Actual Plays perform tabletop role-playing games for an audience. Turning ludic collaborative storytelling into an unscripted performance, Actual Plays have developed into a new and flourishing genre. Ventures such as Critical Role (since 2015) or Dimension 20 (since 2018) professionally produce Actual Plays and market them lucratively via streaming platforms. Occasional live shows demonstrate their popularity: Critical Role filled Wembley Arena (London, UK) in 2023, and Dimension 20 sold out the 19,500-seat venue Madison Square Garden (New York, USA) for its 2025 show. While there is no question that successful Actual Play shows capture large audiences, how exactly the genre appeals to its viewers is harder to ascertain.

Some models for the analysis of Actual Plays exist. In Shared Fantasy (1983), a ground-breaking study on tabletop role-playing games, the sociologist Gary Allen Fine draws on Erving Goffman’s frame analysis to describe how participants and their roles oscillate between different contexts while playing: people meet to have fun by vicariously experiencing adventures in a social frame, their fictional characters go on an adventure together in an often detailed and wondrous world with character arcs and plot twists developing in a narrative frame, and in a game frame players make gaming choices and roll dice to determine the outcome of their characters’ actions based on often highly complex game mechanics. Notably, in most tabletop role-playing games one person serves as a “Game Master” with a distinct set of roles.¹ The Game Master sets difficulties for character actions and adjudicates the rules in the game frame. In the narrative frame, the Game Master narrates everything that happens in the shared imagined world except for the actions of the players’ characters. The Game Master’s distinctiveness is often reflected in the social frame, as they typically sit at the head of the table behind a low, separating screen. In Actual Plays, the Game Master customarily also acts as a moderator and facilitator, opening and closing the session and subtly guiding social dynamics.

For Actual Plays, Robyn Hope’s Play, Performance, and Participation (2017) offers an adapted model based on Fine’s. She describes crucial changes to the social frame:

[T]hese players are simultaneously performers, playing their game before an audience of tens of thousands of people.² They inhabit what I have called the “entertainment frame” – the social context of a performer of any kind who is faced with an audience. Moreover, Critical Role’s entertainment frame is a professional one, as the actors are paid for their work.³

The entertainment or performance frame affects all other roles, as characters’ and players’ decisions are made with the audience’s enjoyment in mind, and it most notably changes the role in the social frame from person to a performer’s public persona. While both Fine and Hope mention that quick oscillations between frames are typical for tabletop role-playing games and Actual Plays, Katrin Rauch⁴ focusses on those moments in which two frames are simultaneously active and their respective roles blur.⁵ Such a blurring may have a comical effect, as two aspects that usually do not belong together are forced to combine, but may also allow emotions to cross between frames and reach the audience. The build-up of emotions within frames and their flow between them and towards the audience, I propose, contribute to the popularity of Actual Plays.

In this essay, I concentrate on dice rolls in Actual Plays because, as I’ll argue, they hold the potential to fuse all frames of its ludic collaborative storytelling performance in an emotionally highly charged moment. The Actual Play series Dimension 20 makes particularly effective use of the potential force of dice rolls by staging them with an extraordinary degree of attention. Focusing on Dimension 20 seasons led by Brennen Lee Mulligan as Game Master,⁶ I first show how the deeply engrained cultural traditions surrounding the use of dice for gaming, gambling, and divination are woven into the performance, increasing the amount of emotional investment dice can attract, hold and redirect between frames. In the second part, I describe how encouraging superstitious beliefs about dice and escalating the stakes leads to even higher emotional engagement and to memorable moments of transgression. In the third part, I focus on how the Dimension 20 series treat random dice results as welcome creative cues and seamlessly integrate chance into the Actual Play’s performative meaning-making process. Brennen Lee Mulligan as Game Master in Dimension 20 skillfully taps into the potent cultural imaginary of dice and carefully stages rolls to generate strong emotional reactions. When interpreting the results, he invites collaborative storytelling and celebrates the agency that results from a sense of being able to produce compelling meaning regardless of uncontrollable forces of chance.

Gaming, Gambling, Divination: Investing in the Force of Dice

The Actual Play anthology series Dimension 20 puts dice at the heart of its performance in every conceivable way. As the twenty-sided die (“D20”) has become the most iconic emblem of tabletop roleplaying games, Dimension 20 makes ample use of it. Its name “Dimension 20” clearly refers to the D20, and a stylized outline of an icosahedron is part of the official logo (see fig. 1).

Figure 1: Screenshot of Dimension 20 series logo.

While allusions to dice, especially to the D20, in the name or logo are quite common in Actual Plays,⁷ Dimension 20 commits to the theme to a much larger extent. Its set, known as “The Dome”, is built of equilateral triangles forming a grid associated with polyhedral die. Even the pieces connecting the triangles are shaped as hexagons to evoke the silhouette of a twenty-sided die (see fig. 2.).⁸

Figure 2: Behind-the-scenes shot from the inaugural season, Fantasy High. It shows the original set design, with the iconic patterns of triangles and hexagons evoking a D20. The arrangement has since been modified several times, but the basic geometric shapes remain. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S01E18, 0:02:37)

The set design ensures that shapes reminiscent of dice are present in nearly every shot, consistently visualizing Dimension 20’s commitment to the fundamental role of dice.

With the set background, the Dimension 20 series give dice a special place in the ludic performance. During a tense moment in the very first battle of Dimension 20’s inaugural Actual Play series Fantasy High (2018), the goblin Riz Gukgak (played by Brian Murphy) attempts to squeeze through a small orifice in the main opponent’s amorphous body to get inside in a maneuver that could decide the fight. Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan calls for the roll of dice that determines whether the goblin succeeds to take place in a specially crafted box with an ominous skull looming over it. Presenting the iconic object to the players and to the camera for the first time (see fig. 3), Mulligan gives it a name and establishes its role for the inaugural season and those that follow: “Here on Fantasy High, when we have rolls of substance where everything hangs in the balance, we bring out […] the Box of Doom.”⁹

Figure 3: Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan proudly presents the Box of Doom for the first time to his audience. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S01E02, 0:47:14)

Mulligan then goes on to outline the mechanics of the “opposed roll” that will decide what happens next on the battlefield: Murphy rolls a D20 and a D4 – a four-sided die – for his character Riz, which combined must reach a higher result than Mulligan’s D20 roll for the monster. On the count of three, both Mulligan and Murphy throw their dice into the box where a built-in overhead camera allows the audience to follow their trajectories. Hence, when Murphy’s dice score 21 to Mulligan’s 2 and the players celebrate the success of Riz Gukgak’s feat by jumping out of their seats, clapping and shouting, the audience can react ‘simultaneously’ with the cast at the table. The Box of Doom orchestrates the interactions of Game Master, players and dice, compellingly visualizes the impact of random dice results on the events of the story, showcases the resources that the show’s production directs towards dice rolls, and mediates the audience’s emotional involvement.

The hand-made object placed in front of the player, the dice being rolled simultaneously for an opposed check, and the embodied reaction of the cast all also stress the physicality of tabletop role-playing games. To draw a remote audience into such scenes of physical presence, Fantasy High uses additional post-production. In the case of the Box of Doom, the dice’s digits are hard to decipher on screen, and so large numbers are edited into the video to reveal the results to viewers at a glance (see fig. 4).

