Twenty Sided Tavern Cast Talk Dimension 20 & The Adventure Zone Inspiration In Unique New D&D Experience

Summary Audience members determine character choices and story direction in the interactive Dungeons & Dragons experience, Twenty Sided Tavern.

Gamiotics technology allows for audience participation in decision-making, mini-games, and character creation.

The show offers a unique live theater experience, blending comedy, storytelling, and audience engagement for a new experience with every performance.

Twenty Sided Tavern is an interactive Dungeons & Dragons experience like nothing else. The off-Broadway show invites audiences to step into a fantastical world and, instead of simply watching like most Actual Plays they are instrumental in the decision making. Using Gamiotics the Tavern Keepers and Dungeon Master lead a hilariously silly game of Dungeons & Dragons with three players playing out their characters on stage instead of rolling dice and using theater of the mind. Audiences are engaged as storytellers from the moment they sit down, deciding everything which character each player will emody and which direction the story takes.

Each show is a completely new and unique experience with over thirty characters and multiple adventures for the cast and crew to choose from as the initial building blocks of the experience. This is not a hard-core rules-heavy game of Dungeons & Dragons, but instead a game where comedy rule of cool, and story is king. The Dungeon Master and Tavern Keeper must navigate the audience's participation using the Gamiotics technology, player choices, and mini-games all while keeping an eye on the clock so they can complete the one-shot each night.

Related 10 Best Fantasy Book Series Based On Dungeons & Dragons (Including Drizzt) Plenty of novels have taken inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, with settings ranging from the foundational Greyhawk adventures to Faerûn.

Screen Rant, along with other media outlets, were given a behind the scenes tour after the show where Dungeon Master, DAGL, and Tavern Keeper, Sarah Davis Reynolds, shared insight into Twenty Sided Tavern. DAGL explained who the target audience is for Twenty Sided Tavern, while Reynolds shared the importance of making this interactive and accessible for newcomers. Reynolds also broke down how Twenty Sided Tavern came to be during the pandemic, how they adjusted the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons 5e to lean into showmanship, and their character creation process.

Twenty Sided Tavern Is A Chance For Audiences To "Experience D&D In A Way That They Can't Experience It At Home"

Twenty Sided Tavern brings a unique spin to the Dungeons & Dragons live show experience, with the players fully acting out their adventure instead of using theater of the mind with unique voices, like with Critical Role and Dimension 20. This allows for a completely new experience. Instead of watching talented performers simply play Dungeons & Dragons around a table, Twenty Sided Tavern gives the audience a true stage performance that is perfect to draw in longtime players and newcomers who have never rolled dice before.

DAGL: There's two camps [for their target audience], right? It's people who play D&D already and want to experience it in a way that they can't experience it at home. And it's people who like anything else that is tangential to this. People who like escape rooms, people who like trivia, people who like board games. We can scratch any of those interests with those re-roll challenges. Tonight we got a spelling bee and a balancing thing. Sometimes we have charades, and sometimes we have trivia, and sometimes we have all sorts of stuff depending.

The audience interaction and the Gamiotics technology are key components of how Twenty Sided Tavern stands out. This audience interaction takes it beyond fans giving players inspiration or helping to name an NPC. The audience is an active participant at the table helping to make decisions throughout the show and even bringing members of the audience on stage to help with the mini-games. It's the perfect introduction to this next step in live theater.

Sarah Davis Reynolds: We call this in-Seat Interactive. So it's that idea of anybody who maybe is scared to go to an interactive show that is one-on-one, but they do want to have an engaging experience that they have an effect on. And that's what's really important for us is that everyone, no matter if you don't want to scream a name, if you just want to sit there and push buttons, you still see your vote happening on screen. You still see how you are directly impacting what's going on. So it's wherever your comfort level is, you have a voice that is really important. So, families love it. Kids who play D&D love it, really love it.

Twenty Sided Tavern Takes Inspiration From Dimension 20 & The Adventure Zone

Dungeons & Dragons Actual Play has become a major part of the game, with shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 finding great success. Critical Role has grown to adapt its campaigns into animated series and publish original games while Dimension 20 is playing a live show at Madison Square Garden next year. Twenty Sided Tavern takes inspiration from the comedic aspects of Dimension 20 as well as the teaching element of The Adventure Zone to make the show perfect for Dungeons & Dragons novices.

