everyone's a winner

Fans of the actual play video series Dimension 20 have come to expect a clutch final-battle nat 20, usually rolled by player Ally Beardsley. Their frankly bizarre propensity for making the impossible happen right when it needs to has shaped multiple seasons of the show, and made their various characters the lynchpin of several finales. This complete coincidence has also, as I said, led to something of a completely accidental Dimension 20 house style: things seem to be going very, very badly—and then a miracle happens.

The recent penultimate episode of the current season, A Starstruck Odyssey, felt like a surprising departure. Admittedly, it’s the second-to-last and not the last episode, so there’s time for things to change. But as the scrappy crew of space mercenaries/privateers (and yes, it did take me until I sat down to write this that the series slang for this job, ‘proldier', is presumably a portmanteau of private or privateer and soldier) found themselves facing off against an array of every enemy they’ve made over the course of the series, dozens of ships standing between them and their goal, things went… pretty well, all things considered? The players are stressed, the odds on paper are huge, but once the rolls started coming in, everything more or less succeeded. This is partly down to the fact that the system they’re using, Star Wars 5e, offers a huge amount of reactions and bonuses that players can use to help one another boost low rolls. It makes for a very fun and collaborative feel, and a style of resource management that’s exciting to watch. The party called for help from allies, and that help arrived in short order. Some of their enemies turned on one another, using up whole turns just causing problems for other NPCs. But there were also a whole bunch of great rolls, including multiple ship-handling nat 20s. If the Dimension 20 finale nat 20 is a narrative miracle, then the dice gods were gleefully showing their hand.

It made me think about the final episode of the first season of the podcast Dungeons and Daddies. In talkback episode released after the season ended, DM Anthony Burch admitted that he didn’t think the episode went very well: there was too little tension. None of the PCs took serious damage at any point, they worked their way through the challenges before them in a methodical and effective manner, and more or less all of the PCs rolled pretty well while many of the NPCs rolled pretty poorly. In retrospect, this assessment is correct… but it wasn’t my experience of actually listening to the episode for the first time at all, and I suspect it wasn’t how it felt to play it, either.

Well, it may have been how it felt for Anthony to play it. He was up front even within the episode about the fact that any loose ends the players left, any catastrophe they failed to prevent or obvious crisis they caused as collateral damage, would become the premise for the next season of the show. So Anthony had good reason to want some things to go badly, and probably was quite aware of having to tick options off of his list as the players successfully defused problem after problem, including a literal bomb. But as a listener, Anthony’s absolute minefield—again, sort of literally—of possible disasters made every round, no matter how successful, fraught with tension. Aside from the fact that the listener and player can’t know in advance that every roll is going to turn out fine, the presence of so many ticking clocks created another kind of dynamic resource management problem, whereby even as one issue was resolved successfully and without much damage to the players, in the back of my mind I was still terrified that they were neglecting another problem. Were they keeping track of the bomb? Were they going to get there in time?

The natural swinginess of D&D as a system helps build this tension, too. Just because players haven’t taken much damage yet doesn’t mean that this won’t be the turn where that changes. It was interesting to hear Anthony and the players lose track of how the suspense feels from the moment and from the outside a bit when reflecting on the episode after it was done.

I think Anthony’s plan for the final episode was extremely clever, capturing the best of both worlds of open-ended and limited series structures. We got the satisfaction of a final confrontation, and of seeing the season’s central problem definitively resolved, but the knowledge that leftover consequences would linger to be dealt with later left open the possibility of genuine failure. I can’t imagine what a Dimension 20 finale that ended with the players actually failing to achieve their goals and defeat the bad guys would look like. It was obvious throughout the latest Starstruck Odyssey episode that Brennan really hoped the players would succeed, which isn’t always the tone of his playfully antagonistic energy with the party. And while they haven’t yet broken through the line of enemies to reach their destination, it’s sort of obvious that they have to: getting stopped before they even reach the location of their final problem would be a pretty disappointing and anti-climactic way to fail. Brennan’s extremely lore-heavy DMing style and highly narrative finales, combined with the fact that they always are and have to be finales, rather than opportunities to kick off a new narrative arc for the characters to deal with, often lead to scenarios where success feels like the only option. It would just be flat and a bit of a bummer if they faced off against the bad guy, lost, and… well, I guess the world’s over. Oops. I trust Brennan knows what he’d do in that scenario, but we’ve never needed to discover it (and Brennan in particular is extremely good at concealing his improvisation, so then again, maybe we have— but that’s a subject for a different post).

The best seasons of Dimension 20 do a great job of instead making you wonder what that success might cost… or, again, thanks to the Ally Beardsley miracle rolls, skirting right up to failure before being amazingly, impossibly, fantastically rescued. But that’s not actually a narrative style it’s possible to plan for, though I’m sure at this point Brennan is tempted to try. The relative smoothness of A Starstruck Odyssey’s penultimate episode is actually heightened by the extremely ominous ‘next episode’ teaser, which seems deliberately designed to reassure viewers that this good luck does not last—suggesting in turn that the producers were aware, watching the episode back, that the crew still didn’t seem to be in very much peril by the end. Like Anthony, it suggests a worry that actually, not enough went wrong.

And that is what we want, right? Aside from being a staple of Dimension 20 specifically, as viewers or listeners, don’t we want that brush with disaster, that threat of failure? Or maybe the randomness of each individual roll fills that need, and in fact, actual play is a form that can take advantage of not needing to draw that kind of suspense out over the entire episode, but instead can let viewers micro-dose it: each roll is a surge of uncertainty, followed by the excitement and relief of success. In the moment, it’s sort of impossible not to instinctively want the number to come up high (or low, if they’re an enemy), even if on some level I’m aware that it might lead to more drama and conflict and story if the players get themselves backed against the wall. If the the conventional shape of tension in a climax is an arc that ramps up smoothly, with some key turning points, actual play might be better illustrated as a rapidly-swooping and erratic sine wave that spikes for every roll.

I’m excited to see if A Starstruck Odyssey gets their miracle—or if they even need it. But more than that, it’s interesting to think about how different shows might learn to take advantage of this different kind of audience experience.