Figure 4: Dice results, shot by the Box of Doom’s built-in overhead camera made easily legible for the audience by large, arcade game style numbers added in post-production. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S1E2, 0:47:51)

The overhead shot of the dice results foregrounds that the group’s spontaneous physical interaction is edited: Digital mediation allows remote viewers to experience proximity and emotional involvement. Fantasy High performs a tabletop roleplaying game for an audience and does so with a special focus on dice.

By carefully staging dice rolls, Dimension 20 integrates the powerful cultural imaginary associated with dice into the Actual Play performance. Dice have been used and produced for many millennia. Astragaloi, ankle bones of even-toed ungulates such as sheep and goats, provided ready-made (uneven) four-sided dice, and six-sided cubes as well as four-sided tetrahedra with differentiating marks have been crafted in Mesopotamia since the third millennium BC.¹⁰ Twenty-sided icosahedra – now iconically associated with tabletop role-playing games – were well known in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt.¹¹ During the many millennia of recorded human interaction with dice, the practice of rolling dice has become infused with meaning and beliefs. In gaming, gambling, and divination, dice change a given situation. Dice, which have been used in board games since the third millennium BC,¹² force decisions in gaming: they “break symmetry”¹³ as the outcome of each roll creates a new constellation that affects player strategies. In gambling, chance outcomes directly affect real-life stakes. In divinatory practices, dice are asked to provide guidance on how to act in a difficult situation. Dice are thus tasked with making a decision that changes the present for the better.¹⁴ In all these cases, dice provide a transgressive connection to realms beyond: Board games may have been used in Ancient Egypt to connect the living and the dead;¹⁵ the gambler calls on or tries to shape fate; and in divinatory practices, dice create a link to spiritual forces that guide the supplicant’s life. Actual Plays can draw on dice’s long-established potential to cross ontological boundaries to connect the fictional world of the characters, the rules of the game, the social dynamics between the performers, and the audience at their screens.

In his approach to dice as Game Master, Brennan Lee Mulligan taps into the forces attached to gaming, gambling, and divination. Central to role-playing game mechanics, dice in Dimension 20 are closely associated with gaming and guarantee a direct connection between the game frame and the narrative frame. As a dice roll determines whether their character acts according to their wishes, players usually treat getting the necessary result as success. The emotional investment in “winning” the roll may carry over into emotional investment in the development of the character and vice versa. The game mechanics that calculate the outcome based on rolls can be complex when dice results are modified by multiple effects. As game designer Chris Klug notes, for a roll to be emotionally charged, it needs to be clear to the player who is about to roll which result on the die is needed for a success: “Players really enjoy rolling for the goals they [know] to be present and visible.”¹⁶ For all important rolls, Brennan Lee Mulligan resolves the game mechanics in advance by factoring in all modifications that apply to the difficulty of the check, ensuring that no further calculations are needed after the roll. He announces the target number and clarifies the stakes, sketching the consequences of success or failure. This preparation allows players and audiences to focus entirely on the die roll in the Box of Doom, directing all their attention to the number they hope to see. Klug underlines that “the act of rolling dice carries with it an emotional charge which […] can be leveraged to deepen the game experience.”¹⁷ With his verbal and physical contextualization, Mulligan increases a dice roll’s emotional capacity, i.e. the amount of energy and attention it is able to draw and hold. When the die stops rolling, that energy fuels the intense reactions of celebration or defeat. Attentively staged dice rolls create highly charged moments that connect the game frame to the character’s fate in the narrative frame as well as enable a shared emotional release in the performance frame.

Gambling raises stakes. While there is an argument that players gamble with their characters’ fate every time they describe a character action that necessitates a roll to determine the outcome, I understand these constitutive, frequent, and regulated actions as part of gaming. Unforced player decisions that put their character at an unnecessary risk, however, can be considered as gambling, and Brennan Lee Mulligan entices players to take such gambles. When Zac Oyama’s character Prince Valdrinor fights his father King Prilbus in the season finale of A Starstruck Odyssey (2022), Mulligan offers Oyama higher stakes on a single opposed roll: if Oyama’s result either surpasses or falls short of Mulligan’s roll of eleven by five or more, the fight is immediately ended, with a permanent win or loss for Oyama’s character. Deciding the outcome of a fight with a single roll instead of a protracted blow-by-blow heightens the tension in the game frame as well as the narrative frame, and casting the fraught father-son-relationship as being in the hands of fate adds dramatic pathos. Taking what game studies researcher Evan Torner calls “director stance”,¹⁸ Oyama understands that going for the gamble makes for a good show and agrees.¹⁹ The gamble pays off: when Oyama rolls an 18, his character wrestles control from his father in what feels like a Greek tragedy’s climactic event.²⁰

Mulligan also opens opportunities for characters to straight up gamble, such as in the fan-famous casino scene in A Starstruck Odyssey. The characters Gunnie (played by Lou Wilson) and Barry Syx (played by Brian Murphy) decide to visit a casino, get drawn into playing Blackjack and bet the ship’s last funds on a single hand. Mulligan models the card game with a dice throw,²¹ Murphy rolls the die in the Box of Doom and loses. To “recover their losses”, the two characters bet their valuable weapons on the next hand, raising the stakes. This time, Lou Wilson rolls and loses as well. Escalating the stakes once more, Mulligan offers Wilson the option that his character cheats, which could mitigate the loss but lead to even worse consequences if the corresponding roll goes awry. Wilson accepts and promptly fails that check as well. The scene exemplifies the fusion of story, game, and performance, as the whole table is visibly invested in the outcome across all frames: the gambling luck of the two characters will affect the entire crew of the ship. As the scene involves only two characters and thus also only two players/performers directly, the other four try to support the active players’ luck in the game frame and provide a rapt internal audience. Mulligan continually raises the stakes in the casino scene, the players/performers go with it, and the losing streak further escalates the sequence. The two active players lean into the escalation caused by the dice and escalate further, while the performers who act as internal audience react strongly and comment explicitly on how the tension affects them physically. When Siobhan Thompson notes “I might actually faint”,²² Zac Oyama asks “Is it ok if I lay down on the ground?”²³ and Ally Beardsley warns “I’m going to really need an inhaler”,²⁴ they all evoke imminent transgressions of the boundaries of professional behavior on stage. Beardsley even gets up from their assigned seat and partially out of the camera frame, nudging a boundary of the production set-up. Continually raised stakes, escalated through the series of abysmally low dice results, affect characters, players, and performers whose clearly displayed (and likely played-up²⁵) high-stress reactions as internal audience models a vibe for the reactions of the viewers and allows them to experience their own emotional response as participating in an intense shared moment.²⁶

Dice’s connection to divination manifest in tabletop role-playing mostly as specific game mechanics that model characters’ divination abilities. While game designer Monica Valentinelli suggests that each roll of the die can be seen as a divination of one’s character’s fate,²⁷ the roll, I would argue, does not foretell but rather creates a character’s immediate future. However, as many Actual Play settings include magic or spiritual elements, individual characters may have divinatory powers.²⁸ In the Fantasy High series, the high elf Adaine Abernant, played by Siobhan Thompson, is anointed “The Elven Oracle”. Adaine can sometimes use her foresight to intervene on behalf of a friend, which translates to the game frame with codified abilities. An ability called “Portent”, for example, allows Siobhan Thompson to (seldomly) change the outcome of a dice roll. Brennan Lee Mulligan chooses to handle the restrictions that the official rule system places on the “Portent” ability very leniently, giving Thompson’s ludic prowess and Adaine’s clairvoyant powers more room to shine. Modelling the character’s ability to sometimes glimpse the future as the player’s ability to control the die invokes the established connection between dice and divination. Thompson employs the ability to often great effect in the game frame, and Mulligan’s permissive home ruling allows her and the other players to revel in those successes. However, the strong effect of a rare moment of control over a dice roll all the more puts into stark relief the enormous power of dice on the story, the game, and the performance as usually unalterable fate. As Game Master, Mulligan keeps experimenting with ways to expand the dice’s capacity to attract, hold, and redistribute emotional investment. As we shall see in the next part, in doing so Mulligan also enhances their transgressive power.

