Hi, Intrepid Heroes!

You can nerd out on anything these days.

It’s maybe one of the 21st century’s best innovations:

the jock
and the nerd
and the princess
and the burnout
and the basket case from The Breakfast Club… are suddenly equal when it comes to personally productive obsessions.

I get it: nerd culture is stereotypically all about the fantasy realm in theory.

Comic books, graphic novels, role-playing games (let’s call them RPG’s; you’ll understand in a bit about the acronym here), movies based on all those things…the level of depth in service to the whole realm of things is endless, it seems.

But as March Madness has dawned as it does this time each year, you realize that it’s no different being a sports nerd.

It’s no different down the line.

Whether you’re into Drag Race, Real Housewives, or The Last Of Us, all the way down to things like general hobbies, the ability to geek out as a pleasurable thing is now very democratic. You can share anything with anyone, anytime, because the online community has made it a Grand Central Station for hobbyists to squee with delight towards one another. God bless the Internet.

And the reason TNOCS.com exists is based on nerds.

We’re the Top 40 historical music geeks from Stereogum, after all. We can challenge one another on chart data, song rankings, quality, and a defense of Olivia Newton-John’s Magic. We’re in it for justice, baby.

Nevertheless, it proves that everyone has a nerdy side to them. And it doesn’t have to be video game-related or dependent on James Gunn’s approval.

My example for myself:

… and give you all kinds of trivial arcana:

My passions are wide-ranging, from horse racing to music to nostalgia and cultural history.

But they include one more they didn’t have before, until sometime last year, when I discovered something I had left dormant back when I was a teenager:

Actual play.

“Actual play” is something I discovered when scanning YouTube looking for anything interesting to turn my head, starting in 2021. What that is, in as brief a way I can explain, is the act of watching other people play table-top RPG’s (see above).

Your first instinct might be to say, “Isn’t that a bit nerdier than actually playing RPG’s yourself?”

Off with your heads, guys. It actually is not, because you’re watching other people pick up what the game allows them to throw down. What is called “actual play” usually involves personality, style, wit, creation, and excellent storytelling.

The theater-of-the-mind part is the best part of actual play, where the dungeon master – the DM, if you will – guides the story along for the players. And the DM usually has to be quicker on the draw to both guide the game into a direction it should go, and add enough personality to keep it interesting for the players and the viewer.

That leads to how I got into it.

I saw in one of YouTube’s interminable ads last year that there was a show on the recently-revived-and-equally-recently-re-deceased G4 Network that was featuring some fearless gamers, who could improvise quickly as improv comedians, playing an RPG in front of the cameras in a studio. I was piqued, and decided after being head-butted repeatedly by YouTube’s ad algorithms to tune in and see what it was like.

It’s a multi-part, multi-hour series of episodes of Dungeons & Dragons (hence the D&D part) set among that part of the vaunted universe of gaming.

What G4 did here was invite a few people, including some comedians who had never played an RPG before.

I found out that D&D, far from being some kind of scourge from the 1980s game played in musty basements with a select group of nerds, was actually a fun fantasy tale.

Where elves and bards and orcs and clerics and scoundrels could both tell a great story with personality while still generally kicking ass in various adventures. It helped to have comedians who could improvise and flesh out personalities on the fly, and it didn’t hurt either that the talented B. Dave Walters was helping create a narrative that had give and take to it, with a sense of humor to balance out the sense of fantasy atmosphere D&D is known for.

After completing this one, I found that D&D was starting to get into my blood, even though I probably couldn’t tell you anything about the game itself. But actual play allowed me to get invested into a genre of entertainment that I had never latched onto as a teenager in 1980s Long Island. And it was in the stories, and how they got told, and portrayed by people who weren’t above lightening the game up with levity without ruining it for the hardcore RPG fan.

The most recent actual play RPGs I have been watching are my favorites so far.

The Dimension 20 actual play videos are a variety of RPG games, set in various, relatable universes.

Imaging playing D&D in a setting of high school, like in Fantasy High. Or in a world of food pyramid-based kingdoms, such as A Crown Of Candy. Or a sort-of take on space operas like Star Trek, within A Starstruck Odyssey.

No two of these shows are the same stories.

But they have one thing in common. And that is Brennan Lee Mulligan.

He is an expert at gently allowing the actual play to head out in a number of different directions, all while controlling the action deftly to keep the trains running on time, for lack of a better word.

In short, he leads a table of comedians (depending on things, usually numbering six) with creatively geeky backgrounds and with a range of D&D experience in campaigns inside the world of Dungeons & Dragons. (In the case of A Starstruck Odyssey, that’s an RPG based on his mother Elaine Lee’s own graphic-novel series Starstruck.)

Brennan, first up, is adorably handsome. (I’m gay, I can say that out loud without getting into trouble as long as I just. stop. there.) But more than that, his ability to craft stories within a universe’s framework that are exciting, funny, occasionally quite touching, and certainly raucous, is astounding. Sometimes it’s not solely about a narrative, but who is in charge of creating and expanding it spontaneously, to allow for tension, drama, conflict, and humor in a way that feels natural without venturing into silliness.

What’s most important: he’s the reason why, at 51, I’m actually now very interested in trying to play Dungeons & Dragons for myself, for the first time.

Granted, not all DM’s are going to be like an actual play one, and not all DM’s may have the ability to aspire to quality storytelling. But Brennan has a way about him that makes you believe all these RPG campaigns should have that mix of light and dark, or humor and action, tension and release within their stories.

It gives me a little hope at this stage in my life, where I’m trying to find and experience a lot of new and different things, that I can find and maintain interest in something that stokes my creative side.

As that aforementioned gay man, it hearkens back to that idea of coming out, finding your own tribe, banding together…

and trying to conquer a new and exciting universe where survival was always something of a priority.

tnocs.com contributing author irishbeartx

It’s weird.

In thinking about this piece, it was starting out as just an appreciation for stories that escaped me back when I was that young, in high school and probably a need of some kind of fantastic outlet. Actual play RPG, whether it’s Dungeons & Dragons or any other specific universe, provided that nudge to the imagination that watching some movie blockbuster of similar fantasy adventure origins couldn’t do.

Now, it seems like a fan letter to someone who got me interested in something I missed out on when I was younger, after years of struggling to find a story compelling enough for my imagination to dive deeper.

Brennan, thank you for that metaphoric seed-planting, and for what you create, if I never get to “get in the comments” to tell you personally.

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