“It’s exactly how we feel, as well. We’re convinced that there are even more people who would love to be invited.” Jeff tells me. “I think Alex Albrecht, the creator of the show brought all these elements together. His initial inspiration for creating the show was – hey, every other D&D show out there was originally a bunch of friends who liked to play Dungeons & Dragons and said let’s make a show. Alex thought what if we make a show first and find the best people for the job rather than people who were friends first?”
It’s been a very successful idea for The Dungeon Run. Having reached their first-year anniversary last week, the cast and crew have developed a very inviting friendship on screen and off. That sense of invitation has expanded to include the audience who get to involve themselves in the game by either contributing comments to the live feed at the bottom of the screen or by purchasing advantage or disadvantage for the players.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Advantage term in Dungeons and Dragons, that’s when a player has a special circumstance or condition that gives her a greater chance of success. Instead of simply rolling one 20-sided die, the player gets to roll two and takes the higher of the two scores. However, the audience can counter that by also purchasing the opposite for the player, i.e.: taking the lower of two rolls.
It’s an interesting twist that can have pronounced effects on the game. I asked Jeff how he keeps track of all that while he’s DM’ing a game.
“It can be very hard.” Jeff admits. “If you’ve seen some of the shows we have done in the studio, we’ve had to peel back a bit of that during the quarantine. That layer of interactivity was very intense, logistically. We’re trying to figure out how to incorporate that fully back into the show. But I am very, VERY fortunate to have a team of people whose job and passion it is to make it easier for me. The production team – they are great of what they do and very supportive of me of what I do. But we have Lord Arrabann, who takes some of that heavy lifting, that interaction with the chat room, while we’re playing the game. The selling of the items, the forces of good and evil, the disadvantage and advantage, I have an earpiece and an iPad where I get a running record of what happens during the day.”
Of course, there’s the plot of the game.
“What happens when we let the audience have sway with the balance of the game? Let’s face it, Dungeons & Dragons is a very balanced game. At first, I’ll be honest, I was really nervous. I didn’t know if it would break things. And there were moments where we have gotten close to that, but what I realized is, it is an incredible gift. It is so much fun. You know, I thought it was going to be how do we do Dungeons and Dragons with this interactive layer happening? But what it’s become is: we’re doing this interactive layer – let’s also do Dungeons & Dragons. It’s become a complete fusion of these people helping us tell this story!”
Jeff went on further to illustrate what he meant by that.
“An example of that is this side quest that we’re doing during Quarantine. We took a pause on the main story and are doing this side quest while we are out of the studio. And that side quest was inspired by something that the audience suggested! They submitted an idea in the form of these force cards. I said, let’s just do their idea. I wrote it and fleshed it out, but the idea was there was going to be magic items in a vault somewhere and the idea was that they had to find it. So, it has been a wonderful gift to have this give-and-take with the audience and they really are the sixth player at the table and that has been the best surprise out of this process how much I have fallen in love with that experience: having the audience influence the game, add chaos, throw off the balance of the game. You know, it’s been wonderful.”
