Dungeons & Dragons started with small groups of friends playing at home, but now it is entering its stadium era:
But in the past decade or so, D&D has emerged as a popular form of spectator entertainment, with comedians, actors and podcasters playing the game for other people to watch. “Actual play,” as it’s known, has attracted millions of viewers online and has even spilled out into the real world, with D&D shows playing in movie theaters, touring globally and selling out stadiums.
One of the most iconic examples of this phenomenon came earlier this year when the show Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden in New York. Roughly 20,000 fans showed up to watch seven comedians perform D&D, with a few rock show flourishes — like gouts of butane fire around the stage to simulate the wrath of the dragon Kalvaxis, the big villain of the night.
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In 2018, Mulligan and six other comedians launched Dimension 20 on the streaming platform Dropout. The stories they tell are mashups: Game of Thrones meets Candyland, Lord of the Rings meets The Breakfast Club, Jane Austen meets A Court of Thorns and Roses.
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That first episode, which is nearly two hours long, has 7.7 million views on YouTube. A representative for Dropout says its subscribers number “in the mid-6 figures,” and that Dimension 20 is one of its most watched shows.
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Fans of D&D started recording their games in the early 2000s, but actual play didn’t pick up as a genre until around a decade later.
The Adventure Zone, which launched in 2014, featured the hosts of the popular advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me playing with their dad. In 2015, a group of voice actors started posting their home D&D games online as the show Critical Role. The first episode of Critical Role on YouTube has nearly 25 million views today.
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They’re also touring globally — Critical Role has performances scheduled at London’s The O2 and Edinburgh Castle in Scotland next year. Fans who can’t make it can watch the live games in around 800 movie theaters in North America. After Madison Square Garden, Dimension 20‘s tour continued on to Los Angeles and Seattle. A show is planned for Las Vegas later this year
Another slowpoke. Only now «enters»?
There was the grand swan song of Diablo edition, but then Shrooms edition, “Maybe Hurr But Also Durr” edition, then the great “One Duh&Duh, One World, One People, One Government, One Wikipedia” nothingburger… and then “dndgate” (successfully spammed over).
The silly thing by now is pretty much dead, and its corpse in excessive make-up is dragged along by…
…YoTubby “celebrities” and other desperate shills.
In other words: as a natural phenomenon it proved almost non-existent, even despite being a decent-looking outlet for the usual blagger/vtuber narcissism.
But then it managed to take off as an astroturf performance brought to you by Hasbro, once the market droids found out a decade too late that “them kids are into some thing, we must have this thing too”.