Good Day to Dice embraces camp, queerness, and sex

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not typically the audience for actual play; I’m picky when it comes to audio performance, and I often listen to only a few episodes before something else distracts me and I turn the show off, forgetting that I had even started it at all — not exactly something that encourages me to to try again. Actual play is one of those segments of the tabletop RPG sphere that I enjoy in short bursts when players tell certain stories with specific systems. I’m also susceptible to second-hand cringe, a hard thing to avoid when a lot of actual play goes for consistently heightened emotion. 

But I paused when spotting a few clips of Saddle Up, a weird west series from sophomore year studio Good Day to Dice, while scrolling TikTok. Every one of the performers were in drag. More to my interests, everyone was a drag king. The opening minutes of the first episode managed to intrigue me. With an air of professionalism and — simultaneously — a sense of playful naivete, the Saddle Up crew introduced themselves and immediately jumped into the game, a bawdy, action-packed murder-mystery in a small western town that didn’t take kindly to new faces. 

What ultimately sold me on Saddle Up occurred in the second episode, when drag king Woody Banger — who was playing the Bareback Bandit — began to bounce up and down on his chair, simulating the fictional sex that his character was having with an NPC. Next to him, the DM, Jane Spencer began to bounce as well as the NPC she was portraying carried on a plot-relevant conversation with the Bandit as the two fictional characters fucked, sighed in a compulsory orgasm, shook hands, and went on their way. 

Now, as I’ve already admitted, I start and stop many more actual plays than I finish. But I can say that I’ve never seen something as raunchy, over-the-top, and absurd as Saddle Up’s first episode. Characters fucked, flirted, abstained, and got giddy when offered a kiss. Through a charming mix of camp aesthetics with a drag performer’s sensibilities, Saddle Up had managed to hit just the right note of narrative audaciousness and satiric-erotic energy to keep me interested.

Jane Spencer and Annalea Fiachi co-own Good Day to Dice; a young actual play studio that started in January of 2025 with the uncontroversial launch of a D&D actual play. While they didn’t have sponsors or corporate backing, the crew did boast Hollywood production experience and the kind of creative ambition you often find in Los Angeles, where talented filmmakers are willing to do quite a bit of legwork to spread the word about their projects. You might not have seen a full episode of Good Day to Dice, but between their TikTok and Instagram, your algorithm probably served up some of their clips. 

I met with Spencer and Fiachi at And Destroy, a local gaming/coffee shop that routinely hosts tabletop events. My recording clearly picked up the Magic: The Gathering game going on behind us. I wanted to talk with these two because, despite the professional set, great lighting, and post-production editing, there’s something… almost charmingly naive about the way they do AP. I tell them as much — that Saddle Up is interesting to me not just because of the over-the-top camp of the show, but because it does away with a lot of the conventions that contemporary APs seem attached to. 

Fiachi is the producer for Saddle Up— they meet every Friday to brainstorm how they can improve. “We planned all next year just before we came here.” Jane is the editor, and often “edits days before the show releases.” They decided to focus on social media because grassroots campaigning “was all they had access to” as far as audience-focused advertising. Good Day To Dice has a large audience on TikTok and Instagram, but Fiachi hasn’t quite figured out how to get people to sign up for their Patreon or YouTube. They want to keep the channel  growing, and while they would love to make this a full-time gig, they know that the path to sustainability is a long-term goal. 

Spencer wants to publish the RPGs she designs for Good Day to Dice’s series. She has written custom game sets for almost every season, basing most of the rules on Hunters Entertainment’s Kids on Bikes. She’s done a ‘20s noir flavor and now a western style for Saddle Up. Both are solid adaptations, but it’s not totally apparent what is happening mechanically while you’re watching, and it’s unclear whether or not that’s on purpose. It works, though, riding the line between explaining the system and just… playing it. “It’s been nice to tailor it to the genre,” Fiachi said. In this case, the system almost disappears into the narrative, supporting the story without ever taking the spotlight off the players. It still feels like a game, but without the hangups that so often accompany leveraging the rules for player gain. 

