Actual Play can easily be associated with epic tales of long campaigns, deep character backstories, and fantastical worlds. Yet, there is real value in stepping into condensed and specific frameworks, like a slasher film, to invoke the same feeling of sitting down to watch a standalone film. The Panic Table’s How’s My Driving achieves just that with the combination of a multi-talented cast, a well-designed Daggerheart hack, and a familiar genre formula. While the show is originally meant for viewing on YouTube, a podcast version is also available. I even had the chance to talk to Cameron Danger Strittmatter, the show runner and Game Master, about the process.
Quick info:
Vibes: Slasher Film
System: How’s My Driving, a Daggerheart horror hack
Show Length: ~2Hours
Accessibility: Detailed content warnings in the show description include: Animal Distress, Violence & Gore, Horror & Psychological Themes, Vehicular Trauma, and other specific phobias.
Platforms: YouTube, Podcast version available
Language: English
Our scream queens are made up of our regular tropes: the baddie, the loverboy, and the group mom.
- Jude, the baddie played by Laurie Hernandez, is a quintessential hottie who gets shit done. Others may think Jude is fully comfortable with herself, but she still has her own secrets.
- Emma, the lover(girl) played by Gina Susanna, is fully committed to their crush, even if that means they are just friends.
- Daphne, the group mom played by Anne Monteverdi, is a fierce protector of her friends and has a past that proves useful when face-to-face with a cold-blooded killer.
The cast of How’s My Driving is multi-award-winning (one even has Olympic gold). I asked Strittmatter how he gathered the table together.
“Gina is the first panic table fan,” he revealed. “She showed up out of the weeds glistening and dewy, and has been rooting for us since we showed up.” Gina can be found in beloved actual plays like BlackwaterDND’s Godkiller: Balance, as well as Afterlight. “At the time that we had brought on Laurie Hernandez, I had done one other show with her, but was unaware that she was a two-time Olympic medalist and about to debut on Broadway.” Hernandez and her team, dubbed the “Final Five,” won gold in team gymnastics at the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games. “We really hit it off. She was the other guest, and I said, ‘Would you ever wanna just get freaky on our freaky show with cameras on?’”Anne Monteverdi, also known as Gnome Anne, is an experienced player at the forefront of many conversations about collaborative storytelling. “You cannot approach actual play without colliding with, or stepping gently around Anne Monteverdi, like it can’t be done. I would say a disproportionate amount of the comments have been about Anne’s extraordinary performance and how it keeps you on your toes.”
We follow these young friends driving down one of the long stretches of Oklahoma highway, where DNGN Club Games is based, in a tale set in 2003. After crashing into a deer and nearly getting run over by a sketchy van, the players are stalked and tormented by a mysterious killer who just wants to hug their face with a plastic bag. It’s refreshing to have a story that doesn’t give the killer any redeemable qualities. He is just evil. But this story isn’t about him; it’s about three survivors and the power of love.
Two key aspects show me Strittmatter’s goal was to spotlight the players: the editing and how he facilitates the game. The switching camera edit style means that rather than a static shot of the full group, we spend more time with individual shots of the players. Even when Strittmatter describes how the “community and safety you had, vanishes into the vacuum of night,” each player is featured on screen as those words marinade. Early in the show, the camera switching is pretty frequent, sometimes a little jarring, but as we get more familiar with the characters, the cameras linger more. We get to savor the tension and excitement in every roll, Monteverdi’s gesturing with their pencil, Hernandez peeking back into frame, and Susanna’s lovesick eyes. There was no hiding of the player behind the character. Even Strittmatter’s camera frame is backlit and he spends most of the show facing the players, which naturally draws your eyes in their direction. Then there are the scenes that Strittmatter lays before them like a blood-soaked red carpet. As someone who spent some years in Oklahoma City, I vividly imagined each moment, down to the scorched ween smell. The non-player characters are only there to make the players the focus and do very little to help resolve anything. Don’t fall for any of Strittmatter’s characters; they don’t last long.
