Dungeons and Dragons is dipping its toes into longform Actual Play content for the first time in many years, and the upcoming 'Dungeon Masters' show has a star-studded cast of actors, voice-actors, and D&D-adjacent celebs. Of course, that's practically a given for any high-profile AP show nowadays…
Aside from being officially produced by the creators of the game, and having a kickass intro sequence, Dungeon Masters does have one other trick up its sleeve, a selling point to make it stand out from its competition. The show wants DMs to adapt the content for their own home games. Essentially, this is an actual play series where you can 'play-along' at home.
To help fans achieve this, Wizards is releasing a Ravenloft Play-Along pack after each episode. Modelled around the ideas DM Jasmine Bhullar has planned for each session, these will include hooks, maps, and encounters - including early access to monsters from Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.
The first Play-Along pack is free, but after that you have to pre-order the new Ravenloft book to gain access. So this intriguing idea is also a great bit of internal cross-promotion by WotC. However, for DMs, I think it could be a bit of a double-edged sword, for one simple reason: modelling your home game too closely off an Actual Play series is a well-known recipe for disaster.
With Critical Role seeing such enormous success, it's not uncommon for it to be fans' first proper exposure to D&D or TTRPGs as a whole. This can lead to an expectation mismatch, the dreaded 'Matt Mercer effect', where new players or DMs become disappointed when their experience doesn't match up with what they've seen online.
Their friends aren't as funny as professional comedians. They're not as good at role playing as professional actors. And there's a lot more downtime than they expected from watching highly edited Actual Play content.
Whereas Critical Role has sourcebooks like Explorer's Guide to Wildemont, these are intended to turn Exandria into a D&D setting. The expectation is DMs and players will make up their own adventures, rather than attempting to ape the CR campaigns.
The D&D Beyond post describing the new Dungeon Masters show, meanwhile, explicitly says the prepackaged content will "help you translate what you see on the big screen to your table", a wording that set off some alarm bells for me. Trying to translate an Actual Play to your own table could be setting yourself up for dissatisfaction, but this seems to be the action Wizards is explicitly encouraging here.
On the other hand, perhaps I'm being overly hand-wringy. The Matt Mercer or Critical Role effect has been a well-known phenomenon for almost a decade now, and my suspicion is it's talked about way more than it actually happens. Hopefully these days, even new DMs are cognizant enough of the possibility that they'll be able to take playable content and inspiration from the series without letting it sabotage their enjoyment of the game.
I imagine it could even be great fun to see the differences and similarities between what happens in Dungeon Masters and at your own table, just as it's enjoyable to watch a streamer or YouTuber play through a game you've experienced yourself.
What's more, D&D Beyond adds that the "situations have been adapted for play rather than to recreate exact scenes from the show, making it easier to bring them to your table no matter where your adventures take you." Perhaps if people are just adapting encounters from the series rather than trying to follow plot points beat-for-beat, everything will be fine!
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts over on the Wargamer Discord.