The Twenty-Sided Tavern is an exciting show that is heading up to the Edinburgh Fringe. The show sees the audience choose their heroes, battle monsters and solve riddles to influence the narrative as the show unfolds.
Combining a dynamic story and real-time technology to create an audience-led engagement like never before. The paths the audience choose and the hilarious outcomes of those decisions mean that every performance is entirely unique.
Ahead of the Fringe, I spoke with David Andrew Greener Laws (aka DAGL) who is the co-creator and Gamemaster of The Twenty-Sided Tavern all about the show and what the audience can expect from the show.
DAGL began by explaining further about the show "The Twenty-Sided Tavern is a live-action roleplaying game where the audience dictates the actions of the players onstage, determining their success (or failure) through voting in elections, competing in minigames, and sometimes being called onstage to roll dice or play Fantasy Beer Pong."
The show was inspired by a love of the classic roleplay game Dungeons and Dragons with DAGL explaining "We are playing D&D every free moment that someone will let us. How lucky we are that this hobby gets to count as research."
"The inspiration came from a desire to share our joint love of this pastime with a larger audience, to create a space where first-time players and long-time veterans could come together for a communal experience. We love it, we know so many people who love it, and what’s better than getting together and playing a story with your friends, even if they’re friends you’re just meeting in the moment?"
The use of technology is vital to the show as the audience decided where the adventure goes, I asked DAGL how this was developed. "Gamiotics is a magical tool that creates immediate, visible impact from the audience onto the story. It truly makes the audience a player in the game, rather than a passive spectator; their decisions, their voice, matters."
The choice of having the audience decide the show was clearly important in developing the show, the allowance for every show to be unique is something DAGL explained
"Absolutely integral. We want every audience member to walk away with the knowledge that something they saw was entirely unique, unplanned, and due to their involvement. You will never have the same experience as another night’s audience"
With the show requiring the use of techology I asked how easy it would be for an audience member to access the required software "Our partner David Carpenter is also the founder of Gamiotics. He started working on the tech back in 2017, and during the pandemic we worked together on a series of live interactive shows via Zoom. That’s where I saw not only that it was useful, but that it was engaging for people all over the world in real time. Getting the technology to work was never the issue. Explaining to people who haven’t used it how much fun they’re going to have? That’s the hard part."
The exciting use of technology that is being used in The Twenty-Sided Tavern led our conversation to what it could do for theatre-going forwards. DAGL said "Interactive and immersive experiences are some of the fastest growing elements of the entertainment industry. What we love about the way technology integrates into our show is that it creates an immediate connection to the audience, which is so necessary to our artform. When the audience can communicate, it opens up new roles for them as fellow storytellers, as decision-makers, as consumers, and as creators."
As ever I asked the question to DAGL of what does theatre mean to you? He said "To me, theatre is an extension of that ever-persistent human desire to gather as a community and tell a story. That feeling is inexorable from our existence, and theatre is one of the many beautiful ways that we can fulfill that need."
Our chat wrapped up with why should anyone come and see The Twenty-Sided Tavern "Because it’s fun! At the end of the day, that’s our main philosophy. It’s a fun, raucous, hilarious time, and if you like to laugh, you’ll have a good time here. Come be a hero!"
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