Fighting Facts: Superstitions and Transgressions

Dice as external forces create facts and the desire to bend them to one’s own will. One way of influencing the outcome, usually associated with gambling, is by loading the dice. In a corresponding talk-back episode, the performer and drag queen Alaska Thunderfuck speculates that the dice used by the cast of Dungeons and Drag Queens are controlled via Bluetooth by the producers of the show. Looking straight into the camera, she adds: “It makes the show better. I mean, I don’t blame you.”²⁹ While a serious accusation of secretly controlling dice rolls would change the way viewers relate to the show,³⁰ other, more superstitious methods of manifesting a desired dice result are openly supported and encouraged.

As Fine already documents in Shared Fantasy and numerous published anecdotes confirm, two factors are commonly agreed-upon among participants in tabletop role-playing games to influence dice results: the dice and the player.³¹ Either for a limited time or in general, a die might be seen as an essentially good (or bad) die, a die may be treated – e.g. put into the light of the new moon – to roll well (again), dice and player may be attuned for better results, and some players just roll well (or badly). Fine calls these superstitions surrounding dice “engrossment beliefs” that are “legitimate within the involvement context of the game but held only dubiously otherwise”.³² They come to the fore when, as Hope phrases it, players are “engrossed in a particular social scenario”.³³ Openly acting according to such beliefs thus marks the situation as exempt from some everyday norms and strengthens the feeling of belonging to a heterotopic ludic community. Dimension 20 taps into that dynamic of emotional involvement: All superstitious beliefs connected to dice and players are voiced and performed repeatedly across all Dimension 20 seasons.³⁴

Thus, when it becomes clear in the casino scene in A Starstruck Odyssey that for strategic reasons Brian “Murph” Murphy will make the first gambling roll, the other players at the table show despair, as “Murph” is “known” to consistently roll badly. Ally Beardsley makes an exclamation, Emily Axford widens her eyes in quiet alarm, Siobhan Thompson interjects incredulously “No, we are letting Murph roll?” and Zac Oyama hides his face in his hands in trepidation while Brian Murphy looks doubtful and Lou Wilson embodies the cocktail-fueled and ill-advised overconfidence of his character Gunny (see fig. 5).

Figure 5: 500 credits are as good as gone: Ally Beardsley, Emily Axford, Brian Murphy / Barry Syx, Lou Wilson as Gunny, Siobhan Thompson, Zac Oyama (left to right) react. Screenshots. (Dimension 20 S13E04, 1:00:06 and 1:00:10)

The result of Murphy’s high-stakes roll, so low that even Gunny’s “card counting skills” (which allow Wilson to add the result of a D4) cannot turn it into a success, plays right into the cast’s conviction that Murphy never rolls well. Lou Wilson is seen by the group as rolling unpredictably, but often badly in high-pressure situations. When he decides to go for a second round of gambling with even higher stakes, others feel called to intervene. Emily Axford warns “Don’t use that die!” as Wilson picks up one she holds to be unlucky, Murphy asks “Do we think that your luck is that much better that it’s worth giving up —?”, to which Wilson, defiantly, replies “Oh, is it”, casually and carelessly throws the die Axford warned him about into the Box of Doom and rolls very low. Everyone at the table displays a strong physical reaction to the abysmal result, and yet, everyone but Wilson seems to agree that the dire loss was an inevitable outcome of combining a bad die, a player with unstable and often bad luck, and an arrogant throw. In contrast to Murphy and Wilson, Ally Beardsley is perceived by the group as getting exceptionally good results especially in defining story arc moments, and their affinity for dice is seen as contagious. When in A Starstruck Odyssey Lou Wilson starts rolling well with a die gifted to him by Ally Beardsley, Mulligan comments with “I don’t know why we would ever fuck with Ally Beardsley’s dice whispering powers”,³⁵ and the cast imagines Beardsley selling dice they have touched for an outrageous price as “#BeardsleyBlessed”.³⁶ The cast of every Dimension 20 series develops an explicitly and repeatedly voiced consensus about each players’ relationship with dice. The shared dice lore becomes part of the performance frame and is played up to further enhance tension whenever an “unlucky” player is faced with a high-stakes roll. A bad outcome, then, affects not only the game frame and the narrative frame but also the performance frame, as it allows the other performers to riff on the trope of the player/performer being “bad with dice”. The banter invites the audience to channel some of the emotional investment tied to the dice roll into the social aspects of the performance frame – for example, by agreeing with the performers’ assessment of someone’s dice skills. Emotional investment in the outcome of a die roll thus transforms, in part, into a shared sense of lore and community.

Mulligan imbues the highest possible result on a D20, a twenty, with a unique aura and thereby creates another avenue that directs emotional attention towards dice rolls. According to the rules of the arguably best-known tabletop roleplaying system, Dungeons & Dragons, such a “Nat 20” – for a “natural,” i.e. unmodified, result of twenty – is most effective during combat as a “critical success”. Mulligan stresses the importance to treat every single Nat 20 as exceptional, repeatedly voicing his commitment to “honor a Nat 20” (see fig. 6).

Figure 6: Brennan Lee Mulligan reconfirming his commitment to honor Nat 20s straight to the camera as a piece of Game Master advice during a game session. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S13E08, 1:17:55)

Mulligan indeed consistently nurtures the special aura of the Nat 20. Far exceeding what the game mechanics demand, he often adds creative touches that feel like a special reward. In A Starstruck Odyssey, sometime after the disastrous gambling scene, the crew open their own casino on their spaceship which introduces a recurring gamble element to the game.³⁷ Once again, Mulligan ups the ante when, with the ship docked in a particularly busy port, he offers the players a high-stakes deal: to multiply the result of a one-time roll by ten, with a potentially huge win or large loss having serious consequences for the crew. This time, Lou Wilson rolls a coveted Nat 20, resulting in an enormous win for the casino that allows the crew to significantly upgrade their ship. In addition to the payout to the ship’s funds according to the amended game mechanic, Mulligan “honors the Nat 20” by narrating that a rich and delightfully eccentric gambler, Bambi, becomes a regular at the ship’s casino and joins them on their travels. By creating Bambi, Mulligan not only adds a charming and memorable recurring character to the campaign,³⁸ but also deepens the sense of reward associated with  this “special” dice result. Mulligan’s rule to “honor the Nat 20” introduces a reward dynamic that mirrors gambling’s appeal: The 5% chance of triggering a “big payout” from even a relatively low-stakes roll adds an element of unpredictability and excitement. As any throw of the die could turn into a special moment for the character, the player, and the performer, this approach funnels more attention and attaches more emotional investment to every single roll.

