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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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.”

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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.”