HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us was one of 2023’s biggest success stories in entertainment media, and it was no big surprise when the company officially greenlit a second season of the show. Of course, much of the year has also seen an active strike in Hollywood that has paused production industry-wide, including the second season of The Last of Us.
Hollywood is going to come for D&D actual plays sooner or later — will they survive?
18.10.2023 - 16:49 / polygon.com / Will
Actual play has garnered an undeniably enthusiastic audience in the last few years. Shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 attract millions of online viewers, and live events sell tens of thousands of tickets. Still, Hollywood has been slow to cash in on the rapidly developing medium — until now.
There are some significant barriers to entry in many forms of actual play that any major studio production seeking to enter the mainstream would have to overcome: the improvisational narrative, the audience time commitment, and the community dynamic.
Still, as Hollywood seeks new ways to engage media-saturated audiences, its inevitable embrace of actual play will transform a version of the primarily low-budget, creative-driven medium. It’s too soon to tell whether that transformation will help actual play more than it harms, but an upcoming experiment in the format may indicate what “Hollywood actual play” could look like.
“At a base pitch, to someone who makes television, the concept of actual play is insane,” said Ned Donovan, award-winning filmmaker and player/producer on Encounter Party. Once an independently produced podcast, Encounter Party will be among the first original programming for the new D&D Adventuresfree ad-supported streaming television channel, made in partnership with Wizards of the Coast and multinational production company Entertainment One.
Donovan and co-producer/Dungeon Master Brian David Judkins face a challenge being among the first actual play shows made for television — especially considering most people, let alone most producers, don’t even know what actual play is. “People can’t fathom actual play,” Donovan said. “It sits in the middle of so many art forms and it’s one step to the left of all of them.”
Actual plays are a lot of things. They’re part episodic drama, part long-form improv, part reality show, part game show, part esport, and part gambling. At its core, actual play is an artistic medium in which one or more people create an improvised story by playing a tabletop role-playing game, where a roll of the dice determines your fate.
“There’s a buy-in from the audience you don’t get from [scripted programs] when you leave it up to the element of chance,” said actual play scholar Dr. Em Friedman, who writes about the format regularly for Polygon and is also an English professor at Auburn University.
That buy-in is exactly the type of dedicated, engaged audience base that major studio producers in Hollywood crave. However, the methods of garnering these audiences aren’t easily replicated. And that’s the point.
“The core audience for actual play is so invested in authenticity,” said Friedman. Improvisational authenticity is so essential to actual play, fans have accused
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By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.