Mulligan’s coordinated strategies increase the capacity of dice to generate emotional energy to such a great extent that a dice result not only redirects the energy across frames towards the audience but can become transgressive. Most particularly transgressive moments are connected to Ally Beardsley, who throughout the seasons develops a reputation for being able to consistently hit a Nat 20 in high-stakes story moments. They do so in the finale of Fantasy High when their character’s life hangs in the balance³⁹ and again in the finale of The Unsleeping City when with a Nat 20 on a simple ability check they unmask the heroes’ greatest opponent, causing Brennan Lee Mulligan to stumble into an astonished monologue: “I don’t understand how to explain that. I don’t understand. I don’t understand how to explain that. I don’t understand, I mean, let me see, let me take a picture, right? [takes a picture of the die with his phone] There are forces at work in this game that I don’t begin to understand. Is this real? Is magic real?”⁴⁰ Beardsley repeats the feat in the finale of Fantasy High: Sophomore Year to solve the final piece of the season’s main plot puzzle, and Mulligan reacts with “What the fuck! Every season!,”⁴¹ strengthening the lore of Beardsley’s nearly inexplicable power over dice. In the penultimate episode of Fantasy High: Junior Year, Siobhan Thompson’s character Adaine Abernant creates a simulacrum of Ally Beardsley’s character Kristen Applebees, a magic copy nicknamed “K2” and “British Kristen”, with real Kristen’s game-relevant abilities but without life experience or understanding of the complex situation in which she finds herself. Beardsley has “British Kristen” attempt to perform an incredibly difficult and plot relevant task. Holding the Box of Doom in the crook of his arm before the roll, Mulligan announces that he “could see a world where I quit the show” should the simulacrum’s attempt at the feat be successful.⁴² Beardsley’s unlikely roll succeeds, and the cast, unable to contain the transgressive energy, dissolves into somewhat frenzied laughter (see fig. 7).

Figure 7: The cast reacts to the outrageousness of a simulacrum effecting divine intervention. Screenshots. (Dimension 20 S21E18, 1:46:06)

Mulligan plays to the emotional turmoil caused by the paradoxically both highly unlikely and simultaneously – because of Beardsley’s reputation – expected success and briefly leaves the table (and all camera frames) in what he performs as exasperated outrage. One of the players, Zac Oyama, spontaneously takes over Mulligan’s seat – and with it the authority of his role as Game Master – and starts addressing Ally Beardsley in her role as the simulacrum “British Kristen”. After a quick off-camera go-ahead from Mulligan (“Do it. For real, do it.”), Oyama narrates as interim Game Master the effects of Beardsley’s dice roll on the world (see fig. 8).

Figure 8: A Nat 20 changes the Game Master unrecognizably. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S21E18, 1:46:28)

Mulligan here allows a dice result to upset the constitutive role distinction between Game Master and players, and the atmosphere approaches hysteria. Most of the episode of the talk-back show Adventuring Party filmed right after the Actual Play episode has all performers including Brennan Lee Mulligan negotiate their still high-riding emotional reactions. The weight imbued by Beardsley’s reputation of rolling incredibly well in big story moments and Mulligan’s commitment to “honor Nat 20s” meet with a specific story constellation that already stretches plot conventions as it gives a mere simulacrum the agency of a central character. The multiplied energy of the dice roll obliterates a boundary that is seen as so self-evident that its crossing is nearly unthinkable. Together, the performers need to find a shared attitude towards the transgressive forces that allow a dice result to destabilize the distinction between Game Master and players that had never before been questioned.

The first time Mulligan leaves his Game Master seat and Oyama takes over, in the antepenultimate episode of Fantasy High: Junior Year, the emotional reaction is nearly breathless, unpredictable, uncontained. After such an intense event, something similar must occur in the finale – lest the season arc feel anticlimactic. The situation repeats itself, with Kristen Applebees failing to perform a difficult task and the simulacrum then succeeding with a Nat 20.⁴³ Again, Mulligan leaves the table and Zac Oyama stands in as Game Master, but this time Mulligan takes longer to rejoin the other performers at the table. In a counterfactual “experiment”, Mulligan then asks Beardsley to roll again “to see” whether Kristen Applebees could have successfully worked the spell had Beardsley used a game mechanic available to them and expended a “luck point” in exchange for another chance for the “real Kristen” to roll the dice.⁴⁴ Beardsley’s roll succeeds and Mulligan rules that the simulacrum’s shocking success stands. With the authority of a Game Master he also decides that the critical success caused the simulacrum to become fully real, stating that “K2 is in Earth now”⁴⁵ and thereby eliminates K2/British Kristen permanently from the game. Even more importantly, Mulligan counters the unsettling transgression of the fundamental order of the performance game with an outrageously metaleptic move, shifting precariously chaotic turmoil into chaotic comedy.

Mulligan both escalates and contains the transgression of a player taking over the role of the Game Master in the very next season. He builds such a shift in roles into a heavily modified version of the game system Kids on Bikes that he co-creates for the Dimension 20 action movie parody season Never Stop Blowing Up (2024). In the “Never Stop” system, players can unlock an ability called “GM” that allows them to take over the Game Master seat with all its narrative powers for 60 seconds when they roll a Nat 20.⁴⁶ The once transgressive event is harnessed as an exciting but regulated game mechanic, and thus the energy of that role reversal is more confined. However, one of the performers in Never Stop Blowing Up, Ify Nwadiwe, uses the Game Master position to thwart his fellow performer Jacob Wysocki’s repeatedly stated goal for his character to reach the highest body count by giving his own character 250 million kills. Wysocki immediately responds with a convincing “I’m so legitimately pissed off” and insistently returns to the topic five minutes later as an explanation why his head is elsewhere and he cannot decide what he wants his character to do, saying “Sorry, I’m thinking about this too much”, pointing to Nwadiwe without establishing eye contact.⁴⁷ Nwadiwe leverages the now rules-conforming not-quite-transgression of taking over the Game Master seat for an improvised and unregulated social transgression, and Wysocki picks up the cue in his reaction which he acts out as spilling over the performance frame into the real social relationship between two members of the cast. The high energy channeled into dice rolls finds new ways to flow.

