Actual play
Based on Wikipedia: Actual play
In 2018, a curious thing happened at the Diana Jones Award ceremony, the most prestigious honor in tabletop gaming. For the first time in the award's history, the winner wasn't a game. It wasn't a designer. It wasn't a publisher or an organization. The winner was a concept: the phenomenon of people playing Dungeons & Dragons on the internet while strangers watched.
This might sound absurd. Why would anyone want to watch other people roll dice and pretend to be elves?
The answer turns out to be the same reason humans have always gathered around fires to hear stories: we crave narrative. But actual play—the term for this genre of entertainment—offers something traditional storytelling cannot. You get to watch the story being invented in real time, to see the moment when a dice roll transforms triumph into disaster or vice versa, to witness players improvising their way through situations no scriptwriter would have dreamed up.
The Accidental Birth of a Genre
The origins of actual play trace back to something decidedly unglamorous: magazine columns. In the early days of wargaming—the strategic tabletop hobby that eventually spawned Dungeons & Dragons—enthusiasts would write "play reports" for gaming magazines, dry recountings of how their battles unfolded. These evolved into forum posts as the internet emerged, with role-playing game communities sharing stories of memorable sessions.
None of this seemed likely to become mainstream entertainment. Tabletop role-playing games had been a niche hobby since the 1970s, associated in the popular imagination with basement-dwelling teenagers and moral panics about satanism. The games themselves could be impenetrable to outsiders—thick rulebooks filled with tables and statistics, requiring hours of preparation and commitment.
Then came the Let's Play phenomenon. In the mid-2000s, video game players began recording themselves playing through games, adding commentary as they went. This format proved surprisingly compelling. Viewers weren't just watching gameplay; they were experiencing it through the personality of the player, enjoying their reactions, their jokes, their strategies. The emergence of livestreaming platforms like Twitch transformed this into a real-time social experience, with chat rooms full of viewers commenting as the action unfolded.
The parallel evolution of esports—competitive video gaming watched by millions—demonstrated that watching people play games could be just as engaging as watching traditional sports. All of this set the stage for someone to point a camera at a tabletop role-playing game session.
The DVD That Started It All
Many accounts credit a group called Acquisitions Incorporated as the origin point of actual play, but this misses an earlier milestone. In 2008, the Bradley University RolePlaying Society—an organization that went by the unfortunate acronym BURPS—recorded their gaming sessions and circulated them on DVD. These college students may have been the first people to document gameplay specifically for an audience seeking entertainment value from watching others play.
That same year, the creators of Penny Arcade, a popular webcomic about video game culture, partnered with Wizards of the Coast to record a podcast of Dungeons & Dragons sessions using the game's newly released Fourth Edition rules. This became Acquisitions Incorporated, and when the podcast proved popular, the players began livestreaming games at the Penny Arcade Expo festival starting in 2010. By 2019, it had earned recognition as the longest-running actual play series.
But the genre's true inflection point came in 2015, when a group of professional voice actors launched a web series called Critical Role.
When Voice Actors Discovered Dungeons & Dragons
The premise of Critical Role was simple: Matthew Mercer, a voice actor known for his work in video games and anime, would serve as the Dungeon Master—the player who controls the story and all the non-player characters—while his friends, also professional voice actors, would play the heroes. They would stream their weekly game sessions live on Twitch.
What they created was something unprecedented. These weren't amateurs stumbling through rules or joking around aimlessly. They were trained performers who could slip into character instantly, improvise dialogue that sounded scripted, and invest emotionally in fictional situations in ways that felt genuinely moving. Mercer's storytelling was intricate and atmospheric. The emotional stakes felt real.
The episodes were marathon affairs—three to four hours on average, with campaigns spanning over a hundred episodes. This wasn't television; it was something closer to a serialized novel experienced in real time, or perhaps a theater production where the script emerged spontaneously from the interaction between players and game master.
Critical Role didn't just popularize actual play. According to industry analysis, it made the format "its own genre of entertainment," fundamentally distinct from either traditional media or gaming content. The show's viewer numbers eventually rivaled those of cable television networks.