We talked about the hornyness of the game, and one thing that the two mentioned was that “consent was baked into the game as we played.” Instead of relying on off-table safety tools, they had instituted levels of consent and calibration within the game to make sure that the performers were always playing the game that everyone wanted to play. Getting in character and above the table consent for sexual scenarios was easily folded into the narrative, and while Saddle Up didn’t shy away from sex, it was always clearly communicated in the moment with characters asking and receiving permission in conversation. While this makes the whole thing kind of twee, it also allowed the performers to engage in simulated sex on-camera, and having it be delightfully campy, raunchy, and clearly telegraphed. Spencer said that she always asks new people about topics they want to avoid, doing a kind of lines and veils to make sure that they create a place where on-camera talent feels comfortable playing, where boundaries — once expressed — are respected. 

While none of this is revolutionary, the fascinating part about the Saddle Up is that it wholeheartedly embraces romance and bawdiness, flirting with erotica while portraying heightened masculine personas — every player, for example, wears a drawn-on mustache. Spencer even wore a rubber chest plate for the first few episodes. “It got so hot!” she complained after I mentioned how much I loved that detail, “I couldn’t keep it on. We were filming in a garage.” 

When asked about bawdiness, both Spencer and Fiachi said that it felt “very natural” to bring in flirty elements to their storytelling. “I can’t stop flirting with you, I guess,” Fiachi said to Spencer, laughing. “It can be a very taboo topic,” Spencer explained, “opening up about anything sexual can be a relief.” 

Erotic expression within a group setting also falls under this umbrella, where exposure to fun, flirty humor can be healthy. “There’s a bigger relief when we see these conversations,” Fiachi said. “It hits harder because we, as a culture, are wound up right now.” There’s a lot of high stakes involved in being simultaneously queer and erotic — trans and queer people are being labelled perverts and dissenters by the government. Giving queer people the space to engage in sexually-driven art within a circle of performers creates a cathartic release valve. “We will always protect our space as a place where queers can exist and play,” Fiachi said. And for as long as Woody Banger is on the show, we can expect more erotic misadventures. 

“Woody inspired the whole thing,” Spencer said, recalling that he was in Good Day to Dice’s 2025 Holiday Special as a sexy reindeer named Woodrow Bangerfur. Besides Woody and Fiachi (who plays Dirty Darling Dane), two other members comprise the core players: Roz Warren (Greasy Rod) and Vico Ortiz (Padre Orlando) had done drag before. (Vico is a well-known drag artist, as well as being a voice and screen actor. They are best known for playing Jim Jimenez on Our Flag Means Death.) Ortiz was initially able to join because they were in town filming Critical Role’s Age of Umbra, and they have confirmed they will be on season two of Saddle Up. “A Rascal exclusive,” I joked. 

On its surface, the four-episode Saddle Up appears simple. But the in-person filming and high production standard allows the show to feel effortless to watch — no distracting backgrounds, no strange lighting, no odd tech setups or angles — and makes way for the rest of the show. There is so much skill behind the scenes and the camera that the kind of wide-eyed, ingenuous playstyle becomes exceptionally endearing. The campy, over-the-top whimsy of the show prioritizes the absurd even in a grounded (if supernatural) setting. Because performance is centered, the transgressive drag of the women and nonbinary folks feels heightened, and the line between flirty and filthy is stretched very thin.

While watching Saddle Up, it does feel like these performers are discovering how to play for an actual play audience in real time. That’s not to say the performance isn’t polished — the entire crew are actors, drag kings, or comedians — but that there’s a kind of easy movement through the episodes that feels fresh. Without hangups or even staying vigilant of contemporary AP’s typical pitfalls,  Saddle Up creates space for its performers to do whatever (and whoever) the fuck they want… as long as they’re willing.