The best part of 'Dungeons & Dragons' is the storytelling. This L.A. stage show leans in

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When I first started playing “Dungeons & Dragons” as a tween, my friends christened me with a new good-natured nickname: gamer geek.While we could spend hours in front of a screen with the latest “Zelda” title, the dice-focused tabletop role-playing game was viewed with suspicion, a ’70s-era invention that belonged to a certain subset of nerd.

Times have changed.Today, “Dungeons & Dragons” enjoys mainstream recognition, and live game sessions from the likes of Critical Role and Dimension 20, the latter of which last summer enjoyed a date at the Hollywood Bowl, have only further cemented its wide appeal.Now a heavily improvised theatrical production, “Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern” has come to the Montalbán Theatre in Hollywood.

The show, which ran off-Broadway in 2024 after years of development, is celebratory, a victory lap for a game that has endured more than half a century.It invites participation, with actors performing the action inspired by the dice rolls and allowing the audience to influence the direction of the show by making choices via a smartphone.

“Twenty-Sided Tavern” brought me back to days and nights crowded around my family’s living room table.My father was an executive with TSR, Inc., the company that created “Dungeons & Dragons” — there were glass dragons on our fireplace mantle, pewter dragons on our bookshelves, painted dragons on our walls and even a metal dragon that hung from a necklace I wore too often (and that probably didn’t help me with getting dates).

As a junior high kid, the game was a refuge, a creative tool where I could envision characters, worlds and fantastical scenarios.There was a lot of math, too, and quite a bit of rules, not to mention addendums to rules and fine print to those rules, but I discovered early on a key to its personal appeal, one that likely makes many hardc...