The Format Takes Shape
As actual play proliferated—by 2021, there were hundreds of podcasts and web series in the genre—certain conventions emerged. The visual layout that became standard shows multiple camera feeds simultaneously displayed on screen: one box for the Dungeon Master or Game Master (different games use different terminology), additional boxes for each player, and perhaps another displaying character artwork, battle maps, or sponsor information.
This "simultaneous-display" format wasn't invented for tabletop games. It came directly from video game Let's Plays, where streamers would show their face alongside the gameplay footage. But it proved ideal for role-playing games, allowing viewers to watch players' reactions as they learned the outcome of their choices.
The format became even more prevalent when the COVID-19 pandemic forced productions to go remote in 2020. Virtual tabletops—software platforms that replicate the experience of sitting around a table with maps and miniatures—became essential tools. What had been a choice became a necessity, and the visual language of boxes-on-screen became ubiquitous.
Not all actual plays followed the Critical Role model of epic-length campaigns. Dimension 20, another popular series, opted for shorter episodes and more contained seasons. The Adventure Zone, a comedic podcast from the McElroy family of internet entertainers, deliberately played fast and loose with rules in favor of humor and emotional storytelling. By 2021, it was receiving over six million monthly downloads.
The genre has continued to evolve with changes in social media. Creators have begun adapting their content for platforms like TikTok, creating short-form actual play content with special effects and interactive elements designed for audiences who might never sit through a four-hour episode.
The Publishing Industry Notices
The relationship between actual play shows and the companies that publish tabletop games has become increasingly intertwined. What began as fans playing games on camera has evolved into a sophisticated ecosystem of licensing deals, official productions, and multimedia adaptations.
Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, has both licensed actual play productions and created their own, such as Rivals of Waterdeep. They've also published official sourcebooks based on actual play content, blurring the line between fan creation and official canon. The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, published in 2020, details the fantasy world created by Matthew Mercer for Critical Role campaigns. A sourcebook simply titled Acquisitions Incorporated brings that show's characters and locations into official Dungeons & Dragons materials.
Paradox Interactive licensed L.A. by Night, an actual play series based on their gothic horror game Vampire: The Masquerade. The show premiered on Geek & Sundry in 2018, demonstrating that games beyond Dungeons & Dragons could support the format.
The commercialization extends beyond the games themselves. Sponsorships from tabletop gaming accessory companies have become common, and successful shows have expanded into merchandise and transmedia products including game supplements, comic books, novels, and animated adaptations.
From Web Series to Animation Empire
The most dramatic example of actual play's cultural reach came in 2019, when Critical Role launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund an animated series based on their first campaign. They were hoping to raise enough money to produce a short animated special.
They raised 11.39 million dollars.
This set the record for the most highly-funded film or television project in Kickstarter's history. The success attracted attention from Amazon, which acquired exclusive streaming rights for what became The Legend of Vox Machina. The show premiered on Prime Video, bringing the characters and stories that had emerged from improvised gaming sessions to a global streaming audience that had never heard of actual play.
A second animated series, The Mighty Nein, based on Critical Role's second campaign, premiered in November 2025. The Adventure Zone's "Balance" campaign was adapted into a series of graphic novels starting in 2018. Dimension 20's "Fantasy High" campaign became a webcomic on Webtoon in 2025.
These adaptations represent something philosophically interesting: stories that were improvised collaboratively, emerging from dice rolls and player decisions, being translated into fixed narratives. The chaos and contingency of the original experience gets smoothed into conventional storytelling, but something of the original collaborative spirit often remains.
Who Gets to Play
Tabletop role-playing games have long carried a reputation as the domain of white men. The stereotypical image—nerdy guys in a basement arguing about rules—reflected a real demographic skew in the hobby. Actual play has become a venue for challenging this perception and expanding who gets to be seen playing these games.
