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/