Popverse's top stories

• DC Comics cancels Red Hood comic book series
• Simon Kinberg on writing X-Men movies, producing Glenn Powell's The Running Man remake, and co-creating Star Wars Rebels [Popversations]
• Better angels and online demons: A trip down the rabbit hole of Downton Abbey fandom

---

I remember a time back in 2008, when I was still new to tabletop gaming and struggling to find a consistent group to play with. Like many people, my friends were scattered to the winds, living in different parts of the US, and I was just about to move overseas to the UK, so it didn’t seem likely. But then I heard a podcast of people sitting around and playing Dungeons & Dragons. No visuals. Little fanfare. Just a trio of webcomic creators, DM Chris Perkins, and a newly formed adventuring company called Acquisitions Incorporated.

Not only did Acquisitions Incorporated help kick off the Actual Play tabletop genre years before shows like Critical Role or Dimension 20 got started, but it, on a personal level, convinced me that remotely playing with my friends could work. Some investigative work into voice chat servers and trial and error into map sharing later, that same group that was inspired by the mere existence of Acquisitions Incorporated is still going. We don’t play as often as I would like (which is constantly), but we’re still together and best friends today.

So, when I tell you that sitting down with Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, two of the DMs behind the screen of the longest-running D&D Actual Play series, to talk about Acquisitions Incorporated was the highlight of my PAX West 2025, I am perhaps underselling it. The afternoon after one of their infamous live sessions on the main stage of PAX, the two game designers chatted with me about running a game, expecting the unexpected from players, and the suspiciously missing villain from the PAX West 2025 session of Acquisitions Incorporated.

How Acquisitions Incorporated turned D&D into a spectator sport

“It never occurred to me at the time that D&D could be something that you could enjoy just listening to and not participate in directly,” Chris Perkins commented to me. He’s someone who has been with the series since the start, running the very first Acquisitions Incorporated session with Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik alongside fellow webcomic artist Scott Kurtz.

When I asked him why Acq Inc has stuck around for so long, he mused, “Part of it might be because it was the first, and if you’re the first at something, I think it has some staying power. But I think more than that, it has always managed to maintain a certain balance between faithfulness to the experience and then going off and just kind of being its own thing and not being beholden to the rules or slavishly devoted to portraying D&D, as many people have experienced it in the past. IT really kind of amps up the silliness and kind of shows that you can enjoy D&D and not have to be all that D&D knowledgeable.”

“And I think the casual fun of it also, in many ways, authentically communicates what it’s like around many people’s dining room tables when they play,” Jeremy Crawford, who has been both a player and DM for Acquisitions Incorporated sessions alongside his roles at both Wizards of the Coast and, more recently, Darrington Press.

“The irreverence and the lewdness,” Perkins quickly clarified, in case that wasn’t clear.

“Yeah,” Crawford continued. “Because I think often when there’ve been attempts to sort of portray what it’s like to play a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, there would often be this desire to elevate it. ‘This is going to be like Lord of the Rings,’ but going back to the 1970s, most people, when they’re playing a tabletop game with their friends, sure, there’ll be elements of that, but often just glorious nonsense, lots of in-jokes and Easter eggs. And I think Acq Inc has always done a really great job of proudly sharing that with a large audience."

"I also think part of the staying power has been that those of us in it really just love playing with each other. And so I think that feeling, the audience can sense it, how much we are having fun just being on stage together. I sometimes like to refer to it as almost one of the home D&D games I’m in that happens to have an audience, but you can almost imagine us having the same game whether there was an audience there or not.”

Acq Inc's "staying power" comes from its flawed characters

It isn’t just the silliness of characters like Jim Darkmagic (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics) that has given Acquisitions Incorporated the kind of staying power most shows would dream of; it is also the occasionally selfish act of characters like Omin Dran that really sets it apart from other D&D Actual Plays out there. “This is a party of amoral characters,” Perkins reminded me. “They’re kind of out for their own gain, and I think that flies in the face of a lot of traditional fantasy trope stories that are kicking around.”

“The characters are relatably flawed,” Crawford added.

Even in the most recent session, those flaws are being exposed. The aforementioned Jim Darkmagic, one of the original characters in the campaign, has revealed that he is terrified of thunder.

“That’s the kind of character foibles that I think resonate and have kept the game alive,” Perkins said.

Perhaps the most important thing about Acquisitions Incorporated – and any Actual Play D&D show – is the sense that no one, not the DM or the players, really knows what will happen next. “One of the most decisive moments for me,” Crawford said.

“And I’m going to pick one, actually, from before I joined as one of the DMs and sometimes players. It was when I was in the audience watching Chris DM, and it was the episode where Omin, to gain advantage [on a roll], sacrificed Jim to Hell. And that triggered, actually, several years of plot lines where I came on as Dungeon Master. And that for me was like that is the show in a nutshell. Where there was, in the moment, a pain for Omin to do it. He did it, coldly, while at the same time, it’s clear it hurt him to do it. And that mix, that is like Acq Inc in a nutshell. This mix of greed but lifelong friendship, and do you make a choice that favors the friendship or profit? And, as is usually the case for Omin, he chose profit.”

