Tabletop Liveplays That RPG Fans Must Watch

There’s been a recent renaissance in the popularity of tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, a renaissance that owes a lot to the podcasts and livestreams of roleplaying groups such as Critical Role. With professional production values, talented actors/roleplayers, and creative Game Masters who think outside the box, these Liveplays, streamed on YouTube or Twitch, promote tabletop roleplaying by showing fans and viewers just how fun and thrilling these games can at their best.

Tabletop gaming, in all honesty, can be a hard hobby to get into. To start up a tabletop roleplaying campaign, someone needs to find 2 to 6 other players with a love for nerdy hobbies, a Dungeon Master/Game Master willing to run the game, and a game system that fits the story everyone wants to tell. Scheduling meet-up times to play these games can be a dicey proposition in a world of fluctuating work schedules (doubly so during the current pandemic). More importantly, tabletop roleplaying games are only fun when every player is civil, considerate, and willing to work together; a single player acting in bad faith (whether they’re being game-breaking Munchkins, spiteful Trolls, or outright sociopaths) can suck the fun right out of a game.

The Tabletop Liveplays listed in this article are fairly exceptional as far as RP campaigns go; Nerds and Geeks looking to join a roleplaying campaign shouldn’t expect their DM to be on the same level as Matthew Mercer, for instance. Even so, the Liveplays below have transformed the tabletop community by giving gamers examples of storytelling, presentation, and friendships to aspire to, while also showing laypeople just what all the fuss over tabletop gaming is about. They’re also fun and funny to watch, too.

Critical Role’s D&D Campaigns

One of the most popular Tabletop Liveplays out on the internet, Critical Role is a long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign on the Geek and Sundry website, the product of a gang of self-proclaimed “nerdy-ass” voice actors that include Matthew Mercer (the voice of McCree in Overwatch), Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Marisha Rey, Sam Riegel, Liam O’Brien, Talesin Jaffe, and Ashley Johnson (one of the stars on the police procedural Blindspot). Half the charm of Critical Role lies in the suburb acting and vocal impersonations of this motley gang of voice actors; the other stems from the gang’s close-knit friendship, which translates into a lot of hilarious pranks, side-skits, and epic storytelling moments.

Dimension 20’s Crazy Copyright Avoidance

A tabletop gaming show produced by College Humor‘s spin-off site Dropout, each season in Dimension 20 is composed of a short tabletop campaigns run by Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan and staffed by a revolving cast of players. Each season is run using the 5th Edition rules for Dungeons & Dragons, but still manage to be distinct thanks to cleverly designed map miniatures and madcap world settings. For instance, the second season of Dimension 20, Escape From the Bloodkeep, is a non-copyright infringing retelling of Lord of the Rings where the players take on the roles of minions of the Dark Lord, while season five, A Crown of Candy, is basically Game of Thrones set in Candyland.

The Adventure Zone’s Epic Rags-To-Riches Stories

A tabletop gaming podcast hosted by the McElroy brothers and their father Clint, The Adventure Zone started out as a light-hearted, comedic Dungeons & Dragon campaign, then evolved into an epic multiverse-spanning odyssey about a ragtag adventuring party that hunted powerful relics across different planes of existence.

This first season of The Adventure Zone, titled “Balance”, wound up being adapted into a best-selling graphic novel series, while the McElroy brothers moved on to a new campaign setting; this Monster of the Week RPG campaign, styled heavily after Stranger Things, revolved around a group of rag-tag monster hunters working to protect their hometown of Kepler, West Virginia from otherwordly horrors.

Friends At The Table’s Indie Games

Unlike the other Tabletop Liveplays in this article, Friends At the Table is a roleplaying podcast group that avoids mainstream titles in favor of indie roleplaying games which focus on narrative storytelling over tactical strategy. Each dramatic and thrilling season of Friends At the Table alternates between two signature settings; Campaigns 1, 3, and 5 (“Autumn in Hieron,” “Winter in Hieron,” and “Spring in Hieron“) are set the world of Hieron, a dark fantasy landscape wracked by numerous magical apocalypses and disasters. Campaigns 2, 4, and 6 (“COUNTER/Weight,” “Twilight Mirage,” and “Partizan”) together form a space opera science-fiction setting spanning thousands of years, which borrows liberally from both the Cyberpunk and Mecha genres.

The titular friends of Friends at the Table have used a wide range of different indie roleplaying game systems over the course of their runtime, including titles such as the D&D-inspired Dungeon World, the narrative cyberpunk RPG The Sprawl, the dark fantasy heist game Blades in the Dark, and even new indie games were inspired by their podcasts, such as the indie Mecha RPGs Beam Saber and Armor Astir: Advent.

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