The increasingly transgressive power of dice in the Dimension 20 seasons manifests in Ally Beardsley expanding on their well-established reputation by unexpectedly using dice beyond the game frame. In an episode of Never Stop Blowing Up, they spontaneously perform a private divination ritual, rolling a die without any in-game reason. When confronted about their audible reaction to the roll, Beardsley explains, “It’s a check for how the rest of this episode is going to go, and I got a Nat 20”, adding apologetically “I didn’t mean to gasp so loud”.⁴⁸ Beardsley also employs dice rolls to influence the behavior of their fellow performers: At the beginning of the Fantasy High: Junior Year finale, Zac Oyama’s character delivers the slightly non-sequitur line, “Even cowgirls get the blues”, prompting disproportional laughter from the table. Brian Murphy explains the context:

[T]hat was an off-camera bit where Beardsley said, “If I roll a Nat 20 Zac has to say:
‘Even cowgirls get the blues.’”⁴⁹

When Beardsley rolls the die not as player but as performer wielding their power for “real” divination or influencing other’s actions – and Oyama strengthens the move by playing along –, the dice’s dynamic force transcends the game. These moments highlight how dice rolls, imbued with emotional and performative weight, can briefly transgress ontological boundaries.

In the finale of the Dungeons and Drag Queens season, a short four-episode season with four drag queens as performers who all had little to no previous experience with tabletop role-playing games and Actual Play, Jujube, one of the queens, is deeply moved by a story event and sheds some tears. In the ensuing talk-back episode, Mulligan explains how the game can create such strong emotional reactions:

[T]he game, I think, sneaks up on you in that emotional way because your investment doesn’t start at that place of catharsis, of crying either for remembering something special or sorrow or joy or whatever is moving you. But it sneaks up on you ’cause you go like, “Well I care about this dice roll.[”] [...] And it just sneaks in and those little moments of investment that don’t even feel as vulnerable, but you start to care. You just start to care about this world and this story. And [...] if you open your heart to one feeling, the door’s open now.⁵⁰

In the science fiction season A Starstruck Odyssey, an artificial superintelligence named Gnosis becomes a central non-player character. Mulligan describes Gnosis as a nested series of gyrating polyhedrons. When the customary character card – added in postproduction – presents a portrait of Gnosis, it becomes obvious to the audience that the outermost shape is a twenty-sided die, containing all other die shapes typically used in role-playing games (see fig. 9).

Figure 9: Character card for Gnosis, an artificial superintelligence playing a central role in the A Starstruck Odyssey season. It has the shape of a twenty-sided die containing a nested series of other polyhedral shapes. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S13E04, 1:23:51)

This visual highlights Gnosis’ resemblance to nested dice, with its intricate, layered structure evoking a connection to its name and the related concept of insight into the infinite. However, only in the interaction between the artificial superintelligence, the players’ characters and the other characters in the imagined world emerges a story that allows us to understand Gnosis as embodying the incredibly powerful and efficacious dice in Brennan Lee Mulligan’s Actual Play universe. Dice have the potential to mediate nearly unlimited energy, but it is the collaborative narrative that allows performers to make meaning together.

Making Meaning Together

In an essay entitled “Fortune’s Tyranny”, comic book artist and tabletop gamer Ray Fawkes recounts how a string of bad dice results for a particular type of check led him to play a character in an unplanned way:

We associated patterns of behavior to [dice] in bouts of superstition, and adjusted the personalities of our characters to match. My roguish biker, prone to near-suicidal behavior in action scenes, became quiet and careful when on foot. Why? Because despite the ratings on his character sheet that said otherwise, I often failed rolls in social challenges. […] I wouldn’t even ask a passerby for the time of day after a couple of spectacularly awful rolls. The dice established the reality, not the numbers.⁵¹

Fawkes’ anecdote about the “peculiar ripple backwards”⁵² reads as if he feels that the tyranny of the dice results restricted both his and his character’s choices, gaining only a character quirk and an anecdote in the bargain. Dice rolls directly affect characters’ actions, and so characters seem to have little control over their own life, and players not much more over their characters’. Hence, participants in tabletop role-playing games and Actual Plays need to develop a perspective on how to deal with fate. Both the game master and the players may feel some pressure to fudge dice rolls to avoid frustration.⁵³ Game studies scholar Pat Harrigan even declares that “dice are there to be ignored” because the alternative is “an uncaring cosmos”.⁵⁴ The Game Master’s and the participants’ attitude towards the “external” influence of dice from the game frame on the narrative frame is thus connected to an attitude towards the universe.

Mulligan showcases in his own interpretation of dice rolls that there is always creative choice: Even “bad” results may lead to enormously satisfying story moments for the character and the show overall. In Fantasy High, Zac Oyama plays the half-orc Gorgug Thistlespring who was adopted by gnomes. When Oyama, trying to learn more about a person Gorgug encounters, rolls a Nat 1 (a spectacular failure, just as a Nat 20 is a “critical success”) on an investigation check, Mulligan interprets it as Gorgug (baselessly) wondering whether that person might be his father. As Oyama keeps rolling a string of low investigation checks throughout the season, Mulligan and Oyama turn Gorgug’s confused and misguided hopes for finding his parents into a running gag, with Gorgug at one point (Oyama having rolled another Nat 1) briefly wondering whether he might be his own Dad. When in the season finale Oyama rolls a Nat 20 on an investigation check, Mulligan takes the opportunity to narrate that Gorgug meets his biological parents who had been searching for him for years. The strong emotional closure transforms the long series of low rolls from a one-off joke turned running gag into a meaningful and touching character arc.⁵⁵)

In Fantasy High: Sophomore Year, Lou Wilson’s character Fabian Aramais Seacaster starts out as the athletic, overconfident son of a famous father, with his physical abilities represented in game mechanics by the subclass “Champion”. Due to a string of unlucky rolls including several Nat 1s, Fabian becomes responsible for the unnecessary early deaths of a group of loyal followers of his father, while he himself ends up in a humiliating situation.⁵⁶ Between game sessions, Mulligan and Wilson decide to model the effect of the “bad” rolls on the character in the story. The game mechanics representation of Fabian loses the “Champion” subclass and all abilities, with Mulligan announcing the change to Wilson’s character at the beginning of episode 8.⁵⁷ Though this decision makes the character much less effective in an impending fight – which some players may interpret as an unfair disadvantage –, Wilson leans into Fabian’s character development, and several episodes later chooses a different subclass. Wilson transitions the former jock into a less stereotypical fighter who announces to his old football coach, a notorious bully: “Toxic masculinity is dead. I dance now!”⁵⁸ Leveraging dice results to drive the story forward produces compelling entertainment, as the media critic Moises Taveras explains in a review of Dimension 20:

The dice, for better and for worse sometimes, keep me on my feet. I can’t predict a thing that’s going to happen thanks to the insanely successful marriage of this mechanic to the cast’s improvisational skills. There’s nary a moment, whether it be a rousing victory or an utter defeat, that doesn’t propel these characters forward in some way and carve out a unique, player-driven story. And because they are improvised rather than written, the characters feel like authentic people, even if they are fanciful in nature.⁵⁹

Boldly leaning into bad dice results lets characters (and everyone else) feel the full force of failure. Finding a way to interpret the failure as a defining character moment harnesses these strong emotions and develops “bad” rolls into great story arcs.