There is pain, but there is a sense of wackiness to Acquisitions Incorporated that makes it unique and, as they mentioned, is close to how many people experience D&D at home. Perkins reminded me that characters have crawled up the anus of a statue or stuck their fist up a dinosaur’s backside to accomplish their goals. Crawford recalls a whole dungeon that was just the party making their way through a monster’s digestive system to crawl out of its butt in the end.

Players can't ruin your plans if you don't make plans at all

Rolling with the punches and adjusting their plans is the hallmark of any good DM, but I’m struck by how much Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford embrace that idea. Just the night before, Crawford’s character was killed in the first three minutes of the game. “Chris presented this carefully constructed riddle, and we just derpy-derped right past it, and I was disintegrated. And so I spent a lot of the session as a mechanical chicken because my character’s spirit went into the body of a mechanical chicken.”

How do you prepare for something as wild as that happening so early in the session? Sometimes, by not planning at all. “When I’m prepping for an Acq Inc session,” Crawford told me. “What’s always most important for me is that I set up a nice buffet of options at the beginning and that I have a satisfying endpoint, usually several possible endpoints in mind, to end the show. What happens in between is really up to the group, and so I will prepare milestones along the way that they may or may not get to, but what I find is that it’s critical when I’m DMing to not count on the group reaching any of those milestones during the show."

"And so for me, it’s really then about just this juggling act of how can I take what they’re doing and weave it together so that at the end it feels like it came together in a satisfying way? And that, for me, is actually one of the most fun things to do on stage as an Acq Inc DM, is how do I weave all this nonsense into something where it feels like in the end like, ‘Wait, did they plan this?’ And nope! I might, again, have the idea of what the final note might be, but how they got there, we usually have no idea.”

However, it was Chris Perkins who really shocked me about the level of planning he puts into each Acquisitions Incorporated session. Aside from the diorama that gets brought out to serve as the set piece to the session, he spends most of his time “thinking about how to begin and how to end and not worrying about so much all the stuff in the middle… I probably walk on stage with a page of notes. That’s it.”

A single page of notes for a three-hour session. The obsessive planner in me is screaming at this point, but Chris Perkins is even more loose with his planning than that. “And it’s just bullet points of ‘Here’s likely things that could happen. If everything goes according to plan, this is what might happen.’ Knowing none of that’s going to go according to plan.”

Even with such limited planning, Crawford acknowledges that the two Acquisitions Incorporated DMs routinely “prepare more than the group ever gets to… We will, both of us, decide, ‘Okay, there’s this special thing going on in the corner of the diorama. This special thing is going over here. This special thing…’ The group might come across one of those things, and so we’ll have all sorts of material at the end of every episode of like, ‘Well, they didn’t touch any of this.’”

Missing out on an encounter or trap is one thing, but Perkins revealed that one of the things that got cut from the PAX West 2025 episode of Acquisitions Incorporated was the Big Bad at the end. Usually, the highlight of a dungeon, the party simply didn’t get around to facing them that night.

“In the game we ran last night, first time this has ever happened to me, is I realized two hours into this three-hour game that there’s a strong likelihood we wouldn’t get through the actual dungeon,” Chris Perkins admitted. “So I start to cut things out, and one of the things that got jettisoned was the villain. I’ve never done that before. I always count on the villain showing up in the adventure, but last night, nope, it got away, along with a bunch of other stuff. And I don’t think anybody… nobody felt his loss at all.”

“No no,” Jeremy Crawford chimed in. “And it’s fun the few times I’ve gotten to play, because sometimes, like last night, Chris had me be sort of a part player character, part non-player character to deliver some of the initial exposition. But then after that, we make sure that I don’t know what’s going to happen. And so I had this feeling like, ‘It feels like there might’ve been something else here planned,’ but I didn’t know for sure and I didn’t feel its lack.”

Even a DM with as much experience as Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford can be caught off guard. Especially by a group like Acquisitions Incorporated. But that is part of the fun and part of why, 18 years after their first session, they remain one of the most fun D&D campaigns you can listen to.

Portions of this interview were edited for clarity.

---

The gaming industry has come a long way since Pong blew all our minds in the 70s. We've got everything you need to know about the next big thing in games. Of course, Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be the big game of 2026, but there are plenty of other games coming out between now and then. Here is our starter guide for every gamer:

• All upcoming games in 2025 and beyond
• Gamify My Life, our weekly gaming column designed
• Popverse Picks: The best Assassin's Creed protagonists
• How to play every GTA game in order
• Why the GTA 6 budget isn't as crazy as you think
• The Magic: The Gathering x Spider-Man crossover set wouldn't exist without the Spider-Verse

And be sure to check Popverse regularly for the latest gaming news.