The Dimension 20 MSG show was everything I hoped it would be — except for the venue
"There is much pain in the world, but not in this room."
On January 24, Dimension 20 pulled off a feat that was as historic as it had been made out to be: a tabletop actual play had (more or less) sold out Madison Square Garden. Nearly 20,000 people filled one of the world’s most famous venues to watch seven improv comedians play Dungeons & Dragons — and it was glorious. Aside from a few issues at the top of the show, which were largely the venue’s logistical errors and no fault of Dropout’s cast and crew, The Gauntlet at The Garden was a watershed moment for actual play, bringing the niche artform to a massive, iconic stage.
For those unfamiliar, in April of last year, when Dropout first announced the show, Rascal dove into the ethical complications of the venue’s surveillance policies. Shortly after, the venue’s partnership with Ticketmaster led to a surge of dynamic pricing, leaving some tickets selling for thousands of dollars — which Rascal covered in depth — before Dropout intervened with clarifying statements and multiple rounds of lower priced tickets in the months leading up to the event. In the time between, Rascal has since covered a number of large D&D-as-performance live shows (resulting in…less than positive reviews). All of that to say, when I purchased my tickets to the event, I was going in with a healthy dose of skepticism.
How could this show live up to its outsized expectations? How, if at all, could the intimate experience of a highly edited and produced actual play translate to an arena of that magnitude? And most importantly, looming over it all was the reality that only days before, Donald Trump had been inaugurated for a second time, his ostensible co-president had done a Nazi salute on national television, and a flurry of executive orders had been signed transitioning a fragile pseudo-democracy into the intermediate stages of full blown theocratic authoritarianism. While the de facto motto of Dimension 20 is “Capitalism is the bad guy”, the odds were stacked against this show. I was hoping for the best, and I expected less than nothing.
