A brief history of role-playing games played in front of live audiences.
by Dr Emily Friedman
If you’re drawn to the vibe of sitting among hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people screaming their heads off at a roll of the dice, 2025 is your year. The calendar is currently full of live, in-person role-playing game performances with a scope and scale that’s bigger than anything that’s come before. Critical Role looms large of course, and is celebrating its first decade with a series of sold-out live shows in the US and Australia that are sure to draw big crowds. Meanwhile, Dimension 20 has plans for touring the West Coast. But first, the prolific troupe of improvisors at Dropout is mounting the single largest D&D live show in the history of the genre, with a sold-out show for nearly 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden. And while these live shows are setting new records, it’s important to note that they’re actually part of a much longer tradition of live role-playing game performance that is, in many cases, a fair bit older than some of its current fans.
As an academic who studies the history of actual play, I’m usually encountering the difficulties of tracking modern digital shows, which now number in the tens of thousands each with dozens or potentially hundreds of hours of content. When I turned to look into the offline prehistory of people playing role-playing games for live audiences, I found a new set of challenges: while some fans of actual play likely know that shows like Dungeons & Daddies and Not Another D&D Podcast have mounted their own tours of growing size since the early 2020s, and that Glass Cannon has toured since 2018, they are just a part of the latest generation of the offline version of performed play.
An important part of the prehistory of modern actual play online is the prior decades of people playing role-playing games offline, for audiences in theatres, bars, convention halls, and college campuses across the globe. Finding information about those performances presents new challenges: hunting down old convention programs, shaking my fist at dead websites, keeping an ear out for those who remember and can tell me what it was like to be at those shows.
So far, the oldest example I’ve been able to trace is Hampshire College’s Deathfest, a battle royale-style event described as “Dungeons & Dragon’s weird cousin” that slowly accumulates an audience across the experience, as defeated players become part of the audience. The annual game has been organized for over three decades. It’s almost certain that other college campuses put on some kind of role-playing games for audiences in the 1990s and 2000s (and let us know about them in the comments!).
Similarly, conventions were an early site for audiences to watch other people play. Game designer Allan Goodall recalled in a message to Polygon a Call of Cthulhu game at the first Necronomicon in Danvers, MA, in 1993. Set during Boston’s Big Dig, the adventure features 12 players which Goodall noted included “NPC ghouls.” Tracy and Laura Hickman’s Killer Breakfast was a long-running Gen Con tradition that ran from the late 1990s to the early 2020s, sending hundreds of players to their doom in the span of just two hours.
Convention live shows met early actual play when the Acquisitions Incorporated series began performing live shows at Penny Arcade’s PAX conventions in 2010, starting with annual installments at PAX Prime until adding PAX East in 2014, West in 2016, and South, Australia, and Unplugged in 2017. The loosely-connected narrative now sprawls over a decade, but never demands too much of its audiences thanks to animated recaps helmed and narrated by Kris Straub.
Critical Role’s early live shows in 2016-2020 were primarily main campaign episodes performed in conjunction with various conventions, though the logistics of livestreaming from theatres not used to such a complex production lift meant technical issues often thwarted the troupe. By the time they returned to live shows in the 2020s, they were able to create more sophisticated recording setups for their shows, though like the rest of the company’s content the shows are now aired after recording.
In a similar way, Dimension 20 only had limited chances to perform live before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the core cast of Intrepid Heroes playing at Chicago’s C2E2 convention in 2018 and Brooklyn’s Bell House and RTX in 2019. Aabria Iyengar ran a special one-shot of Misfits and Magic at Gen Con in 2022, but the core cast didn’t play live again until April 2024, when they played six shows in four cities in a sold-out UK & Ireland tour.
In addition to colleges and conventions, comedy clubs, bars, and other nerdy event spaces have been used for improvised gameplay. This analog tradition still continues on stages like Los Angeles’ semi-scripted show Dungeon Master, which has run since the early 2010s, and Seattle-based Dungeons & Drag Queens, which has toured across the country since 2021. But the richest as-yet unexplored part of the history of live performances including role-playing games is the connection to various Fringe festivals. Fringe festivals spotlight performances created outside of theatre institutions, often small-scale, low-budget, or experimental. Fringe festivals bring together thousands or tens of thousands of shows across dozens of venues or more, and so records can be spotty or even non-existent.
DnD Improv began at the 2006 Winnipeg Fringe Festival and has run ever since. Polygon heard from comedians Ben McKenzie and Richard McKenzie (no relation), who first put together “+1 Sword,” an improvised show including D&D the duo performed for a dungeon-like basement bar at the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival and 2010 Melbourne Comedy Festival. The two would then create a fully-improvised comedy show Dungeon Crawl, with Ben as DM and a guest cast of comedians and improvisers, with lots of audience input. The show would run with various settings monthly until 2014, and has been performed intermittently since, including at PAX Australia. The show somewhat resembles The Twenty-Sided Tavern, now an off-Broadway show with a planned mounting in Australia, which appeared at Edinburgh Fringe. Also at Edinburgh, last year Chaosium, the National Library of Scotland, and University of Edinburgh’s History and Games Lab collaborated to sponsor a live Call of Cthulhu game.
This is still very much work in progress. There’s far more recovery work to be done to trace the history of role-playing games in live theatrical performance – whether you’re a fan, a player, or just found yourself at an improv club at just the right time, please let us know in the comments if you remember live shows that we shouldn’t forget!
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