In the detective series Mice and Murder, Rekha Shankar’s and Grant O’Brien’s characters pay homage to Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes. As a brief flashback reveals, the con woman Daisy D’umpstaire and the famous detective Sylvester Cross fell deeply in love, and yet Daisy left Sylvester at the altar without an explanation. At the beginning of the series, they meet again, years later, at a manor house as part of a group investigating suspicious occurrences. During the first few episodes, while O’Brien rolls well and Sylvester is able to gather some important clues, Shankar fails most of her checks, and so Daisy’s investigation does not gain traction. The performers all notice. In the third episode, O’Brien/Sylvester remarks, with a somewhat smug undertone and gesturing with a pen as if it were a pipe: “Wow, I’ve really thrown you off your game.”⁶⁰ Rekha Shankar makes increasingly dejected comments before she rolls, and after several low results, Mulligan empathizes as he withholds information from her character and adds: “You have great stats and skills. I don’t know what’s going on.”⁶¹ After yet another badly failed investigation check, Mulligan gives Shankar the choice to either roll a different ability check or, based on a special character feat, re-roll her die for investigation. Shankar asks her fellow players what she should do, and the crew encourages her to attempt investigation again, with Ally Beardsley cheerleading: “Come on, you can do it, believe in yourself! You’re just as good as Sylvester!”⁶² In that moment, Shankar translates the long string of low investigation rolls into a crucial aspect of her character’s backstory by giving the following explanation for Daisy’s failure to locate evidence up to this point:

Daisy has not been herself since she laid eyes upon Sylvester at this manor. She feels the reasons she left him coming to surface – reasons she hasn't really necessarily explained to him, that yes, the things that she is good at waver in his presence and when you are with someone who stands for so much good, how can she be a criminal around him? So, you’re with the person that completes you, but when he completes you, you are not yourself. [very strong impressed reaction from the Game Master] And that’s what she realizes as she stares boldly at this painting and says, “I'm going to investigate it again”.⁶³

Mulligan rewards Shankar’s in-character justification for a notorious series of low dice results by giving her advantage on the upcoming roll. When Shankar makes use of the advantage to achieve a (modified) result of 25, Mulligan both responds to its game effect with “Hell yes! That is a gold medal difficulty”, and expresses the deep satisfaction that arises from the die result validating Shankar’s clever integration of the earlier dice results into her character’s backstory: “Oooooh, when the dice cooperate, baby!”⁶⁴ Narrating the in-world effect of the successful investigation check, Mulligan carefully incorporates Daisy’s newly discovered character trait into his description that gives Daisy/Shankar the clue:

Daisy, you look up and think, “How can I be myself? How can I see myself, when I’m so wrapped up in my feelings for another?” And as you think about your relationship to your identity, […] you look up and look into the eyes of the sort of medieval badger lord, and let go for a moment of this mounting pressure, and instead just look, have a moment of being pensive and looking into the eyes of the portrait, and as you look into the eyes of the portrait, one of the eyes swivels just a little bit.⁶⁵

From that pivotal moment on, Daisy makes sure to be unobserved when investigating, and Shankar gives little monologues to the effect before clicking the dice button. The results are noticeably better, Daisy and Shankar gain confidence, and by the middle of the next episode, Shankar remarks full of conviction: “You see, this bitch rolls better when nobody’s around.”⁶⁶ Shankar’s explanation of Daisy’s difficulties at the beginning of the case has been fully integrated into the meaning-making process at the table.

Within the first few minutes of the next episode, Shankar asks for a difficult check. Some inhabitants of the manor claim that the house is haunted, and Shankar wants Daisy to summon a ghost to go through a small hole to investigate the secret room beyond. Mulligan allows the check, Shankar rolls a Nat 20, and Beardsley gleefully ribs the Game Master by pointing out that he now has to spend the night to rewrite the lore for the season. As O’Brien elaborates, the genre rests on the detectives finding a rational explanation for what at first looks like supernatural occurrences, so Shankar’s Nat 20 might have ruined the foundations of Mulligan’s world building. Beardsley tries to walk their glee back, offering the alternative interpretation that the Nat 20 clarifies for Daisy without a doubt that ghosts do not exist. Mulligan acknowledges the challenge with “I’ve never gotten rocked this hard”, takes another moment and then declares to much acclaim: “I’m ready to honor this Nat 20.”⁶⁷ Mulligan showcases here that with confidence in the performers’ collaborative improvisation skills and mutual trust, any dice result can be embraced as valuable creative input.

With no need to “fudge” dice results – since the full range of emotions can be integrated into the performance –, the meticulously staged dice rolls unleash their maximum energy. Dimension 20’s Actual Plays radiate the conviction that whatever act of randomness or contingency one encounters, a cooperative community can always turn it into a captivating story. Dice amplify and mediate the emotional energy of a compelling narrative, and the show exudes the agency, joy and deep satisfaction of making meaning together.

Bibliography

Actual Plays series, related talk-back show, and game system

Dropout.tv. Fantasy High. 17 Episodes. 2018. (= Dimension 20 S01)

Dropout.tv. The Unsleeping City. 17 Episodes. 2019. (= Dimension 20 S03)

Dropout.tv. Fantasy High: Sophomore Year. 20 Episodes. 2019–2020. (= Dimension 20 S07)

Dropout.tv. Mice and Murder. 10 Episodes. 2021. (= Dimension 20 S09)

Dropout.tv. A Starstruck Odyssey. 18 Episodes. 2022. (= Dimension 20 S13)

Dropout.tv. Dungeons and Drag Queens. 4 Episodes. 2023. (= Dimension 20 S18)

Dropout.tv. Fantasy High: Junior Year. 20 Episodes. 2024. (= Dimension 20 S21)

Dropout.tv. Never Stop Blowing Up. 10 Episodes. 2024. (= Dimension 20 S22)

Dropout.tv. Dimension 20’s Adventuring Party. 18 seasons. 2020–.
[talkback show discussing events of each Dimension 20 episode starting with Dimension 20 Season 5, A Crown of Candy]

Dropout.tv. Dimension 20. Never Stop Blowing Up. The System. 2024.

Research articles and reviews

Costikyan, Greg. “Randomness: Blight or Bane?”. Will Hindmarch (ed.). The Bones. Us and Our Dice. N.l.: Gameplaywright Press, 2010. 44–66.

Dales, George F. “Of Dice and Men”. Journal of the American Oriental Society 88.1 (1968): 14–23.

Dropout.tv. “Gunnie and Barry Need a Big Win | Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey.” youtube.com. 2023. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsQ893GVPA. (Last accessed: 2 Nov 2024)

Fawkes, Ray. “Fortune’s Tyranny”. Will Hindmarch (ed.). The Bones. Us and Our Dice. N.l.: Gameplaywright Press, 2010. 190–193.

Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy. Role Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Finkel, Irving L. “On the Rules of the Royal Game of Ur”. Irving L. Finkel (ed.). Ancient Board Games in Perspective. London: British Museum Press, 2007. 16–32.

Harrigan, Pat. “The Unrollable”. Will Hindmarch (ed.). The Bones. Us and Our Dice. N.l.: Gameplaywright Press, 2010. 156–162.

Hope, Robyn. Play, Performance, and Participation: Boundary Negotiation and Critical Role. Master’s thesis. Concordia University, Montreal. 2017. Online. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/983446/1/Hope_MA_S2018.pdf

Klug, Chris. “Dice as Dramaturge”. Greg Costikyan, Drew Davidson et al. (eds.). Tabletop. Analogue Game Design. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2011. 30–40.

