a ritual to re-bind an evil chaos wizard trying to break out of his magical prison. (I'm not sure how many plot scenarios they have to work from, but apparently this also differs from show to show.) A series of unlucky rolls towards the end resulted in a bittersweet ending: they stopped the wizard, but his accomplice - and a certain amount of chaos - escaped, and the paladin accidentally killed the artificer because he rolled a 1 during the final boss battle. (The Mage finished the show as a ghost.)