Sarah Davis Reynolds: So, our scenic designer is one of the art directors in Dimension 20, and our video designers are Dimension 20 video designers as well. So [Dimension 20 is] definitely a big inspiration, not [just] artistically, but also just in general. The very comedy-based ones...I think any of the ones that are, again, good storytelling, bring in the comedy. I think an interesting thing about Adventure Zone is the idea of teaching D&D. Because a very important thing to us is accessibility, is making sure that you don't have to be an expert to come see the show and have a good time at it. So we will do that tutorial at the beginning. We'll teach you things at the beginning so that you can follow along slightly. I think Adventure Zone has a good example of that too, of reminding everyone all the time what dice you're supposed to roll.

The pandemic led to a lot of artistic experimentation as people tried to find ways to engage audiences while the world was on lockdown. Twenty Sided Tavern was born of this as the team was developing shows in the hopes of finding the perfect way to incorporate Gamiotics, but it wasn't until Reynolds and DAGL landed on their mutual love for Dungeons & Dragons that the true marriage between the technology and the story revealed itself.

Sarah Davis Reynolds: During the pandemic when none of us could do anything, we started working on Zoom shows that use that interactive technology to be a little bit more engaging than watching another Shakespeare reading on Zoom. We did a new show every month, and it could be things like Alice in Wonderland was stuck in a time loop. We did a great Gatsby dating sim, we did all sorts of things like that. DAGL was one of the writers, and I was one of the game designers. DAGL and I have been playing D&D for over a decade. We went, I want to do a D&D show. Will you let us do a D&D show? We did a D&D show and it immediately clicked. We went, Oh, this is what's missing. I love Actual Plays, but this is what's missing from Actual Plays for me is I'm just watching other people do it. This lets me have a role in, have a voice in it. So we knew that that is what we wanted to take moving forward. So then we started doing development in front of an audience at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2021. And then a lot of development here in New York. Following all of that, it's a lot of DAGL and I with a whiteboard and post-it notes all over the wall figuring things out

Twenty Sided Tavern Leans Into Theatricality With Their Approach To D&D Wanting To "Make Sure That It Is Performative"

Twenty Sided Tavern is not the most strict when it comes to the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, because it is not simply a game, but a theatrical experience. Some spells and experiences need to be more theatrical and performance-focused instead of relying on the traditional theater of the mind.

Sarah Davis Reynolds: There are a lot of things we have to think about in terms of changing it slightly from the way you would play at home to make sure that it is performative. So in D&D, if you cast Magic Missile, you don't have to roll for it here, [here] you got to roll for it. We got to see that dice roll happen. There's that tension. So there is a little bit of how does this read best for an audience, for a performative way? Again, that idea of not just watching people play, but having a voice in that. So I think it is really a core of it. We say with our actors that in order they need to be funny, they need to be good storytellers, and they need to be good at D&D in that order. That funny is performative, that storytelling is performative, and then D&D is mechanical because we can teach them to play D&D. We can't teach you to be funny, necessarily. So there really is a core of performance there that is so important. Also just not really seen in a lot of theater right now, but it's all core building blocks that we all know. It's just letting you kind of run wild with that.

Twenty Sided Tavern has over thirty characters to choose from, which is a big part of what immediately sets each show apart from one another and gives the audience agency in their experience from the start. The audience is split into three groups, tied to one of the players. Each group is able to vote for which of the three mystery options presented to them will be the character that their player will portray. Reynolds shared insight into the character creation process and explained how detailed each character is.

Sarah Davis Reynolds: [The characters] all have their own bespoke illustrations. They're all built with 5e rules, so they all have full character sheets, based on that. I love to create characters that have an interesting hook. So things like Barry, who is a goblin super villain who just accidentally does good a lot. One that you didn't see tonight was Wondro The Wizard who is a rogue. He's an arcane trickster, but the idea is that he actually doesn't have any magic. His magic missiles are just pigeons with grenades attached, and his infestation spell is just a jar of bugs. So those things are just really interesting and fun to play with, but still lean on the mechanics that we know of 5E.

About Twenty Sided Tavern

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Dungeons & Dragons The Twenty-Sided Tavern is a live, onstage game of Dungeons & Dragons where YOU control the action. By calling out suggestions and making decisions on your smartphone, you’ll determine which heroes appear, where they explore, and ultimately how their story ends.