Lily 💞 [pseudonym]. “Fantasy High but it’s just Gorgug asking people if they are his dad.” youtube.com. 2019. (URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKypFhCse9E)

Minas-Nerpel, Martina. “A Demotic Inscribed Icosahedron from Dakhleh Oasis”. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 93 (2007): 137–148.

Perry, Rick. “Dimension 20 Set.” Rick Perry. N.d. URL: https://rickperry.myportfolio.com/dimension-20-table. (Last accessed 2 Nov 2024)

Piccione, Peter A. “The Egyptian Game of Senet and the Migration of the Soul”. Irving L. Finkel (ed.). Ancient Board Games in Perspective. London: British Museum Press, 2007. 54–63.

Pliatsika, Vassiliki. “Why So Serious? An Extraordinary Cone Shell Group from Mycenae and the Problem of Identifying Mycenaean Board Gaming Material”. Barbara Carè, Véronique Dasen, Ulrich Schädler (ed.). Back to the Game: Reframing Play and Games in Context. Lisbon: Associação Ludus, 2021. 53–87.

Rauch, Katrin. “Fusion von Frames und Identitätsschichten bei Actual Plays. Die erste Staffel Exandria Unlimited (2021) von Critical Role als Beispiel.” Paidia. Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung. URL: <https://paidia.de/fusion-von-frames-und-identitaetsschichten-critical-role/>

Rauch, Katrin. Frame-nonkonforme Intersektionen und deren Auswirkungen in Actual Plays. Master’s thesis. Innsbruck University, Innsbruck. 2024. URL: https://ulb-dok.uibk.ac.at/ulbtirolhs/download/pdf/10337760

Tait, W. J. “Were There Gamesters in Pharaonic Egypt?”, Irving L. Finkel (ed.). Ancient Board Games in Perspective. London: British Museum Press, 2007. 46–53.

Taveras, Moises. “How Dimension 20 Restored My Appetite for Television”. Paste. Signs of Life in Music, Film & Culture. 26 May 2023. URL: https://www.pastemagazine.com/games/dungeons-and-dragons/how-dimension-20-saved-my-appetite-for-television

Tidball, Jeff. “One Point Three Million: An Interview with Scott Nesin, Inventor of the Dice-o-Matic”. Will Hindmarch (ed.). The Bones. Us and Our Dice. N.l.: Gameplaywright Press, 2010. 74–81.

Torner, Evan. “The Self-Reflexive Tabletop Role-Playing Game”. Game. The Italian Journal of Game Studies 5 (2016): 85–96. URL: https://www.gamejournal.it/torner-the-self-reflexive-tabletop-role-playing-game/

Valentinelli, Monica. “Make a Wish: Dice and Divination in Gaming”. Will Hindmarch (ed.). The Bones. Us and Our Dice. N.l.: Gameplaywright Press, 2010. 175–181.

Figures

Cover picture: Character card for Gnosis, an artificial superintelligence playing a central role in the A Starstruck Odyssey season. It has the shape of a twenty-sided die containing a nested series of other polyhedral shapes. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S13E04, 1:23:51)

Figure 1: Screenshot of Dimension 20 series logo.

Figure 2: Behind-the-scenes shot from the inaugural season, Fantasy High. It shows the original set design, with the iconic patterns of triangles and hexagons evoking a D20. The arrangement has since been modified several times, but the basic geometric shapes remain. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S01E18, 0:02:37)

Figure 3: Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan proudly presents the Box of Doom for the first time to his audience. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S01E02, 0:47:14)

Figure 4: Dice results, shot by the Box of Doom’s built-in overhead camera made easily legible for the audience by large, arcade game style numbers added in post-production. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S1E2, 0:47:51)

Figure 5: 500 credits are as good as gone: Ally Beardsley, Emily Axford, Brian Murphy / Barry Syx, Lou Wilson as Gunny, Siobhan Thompson, Zac Oyama (left to right) react. Screenshots. (Dimension 20 S13E04, 1:00:06 and 1:00:10)

Figure 6: Brennan Lee Mulligan reconfirming his commitment to honor Nat 20s straight to the camera as a piece of Game Master advice during a game session. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S13E08, 1:17:55)

Figure 7: The cast reacts to the outrageousness of a simulacrum effecting divine intervention. Screenshots. (Dimension 20 S21E18, 1:46:06)

Figure 8: A Nat 20 changes the Game Master unrecognizably. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S21E18, 1:46:28)

Figure 9: Character card for Gnosis, an artificial superintelligence playing a central role in the A Starstruck Odyssey season. It has the shape of a twenty-sided die containing a nested series of other polyhedral shapes. Screenshot. (Dimension 20 S13E04, 1:23:51)