Chemistry like this table doesn’t come around often, so it makes perfect sense that a sequel is already on the cutting room floor. How’s My Driving: Thank you for Shopping will return with the same cast, slated to be released this spring.
I haven’t been as quick to jump into Daggerheart as many of my friends, but this actual play has shown me not only an incredible creation by Jack Panic, the creator behind DNGN Club, but a condensed version of the game that feels much more like a version I would love to play.
“I never thought about Daggerheart as a horror game,” Strittmatter explained. “I played two versions of the game, one of which was run by DNGN Club’s Jack Panic himself, to walk us through how the game is played.” The use of fear to bolster the killer and the slowly depleting fuel (the alternate version of hope) fits perfectly in a slasher film. When the Game Master refers to a “speed limit,” it’s a signal to the players that is the threshold for success they have to meet. “Replacing the hope and fear and that fuel diminishes, captures the terror of a game like dread where you know that statistically your luck is running out.” The game is stripped down to its core storytelling mechanics, so one session is enough to finish a full story. “The reason How’s My Driving kicks ass is that Jack takes the SRD of Daggerheart and he boils it down to what makes Daggerheart a fundamentally superior cinematic storytelling system as compared to the great and grand dragon. Instead of complex stat blocks, the driver has one move, kill, that’s it. If you fail against it, you die.” The only way the players can avoid the killer is by spending their fuel or hoping to roll higher. Panic even took the game design a step further into augmented reality by creating a phone number you can call to kick-start the game. For the GM, the prep work is minimal; you could pick up this module and start playing it right away.
“You can spend a lifetime designing your Saw-like machination for the players, but that’s not the show. What they do with what you throw at them is the show,” – Cameron Danger Strittmatter, Game Master.
“I played it with my family — I suspected in that moment it would be in a manner in which family does anything with their nerdy offspring, which is with high tolerance and genuine mercy,” Strittmatter’s suspicions mirror my own when trying to approach my family about actual play and roleplay. “So for them to be on the edges of their seats at the end of How’s My Driving and asking when they could start playing the next round. I thought, ‘This is muy bueno.’” That potential to introduce new people into tabletop roleplay cannot be understated.
The beauty of the slasher film genre is how specific the formula is — a ritual, as Strittmatter describes it. Something like that can seem constraining, but what it really means is freedom to focus more on surrounding details. A slasher will have some kind of Killer who is inspired to kill due to a trauma. The killer then stalks their victims and one by one kills their prey. The simple message is that the killers could be anyone and anywhere. This was a winning choice for an Actual Play.
When talking about how he approached the genre, Strittmatter explained, “I pick one or two pieces of art, and I decided these are the boundaries in which we will work. No Country for Old Men really stands out for me. Every time I picture the plastic bag, man, I’m like, what would Anton Chigurh do?”
You don’t watch a slasher film just for the ending; it’s exploring how different people act in a life-or-death situation, and maybe for the cheesy one-liners. This team leans hard into the campy side of slashers and splatters it with pop culture references and tension-breaking humor. In this case, we get an incredibly wholesome sapphic romance that pokes fun at media from the early 2000s. Even the 4:3 aspect ratio snaps you right back to when we were all scared of a little girl crawling out of our televisions. I would have liked a little more exposition of the player characters near the end of the show, but that’s what a sequel is for! The familiarity of the genre also meant that there was much less execution needed up front. The audience is instead greeted with a blood-dripping opening sequence that’s still stuck in my head. The details we learn are just enough to whet the imagination, but not so dense that we struggle against the current.
This show is a monument to all the reasons I fell in love with Actual Play and wanted to write about it. Strittmatter remembered a comment that lauded the show’s ingenuity to Daggerheart as Paranormal Activity was for Blumhouse. We see the real reactions of people enjoying a game, professional collaboration, and total buy-in from everyone involved, and the excitement of knowing how easily the entire show could shift from one dice roll. So the question remains, who will survive the sequel?
Images via The Panic Table
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!
