Kansas City Chiefs Release Hour-Long D&D Actual Play Video

The Kansas City Chiefs posted an interesting video over the weekend, featuring six of their defensive players playing Dungeons & Dragons. The video, Dungeons & Defense, was posted over the weekend and has racked up over 29,000 views as of Monday morning. The video features Chris Jones, Mike Pennel, George Karlaftis, Derrick Nnadi, Mike Danna, and Ashton Gillotte in a session led by veteran Actual Play performer Anna Margaret in a homebrew session. The session itself follows typical D&D tropes - six adventurers enter a tavern and are tasked with retrieving a magical orb stolen from a sect of clerics. The full video can be found below.



The NFL and TTRPGs have had a series of recent crossovers. The Cleveland Browns had a well-documented game of D&D going for several years featuring defensive star Myles Garrett. The ringleader of that group, Johnny Stanton IV now produces tabletop RPG content. Additionally, former Dallas Cowboys player Travis Frederick co-founded Demiplane.

 

[Meech17]

This talk about being shamed, or ashamed of gaming reminds me of a story from my teen years.

I was 17 or so, in High School, and working my first job at Taco Bell. Every now and then, they would introduce several new menu items at the same time, and whenever they did they'd have an all-hands meeting where we'd go in, and all learn to make the new food items, or learn the processes behind them, whatever. It was a rare occurrence.. I did it maybe three times working there in as many years.

I was also in the school marching band. That summer I had taken a week off work to attend band camp. This meeting was right off the end of that, and I had requested being off a couple days after to rest and relax a little bit before going back to work, and my manager agreed on the condition I attended the meeting. Since I wasn't working that day, I wore street clothes into the restaurant. We had band camp at a small college a few hours away, and this college had a t-shirt shop. They would sell shirts, and iron on a bunch of stuff however you wanted. Our school (and many others) had been using them for bandcamp for quite a while, so they really leaned into it, and would always make us custom band camp graphics with our school names, band names, the year, etc.

So I'm proudly wearing my new, tie-dye marching band shirt into this work event and my coworkers start roasting me for it. American Pie was still less than a decade old at this point so "One Time, at Band Camp" jokes were still very much in the zeitgeist.

One of my shift managers.. And this was a guy who grew up in a rough area. He had done some time in jail, been involved in gangs, and even while working at Taco Bell, still ran a side-hustle as an independent pharmacist... He says:

"Hol' up now. You guys are clowning on him.. But I would bet money that band camp is sick as hell. If I know anything.. You get a group of people who are all similar together, and it don't matter if you're the dorkiest geeks in the world. If you're away from home, surrounded by a hundred other super dorky geeks just like you.. It's impossible to have a bad time."

And that's really stuck with me through life.

 

[MGibster]

With social media being a thing, a lot more players turn to things like gaming (digital and tabletop) to socialize and blow off steam. You are one bad decision away from going viral at a bar or nightclub.

One bad decision away from going viral at a bar or nightclub is what we thought of the Cowboys in the early 1990s.

 

[Gradine]

TTRPG's have long been popular with the enlisted, some of those are transitioning the brass and some are coming in with existing experience.

Really, TTRPGs have long been popular anywhere where is life is strictly institutionalized. D&D is incredibly popular in the prisons that allow their inmates to play.

 

[payn]

Really, TTRPGs have long been popular anywhere where is life is strictly institutionalized. D&D is incredibly popular in the prisons that allow their inmates to play.

I recall reading about prisoners making cardboard spinners and dice fill ins so they could play. Dice had been banned because of gambling by prisoners.

I suppose prison is boring with lots of time on your hands.

 

[Von Ether]

I recall reading about prisoners making cardboard spinners and dice fill ins so they could play. Dice had been banned because of gambling by prisoners.

I suppose prison is boring with lots of time on your hands.

When I was a reporter, I did a story on the state of the small Sheriff's county jail and was told so many jail break stories by the deputies. I asked, "If these guys are so smart, why are they criminals? Why did they get caught?"

Answer was, "When you have nothing to do for hours but to focus on one thing, there's a lot you can to do to figure it out."