1. The role has different names in different game systems, such as “Dungeon Master” in the well-known system Dungeons & Dragons. I use “Game Master” as the more descriptive term.[↩]
2. Hope’s phrase “playing before an audience” references Critical Role’s initial broadcasting mode by streaming their Actual Play sessions live on Twitch. Critical Role’s streams are now pre-recorded and lightly edited, and a version heavily edited for length, “Critical Role Abridged”, exists for campaign 3. [↩]
3. Hope, Play, Performance, and Participation, 29.[↩]
4. I am immensely grateful to Katrin Rauch who introduced me to the current generation of Actual Plays, providing me with a seemingly endless source of joyous entertainment as well as a fascinating topic of research.[↩]
5. Rauch, Frame-nonkonforme Intersektionen, 69–80 and passim; Rauch, “Fusion von Frames und Identitätsschichten bei Actual Plays”, passim.[↩]
6. I draw examples from the following seasons, all with Brennan Lee Mulligan acting as Game Master and spanning the entirety of Dimension 20’s run to date: Fantasy High [Freshman Year] (2018), The Unsleeping City (2019), Fantasy High: Sophomore Year (2019–2020; streamed live; via video conference for the last session), Mice and Murder (2021; via video conference), A Starstruck Odyssey (2022), Dungeons and Drag Queens (2023), Fantasy High: Junior Year (2024), Never Stop Blowing Up (2024).[↩]
7. The names and logos of, for example, Critical Role, Dice Camera Action, and Not Another D&D Podcast all refer to dice or feature a D20.[↩]
8. In his published notes on the set design, Production Designer & Creative Producer Rick Perry labels the hexagons “center trim elements shaped as D20’s”. Rick Perry. “Dimension 20 Set”. Rick Perry. URL: https://rickperry.myportfolio.com/dimension-20-table. (Last accessed 2 Nov 2024[↩]
9. Dimension 20 S01E02, 0:47:10–0:47:14.[↩]
10. Finkel, “Rules of the Royal Game of Ur”, 17, 30; Dales, “Of Dice and Men”, passim.[↩]
11. Minas-Nerpel, “A Demotic Inscribed Icosahedron”, 144–145.[↩]
12. Finkel, “Rules of the Royal Game of Ur”, 17.[↩]
13. Costikyan, “Randomness: Blight or Bane?”, 58–62.[↩]
14. Classics and game studies scholar Vassiliki Pliatsika states that it is difficult to distinguish whether “implements which generate luck, like cubic or polyhedral dice, binary lots and astragali” were used for divination or games, as both were “closely interconnected throughout antiquity” (Pliatsika, “Why so serious”, 72), and W. J. Tait argues that gaming or gambling may have been part of divination (Tait, “Gamesters in Pharaonic Egypt”, 51). Egyptologist Martina Minas-Nerpel describes a twenty-sided die inscribed with the names of Gods that likely was used to determine which God might be able to help in a given situation (Minas-Nerpel, “A Demotic Inscribed Icosahedron”).[↩]
15. Piccione, “The Egyptian Game of Senet”, passim.[↩]
16. Klug, “Dice as Dramaturge”, 37.[↩]
17. Klug, “Dice as Dramaturge”, 34.[↩]
18. Torner, “The Self-Reflexive Tabletop Role-Playing Game”, 91.[↩]
19. As professional performers, the Dimension 20 cast is usually aware that their actions as players and characters need to be entertaining for an audience. Sometimes performers explain their decisions as players or characters as the result of taking a “director stance”, such as when Emily Axford defends her character’s choice to touch an unknown, extraordinarily strange alien object in a wrecked room – which leads to a cascade of strong effects that nearly incapacitate her character – by stating that she thought it would be “more fun [for viewers] than an investigation check” (Dimension 20 S13E04, 1:22:32).[↩]
20. Dimension 20 S13E18, 1:53:38–1:54:40.[↩]
21. Mulligan makes the player choose between two different methods: one D20 roll that needs to beat a 13 or two rolls that each need to beat an 8; in both cases, the odds for the character to win are about 40%.[↩]
22. Dimension 20 S13E18, 0:58:47.[↩]
23. Dimension 20 S13E18, 1:05:02.[↩]
24. Dimension 20 S13E18, 1:08:52.[↩]
25. When Siobhan Thompson mentions fainting, Zac Oyama, who sits next to her, quietly checks with her whether she is ok, and she signals that he does not need to worry.[↩]
26. Dimension 20’s production company dropout.tv uploaded a 16-minute cut of the casino scene to YouTube in 2023. Its two top-rated comments explicitly mention how stressful the scene feels to the audience: “the way this scene is so much more stressful than any of the combat scenes in Starstruck” (@lemkem4442); “lou’s commitment to his characters has led to some of the most chaotic and stressful moments in dimension 20, and I live for it every time” (@elderflower2133). Dropout.tv, “Gunnie and Barry Need a Big Win”.[↩]
27. Valentinelli, “Dice and Divination in Gaming”, 177.[↩]
28. Valentinelli, “Dice and Divination in Gaming”, 176.[↩]
29. Adventuring Party S13E02, 0:14:28.[↩]
30. While Fine describes cheating as a wide-spread practice of players and Game Masters alike in tabletop role-playing games (Fine, Shared Fantasy, 99–102), Hope, drawing on empirical data collected by the anonymous runners of the website CritRoleStats which recorded every single dice roll made in Critical Role games from 2015 to 2023, is convinced that Critical Role does not tamper with dice results (Hope, Play, Performance, and Participation, 75).[↩]
31. Compare Fine’s sections “Dice Beliefs” (Fine, Shared Fantasy, 92–96) and “Beliefs in Personal Luck” (Fine, Shared Fantasy, 96–98).[↩]
32. Fine, Shared Fantasy, 92.[↩]
33. Hope, Play, Performance, and Participation, 69.[↩]
34. Most of the ways of manifesting a desired dice result – mumbling encouraging words while shaking the die, blowing on the die or kissing it – rely on close physical connection between the body of the player and the die. Hence, as several researchers point out, many players find it hard to trust virtual dice (Fine, Shared Fantasy, 98; Klug, “Dice as Dramaturge”, 34). In Mice and Murder, a Dimension 20 season filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic and played remotely with the help of a virtual roleplaying platform that “rolls dice” by generating a random number without involving actual dice, one of the performers, Rekha Shankar, says “I wish there was a virtual way to do like one of these with the dice, you know?” while mimicking shaking dice in her cupped hands (Dimension 20 S09E03, 1:45:36). Scott Nesin, the owner of the virtual gaming platform GamesByEmail, reports that while his site’s dice rolls were based on other random number generators, he received a steady string of complaints that they were “bad”. In response, Nesin has built his own dice-rolling machine, the Dice-O-Matic, which continuously rolls 200 physical dice and automatically digitizes the results. Nesin reports that since he has anchored the virtual platform’s dice results in actual physical dice, he has had no more complaints (Tidball, “Dice-O-Matic”, passim).[↩]
35. Dimension 20 S13E05, 0:54:45.[↩]
36. Dimension 20 S13E05, 0:54:47–0:55:10.[↩]
37. With much better odds than during the character’s casino visit: For each in-game day, the players roll one D20, win on an 8 or higher and lose only with a three or lower.[↩]
38. Dimension 20 S13E14, 1:33:29–1:37:59.[↩]
39. Dimension 20 S01E15, 1:56:24.[↩]
40. Dimension 20 S03E17, 0:29:20-0:29:51.[↩]
41. Dimension 20 S07E20, 3:46:38[↩]
42. Dimension 20 S21E18, 1:45:09.[↩]
43. Dimension 20 S21E20, 1:17:29.[↩]
44. Dimension 20 S21E20, 1:21:10.[↩]
45. Dimension 20 S21E20, 1:24:02.[↩]
46. Dropout.tv. Dimension 20. Never Stop Blowing Up. The System, 4.[↩]
47. Dimension 20 S22E09, 1:28:32–1:30:30 and 1:35:40.[↩]
48. Dimension 20 S22E04, 0:33:52.[↩]
49. Dimension 20 S21E19, 0:09:35–0:10:02.[↩]
50. Adventuring Party S13E04, 0:15:25–0:16:01.[↩]
51. Fawkes, “Fortune’s Tyranny”, 191.[↩]
52. Fawkes, “Fortune’s Tyranny”, 191.[↩]
53. Fine, Shared Fantasy, 99–102; Hope, Play, Performance, and Participation, 70–72.[↩]
54. Harrigan, “The Unrollable”, 156; 158.[↩]
55. A fan-edited supercut, “Fantasy High but it’s just Gorgug asking people if they are his dad”, has been viewed 1.25 million times on YouTube with nearly a thousand comments, illustrating how well the story arc born from failed investigation checks works. Lily 💞 [pseudonym]. “Fantasy High but it’s just Gorgug asking people if they are his dad.” youtube.com. 2019. (URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKypFhCse9E[↩]
56. Dimension 20 S07E06.[↩]
57. Dimension 20 S07E08, 0:07:58–0:08:40.[↩]
58. Dimension 20 S07E15, 1:08:00.[↩]
59. Taveras, “How Dimension 20 Restored My Appetite”, n.p.[↩]
60. Dimension 20 S09E03, 1:45:21.[↩]
61. Dimension 20 S09E04, 0:20:50.[↩]
62. Dimension 20 S09E04, 0:46:25.[↩]
63. Dimension 20 S09E04, 0:46:28–0:47:13.[↩]
64. Dimension 20 S09E04, 0:47:34–0:47:46.[↩]
65. Dimension 20 S09E04, 0:47:52–0:48:33.[↩]
66. Dimension 20 S09E05, 1:00:13.[↩]
67. Dimension 20 S09E06, 0:09:32–0:09:43.[↩]