Review: DND Live at the Fringe: When Dwarves Cry

I would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly say that Dun­geons and Drag­ons has gone main­stream, but it’s become a lot more pop­u­lar in the last twen­ty years.  It prob­a­bly helps that there are so many TV shows these days with a fan­ta­sy ele­ment, as well as movies like the Lord of the Rings series mak­ing sword-and-sor­cery stuff cool­er.

DnD is a table­top role­play­ing game where play­ers build fan­ta­sy char­ac­ters, and play those char­ac­ters’ choic­es in a sto­ry facil­i­tat­ed and guid­ed by a DM (dun­geon mas­ter, the per­son telling the sto­ry they’re part of), with dice rolls dic­tat­ing the suc­cess of those choic­es.  A good DM is a crafts­man, colour­ing in the details of each new sce­nario with skill and com­mit­ment, but good play­ers are also won­der­ful to work with.

I’m a DnD ama­teur.  I played a lit­tle, very bad­ly, twen­ty years ago, because my boyfriend of the time played.  I played a lit­tle, 10 years ago, for the same rea­son.  Right now I’m play­ing a game with some friends because I actu­al­ly want­ed to, and hav­ing a ball doing it.  I’m still nowhere near good, and the dice maths of it con­tin­ues to elude me, but I have heaps of fun, and def­i­nite­ly more con­fi­dence in my abil­i­ties (to most­ly hit ene­mies in the nuts, pro­vide teenaged sass, and occa­sion­al­ly burst into song or awful puns.)

Dicer­atops, as well as run­ning a pret­ty cool pod­cast, “Dicer­atops Presents”, has been stag­ing live DnD shows at Bats for some time now.  A show includes, as well as the DM, at least three of a steady cast of six play­ers (and their char­ac­ters).  The shows stand alone; a new­bie won’t be miss­ing half a sto­ry if they’ve not seen pre­vi­ous shows, and it’s easy to get the gist of the char­ac­ters fast.  The set-up is the DM at his table, and the play­ers at theirs, with their char­ac­ter sheets and dice.  They’re miked, and there’s a sim­ple light­ing rig with a few dif­fer­ent dra­mat­ic light colours, which the oper­a­tor uses based on what he thinks the action needs.  Some­times that’s a bit arbi­trary, but it’s fun to know that he’s light­ing in response to the sto­ry, ad hoc, rather than fol­low­ing a set sched­ule.

Full dis­clo­sure:  The DM, Mor­gan Davies, is an old friend of mine.  But he’s also an award-win­ning game design­er.   And on Fri­day night he set the scene for a super­fun and very sil­ly mini adven­ture with three of the revolv­ing cast.  Wire­mu Tuhi­wai of the Welling­ton Inpro­vi­sa­tion Troupe (WIT) played Ford the Ranger (yep), a pret­ty com­pe­tent fight­er char­ac­ter.  Tuhi­wai is a great impro­vis­er, and played his ranger lowkey and wry.  Steven Young­blood, also of WIT, was a charm­ing­ly obliv­i­ous Randy Dwarf, pro­duc­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing mag­i­cal kit­tens and sto­ical­ly avoid­ing Feel­ings until he could­n’t any­more.  And come­di­an Jar­rod Bak­er played a sar­cas­tic and most­ly athe­ist priest called Frun Gothilde.  Togeth­er they solved a mys­tery, fought some mon­sters with var­ied suc­cess, and Randy faced some painful emo­tions.

Davies was a love­ly DM to watch, wild­ly ges­tic­u­lat­ing as he described the land­scape and clear­ly delight­ed when his play­ers respond­ed in a fun­ny or inter­est­ing way.  The adven­ture is obvi­ous­ly named after a Prince song and the sto­ry played with Prince-relat­ed themes and puns through­out.  Did we know the Pur­ple Rain joke was com­ing?  Yes, of course.  Did we enjoy it regard­less?  Hell yes we did.  We laughed help­less­ly when Randy utter­ly failed his dice rolls time and time again, and cheered when he FINALLY got a decent one.  Loud approval greet­ed Tuhi­wai’s ambi­tious action attempts, and dis­may when he fell short, and when Bak­er’s tac­i­turn priest fire­balled the mon­sters we were all pret­ty grate­ful that some­one at least was get­ting some dam­age in.  I like to think there was even gen­uine sad­ness in the audi­ence at the end when a non-play­er char­ac­ter died.  The audi­ence were clear­ly most­ly either DnD play­ers them­selves, or some­how fans of gamer/geek cul­ture, and they were into it.  We were invest­ed.

Turn­ing a game like DnD into a show depends on the skill of the play­ers, and for the tech­ni­cal side to be super-sim­pli­fied.  We cer­tain­ly would­n’t have been as hyped to watch them spend 10 min­utes each before their turns dis­cussing what their bonus action would be, whether they were going to employ some device to get extra rolls or extra dam­age, the dis­tance they were mov­ing, or their armour class and skill lev­el.  The play­ers gave us the infor­ma­tion we need­ed for basic under­stand­ing, and the rest was left unspo­ken.

I will absolute­ly go to the next Dicer­atops show.  These per­form­ers are great play­ers, gen­uine­ly love the game, and were clear­ly hav­ing a real­ly fun time.  They trust­ed  each oth­er’s cues, kept up the integri­ty of their char­ac­ters, and worked hard to keep the action mov­ing and the plot pro­gress­ing.  If any­thing, I wish I’d been play­ing with them.

Check out Dicer­atops’ pod­cast at https://diceratops-presents.pinecast.co/