Maze Arcana's Sirens features an all-women cast. Rivals of Waterdeep and Into the Motherlands showcase casts entirely made up of people of color. Death2Divinity describes itself as featuring an all-queer, "all fat-babe" cast. These shows don't just represent diversity in gaming; they normalize it, demonstrating that people of all backgrounds can inhabit heroic roles and tell compelling stories.
The genre has been particularly notable for LGBTQ representation. Because actual plays are often produced independently and distributed online, they face fewer of the commercial pressures and content restrictions that have historically limited queer representation in mainstream media. The Adventure Zone and Dimension 20 have both been recognized for including LGBTQ characters in prominent roles.
But the relationship between actual play and its audience is complicated. Academic research has documented how viewers sometimes feel entitled to critique player performance, treating the experience as partly theirs because they're watching in real time. This has led to problematic dynamics, particularly around female players.
Studies of fan discourse reveal a narrow window of acceptable behavior for women at the gaming table. Female players face criticism both for knowing too little about game mechanics (reinforcing stereotypes about women and gaming) and for knowing too much (perceived as threatening to male expertise). Their characters receive more scrutiny when they become central to the campaign's story. The familiar patterns of gatekeeping that have long plagued gaming communities reproduce themselves in comment sections and discussion forums.
Yet researchers have also documented significant pushback against these behaviors, with many fans actively challenging sexist discourse. The community is contested terrain, not a monolith.
Labor and the Streaming Economy
The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike—the labor action by the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists—illuminated the complicated position actual play occupies in the entertainment industry. Some shows were clearly affected by the strike. Others were not. The distinction came down to arcane questions of contract structure and distribution platform.
Dimension 20, which airs on the subscription streaming service Dropout, fell under SAG-AFTRA's Electronic Media contract and was shut down. Critical Role, which streams primarily on YouTube and Twitch—platforms open to anyone who wants to post content—occupied what industry observers called a "grey area" and continued production.
The situation was eventually resolved when Dropout determined that their productions fell under a non-struck SAG-AFTRA contract, but the episode highlighted how actual play straddles the line between amateur content creation and professional media production. A format that emerged from hobbyists recording their gaming sessions now involves professional actors, substantial production budgets, and the labor relations questions that accompany any entertainment industry.
The Alchemy of Witnessed Creation
Why does any of this work? Why would millions of people watch strangers play pretend?
The academic Emily Friedman, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, offered one explanation: "There's the elemental pleasure of being told a story, intertwined with the alchemy of watching that story be created in front of your eyes (or ears). We perceive simultaneously the character played and the player playing."
This dual awareness—seeing both the fiction and the people creating it—gives actual play something that scripted entertainment cannot provide. When a character makes a desperate gamble, viewers know that the outcome truly hangs on a dice roll, that even the storyteller doesn't know what will happen next. When an actor tears up at a character's moment of grief, viewers understand they're witnessing both performance and genuine emotional investment.
The format has also done something remarkable for the games themselves. Sales of Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games have surged alongside the popularity of actual play. People who would never have considered the hobby—intimidated by complex rules, uncertain how to find a group, unsure what playing even looked like—have been able to watch and understand. The barrier to entry hasn't disappeared, but it has become imaginable to cross.
Industry analysts describe this as demolishing the "opaque divide" that traditionally kept tabletop games hidden from mainstream audiences. What was once a hobby you had to be initiated into has become a spectator entertainment you can sample without commitment.
The archive of realized gameplay continues to grow: not just the professional productions with their millions of viewers, but countless smaller shows discovered at web festivals, amateur recordings posted to YouTube, actual play categories appearing at conventions from New Jersey to New Zealand to Cusco, Peru. The "ambitious middle" of the genre—shows that aspire to the storytelling heights of the most popular productions but lack their resources—represents a vast creative ecosystem largely invisible to anyone not specifically looking for it.
What started as play reports in gaming magazines has become a new form of participatory narrative, one where the audience witnesses creation rather than merely consuming its results. The story emerges from collaboration between performers, game systems, and the fundamental uncertainty of rolled dice. Nothing quite like it existed before, and nothing else provides quite the same experience of watching imagination become story in real time.