Long Form Theme: The Dungeon Master

My improv company loves themed shows. We have had Wild West shows, Summer Camp shows , and even Pirate Musicals. Our Thanksgiving show is probably the best example of this, it's T. Hanks Giving. We all dress as Tom Hanks characters and theme our games around Tom Hanks movies, it's brilliant and dumb. When I was working on coming up with a new theme for shows I realized we hardly did anything with the fantasy genre. Then I wondered if it would be possible to improvise a D&D campaign in front of an audience and not have it be totally awkward and terrible. This is the ongoing tale of my struggle with The Dungeon Master.

Dungeons and Dragons has a few key things that I knew had to be included if we wanted to capture the feel of a campaign.

• Characters with different (often complementary) skills and talents.
• Powerful enemies with plenty of goons who our party can overcome.
• Varied Non-Player Characters who provide information and side-quests
• Exploration

Some extra things that we thought would be really cool to include

• Combat
• Magic
• Dice Rolling

My current iteration of the show runs this way:

1. I introduce myself as the Dungeon Master and give a brief audience warm-up.
2. I ask three audience members, "What's a power that you wished you could've had as a kid?" or "Every character needs a special skill, what's this guy/gal's special skill?" Then the players step up and give their character name while justifying their special skill and building an adventurer out of it.
3. I get a problem that someone had that day or an issue that's on an audience member's mind. I use this suggestion to create the monologue filled with our campaign exposition. I create a couple different problems that need to be solved and I let the players get started.
4. Whenever an NPC is needed I become a walk-on and give the story some shape or I edit from the sideline to accomplish the same thing.
5. I also have one or two people there to exclusively play NPCs and they serve basically as wild-cards to keep the story from getting too stagnant.

Basically it's played as a long form where the monologist is also the main person with editing power. We throw a giant D20 whenever characters try to do something incredible. Occasionally we do lore or history checks where a character has to justify something weird that just happened.

We haven't quite perfected this show yet, but I will be rehearsing it several times over the next few weeks in order to work out the kinks. What do you guys think? Where are the things that seem like they could be trouble?