Felicia Day Is A New Guest At The Twenty-Sided Tavern; The Key To Improv And Dungeons & Dragons

As The Twenty-Sided Tavern continues to make a name for itself in its New York run a new collection of faces has appeared, lurking in the corner with a hood over their heads… one of these people is Felicia Day, the first special guest of the Twenty-Sided Tavern. We talked to her about performing at a D&D stage play, and her roots in improv comedy.

Felicia Day should be known by all in nerdy communities as the creator of Geek & Sundry and The Guild. More recently Felicia Day has been getting involved in 3D Printing and hosting multiple podcasts alongside regular acting roles for live-action and animated productions.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern is a D&D stage play experience where the players are influenced by audience prompts as well as the outcomes of various audience-led minigames that they can partake in with their mobile phones. Earlier this year we spoke with DM and Tavern Keeper of The Twenty-Sided Tavern, David Andrew Greener Law (DAGL) and Sarah Davis Reynolds, respectively.

The Perfect Blend Of D&D, Improv, And Stage Acting

To start our conversation I wanted to understand how Day got involved in this production. She laughed as she began to explain that she "wished it was more exciting but they called and I said Yes. I am so thrilled, I had actually been seeing advertisements and reviews on all of my socials and I vowed as soon as I could get to New York I would see the show because it looks so awesome and to get an email asking me to be the first guest star for the show was such an amazing honor and I couldn't have said yes fast enough."

At this point Day explained that she had yet to see the show in person, but she had been provided a recording of the show to get a better understanding of how it functioned. "Believe me I do my homework, I'm an A-student" Day confessed

"I will be seeing it multiple times before I go on the stage next Thursday," Day continued "we have a great rehearsal process and I can't wait to get on the stage, it's so beautiful!"

With Day being involved in productions from stage to screen across multiple disciplines I wanted to understand what it was that made Day so excited to join as a guest of The Twenty-Sided Tavern.

"As an actor, it's always been my dream to act in a play on Broadway and of course I have been very involved in the D&D world from the very beginning of the broadcasting D&D world and on top of that I've been doing improv for as long as I've been in Hollywood. The Guild actually came out of an improv class, two of the cast members were in my improv group and we still perform occasionally in Los Angeles together.

"This is truly combining three things that I love more than anything in once beautiful package"

Later on in our discussion Day spoke about the different material she has access to in the lead up to her role in The Twenty-Sided Tavern but reinforced that what she's been working on the most has been improv. "The wonder thing is that I can come and do the show without weeks and weeks of rehearsal because we're making it up, there's a lot of structure, audience interaction, and technical stuff going on but it's one of those things that it's going to be a lot of on the job training"

The Role Of A Lifetime

The way that The Twenty-Sided Tavern functions is that at the start of each performance the party is selected. Each archetypal character – Rogue, Warrior, Wizard, etc – has a number of different permutations that can be selected.

The role that Felicia Day is playing is the Mage.

"The character of the Mage depends on the audience, the wonderful thing about Twenty-Sided Tavern is that the audience is completely involved the whole time with what's going on on-stage. The audience gets to choose what character I play, they get an option between three different characters," 

Day continued to describe the many ways the Audience gets to participate "there are all these points at which the audience helps me win a battle, or chooses the approach that we take as a party and it's so fun and so amazing, I can't wait to be live in the audience and then I can't wait to be on the stage after that."

Asking how involved she was in building out the skeleton of the three different mage characters Day explained to me that where she'll really be involved in is fleshing that character out past their selection. "The archetypes are there but of course my interpretation of a Gnome Mage is going to be very different from Aabria (Iyengar) or Erika (Ishii's) Gnome Mage so the wonderful thing about improv is that it's unique to the performer."

"Every scenario is going to be different every night, every character is going to be different every night, heck, my Gnome Mage is probably going to be different every night"

Good News For Fans Of The Guild In 2025

I couldn't resist asking whether there was any chance of a cameo appearance from Codex, Day's character from The Guild. "You know, I don't think Codex will be appearing on this stage but I am working on a Guild musical, we're going to be doing a stage reading of that very soon so you will see Codex on a stage, probably in 2025"

Felicia Day's run at The Twenty-Sided Tavern begins on the 19th of September and will last until the 24th. At the time of writing there is only one showing left for Felicia Day's run, but if you're a fan of TTRPG actual plays like Dimension 20 Aabria Iyengar will be special guesting from September 26th - October 7th and Erika Ishii will be joining the Tavern from December 5th - December 17th.