The creators behind the hit stage production, The Twenty-Sided Tavern, discussed the roots of their show at San Diego Comic Con (SDCC).

The Twenty-Sided Tavern

At The Twenty-Sided Tavern, the audience is not just a viewer but the fourth player. Throughout gameplay, the audience influences key decisions via Gamiotics, a browser-based software that allows you to vote on where the story will go. Some options available to the audience include what characters appear, what experiences they explore, and much more. With a cast of five actors and over 30 playable characters, audiences will experience an expansive fantasy world set in the Forgotten Realms, and face riddles, puzzles, combat, and more, to help shape the story. Laughter flows like ale and with the audience in full control and exciting reveals around every corner, no two shows are alike!

For those seeking a more daring experience, there are opportunities to join the action onstage and test your strength (or dexterity, or wisdom, or charisma) through a variety of rollicking games, including trivia, charades, and the ever-popular Fantasy Beer Pong.

Interview with The Twenty-Sided Tavern Creators

The Twenty-Sided Tavern creators, Sarah Davis Reynolds and David Carptener, talked with us about the inception of the production at San Diego Comic Con. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Sarah and David played 18 one-hour long sessions of long form Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with actors across the country via Zoom. The idea for a stage production was born from these sessions.

David: While we were working on these [Zoom campaigns], I said, hey, I think that it would be really cool to try and do interactive storytelling. What happens if we put RPG mechanics into this sort of live storytelling? And so, that’s when we started doing a very early version of this with the software. That one was so different than everything else, right? And it was also so accessible. And so when the pandemic was starting to ease and Zoom theater needed to die, […] I had to make a decision at that point of of what I wanted to come back into live theater with. And so I called [Sarah Davis Reynolds] and said, let’s do, let’s do this.

In order to give the audience a choice during the show, The Twenty-Sided Tavern employs software that all audience members can access on their cell phones. Through this software, each audience member can choose the on-stage characters, their movements, and the trajectory of their journey.

Sarah: We say we always say that the actors, in order need to be funny, be good at storytelling and be good at improv in that order. Because most important is it is a comedy and is telling a story because it doesn’t have a full script. [The  actors] need to be able to have that instinct to tell a satisfying story throughout the whole two hour quest. 

We’re also playing a game on stage with the audience. Right? So in terms of weaving in the in-game mechanics, there are stakes for everybody. There are stakes that the players have [and] the actors have. They can die. There are storytelling stakes, right? We kill the actors. The directons are storytelling stakes in terms of success and failure and the goals and objectives of what they’re trying to achieve.