How Encounter Party won over TV audiences

Encounter Party is the latest long-form narrative AP from Wizards of the Coast on the D&D Adventures channel. In speaking to the show’s producers, Brian David Judkins and Ned Donovan, they painted an image of a new kind of actual play—one that focuses on story and character over player and gameplay—meant to reach an fresh audience with no pre-existing connection to the TTRPG space. 

There have been a number of experiments into televised actual play from HarmonQuest to Rivals of Waterdeep, but Judkins and Donovan had something else in mind. “We wanted a show that feels like a prestige television program from the ground up,” said Donovan when I sat down with him and Judkins for a postmortem on the show back in April. 

With three seasons of an AP podcast under their belt, I was extremely interested to see if their transition from audio to video would live up to the lofty goals the duo had set out for themselves. “Shortest answer is, yeah,” said Donovan. “At least anecdotally, we have captured an entirely different viewer set than the general large-budget TTRPG show.” Many who reach out to the show on Twitter, Discord, and other social media platforms, say that “[Encounter Party] is their first actual play. We're capturing people that have never found the TTRPG entertainment art form before.” 

The show currently has a 9.7/10 rating on IMDB (out of 72 reviews), a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 50 reviews). And while there are some references to other APs like Dimension 20, the content of many of those reviews confirm that a significant portion of people who are enthusiastically talking about this show online are not pre-existing fans of actual play or tabletop games in general. 

“It was you, Rowan, who said this was the first AP you'd ever watched that felt like it should have an all-day marathon on TBS,” said Donovan, which is true. Thanks to the efforts of the crew—which includes folks like sound designer Will Melones, stage manager Ash Minick, and lighting designer Sean Emer—Encounter Party exhibits the same level of polish as a multi-camera dramedy on a major cable network. 

“Obviously, actual play entertainment is continuing to grow,” said Judkins. “There are people trying a lot of new things as far as story delivery and format and everything. But as far as we were concerned, we were tackling two audiences at the same time [tabletop audiences and TV audiences], which is something that I don't think anyone else has had the opportunity to attack.” An important note to make here is that, since this interview, Dropout has been making a significant push to make their programming accessible to a television audience, as exemplified with their attempt to get Dungeons & Drag Queens nominated for an Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series Emmy, which was deemed ineligible due to technicalities of series length. Encounter Party is making a similar push to get a nomination for Outstanding Structured Reality Program—and was deemed eligible for consideration.