“You’Re Going To Be Amazing”: The Mercer Effect and Performative Play in Dungeons & Dragons

This chapter examines how spectated games of D&D have affected modern play styles. I discuss how new ways of consuming D&D have provided a perspective that suggests a very active mode of play which focussed on imaginative acting more than number crunching and the minutiae of rules. This has arisen not only from the popularity of games viewed by the incoming player base, but through a persistent clash between the rules of the game and D&D’s emphasis on imaginative play which is uniquely enacted in every game.