There’s been plenty of tabletop roleplaying shows emerging on YouTube over the past couple of years, with Outside Xbox’s Oxventure series, the Critical Role broadcasts on Twitch or Rooster Teeth’s Heroes and Halfwits becoming incredibly popular. The majority of these shows focus on Dungeons & Dragons, or at least some variant of it, but there’s more to tabletop roleplaying than fantasy.
Enter No Rolls Barred.
Shown every Sunday on partsFUNknown, WrestleTalk’s second YouTube channel, the core premise remains the same: a group of friends create their own characters and imagine a world where they interact with each other. The key twist is that they’re not forming a party to raid castles, fight monsters or spend two hours dicking about in the tavern, much to the annoyance of the game’s DM.
No Rolls Barred is different, as the series uses the game World Wide Wrestling by Nathan D. Paoletta as a basis. World Wide Wrestling lets players create their own personal wrestling federation, complete with unique wrestlers and storylines, and allows them to work matches, cut promos and do anything else they can think of. As always, the limits are only your imagination, and given that wrestling seems to always adopt an “anything goes” approach to their content, the possibilities for World Wide Wrestling are nigh-on limitless.
Helmed by professional Dungeon Master Tom Burgess, brilliantly dubbed the Head of Creative, No Rolls Barred takes place in the fictional promotion of City British Wrestling. Its cartoonish cast of caricatures and an unmistakable British approach to swearing and violence makes the promotion feel like a cross between 80s to mid-90s WWF and Scottish indie promotion ICW (ECW but with more “did ye, aye?”). Think job-based gimmicks, plenty of F-bombs and more than a few broken bones.
The players consist of current WrestleTalk presenters Oli Davis, Luke Owen, Laurie Blake and Adam Blampied. Each season, they’ll be joined by a series of guest players, with the first season introducing drag queen Lolo Brow. Every player has their own wrestler with unique skills and identity, and the way they bounce off each other is fascinating to watch.
Oli and Luke portray Golden Joe and Silver Bro, a brotherly tag team by the name of The Precious Metals. By the end of the first episode, Oli and Luke brilliantly establish Joe’s ambitious nature and Bro’s naivety, allowing for a slow burn storyline where one will inevitably turn on the other. We’re three episodes in at the time of writing, and their relationship has honestly become appointment viewing.
Beyond that, there’s the mentor-mentee relationship between Laurie’s veteran character Tony the Milkman and Adam’s Kid Flippz; with plenty of jokes about how Kid’s acrobatic moves are “killing the business”. Lastly, Lolo’s character, The Denimatrix, comfortably straddles the line between anti-hero and straight-up dickhead, leaving nothing but battered bodies in her wake. Yes, she’s a dominatrix in denim. There’s plenty of terrible puns, it’s beautiful.
Because all involved are huge wrestling fans, the storytelling and character work is on point. Their work and commitment as performers helps sell the ridiculousness their imagination has conjured up, but it’s their knowledge of the wrestling business that gives the CBW universe that added edge, especially if you’re a wrestling fan too. Watching the character dynamics and narrative evolve over time feels like you’re part of the inside joke, waiting patiently for the inevitable punchline.
As for the Head of Creative, Tom Burgess’ skill as a DM is completely on show, encouraging players to express their creativity or fleshing out the backstory of characters. His penchant for creating goliath-esque villains for the players to overcome also helps sell the larger-than-life aspect of wrestling. How will our heroes ever conquer the gargantuan threats CBW has to offer, such as current champion Apex? With really good dice rolls, maybe.
Success and failure comes at the roll of the dice, meaning the best laid plans of any wrestler can come undone with a terrible roll, adding a whole new layer to the drama and entertainment. Watching the players describe how they’d like to punish their opponent, only for a bad dice roll to scupper those plans, turning their WrestleMania moment into a Botchamania lowlight never gets old.
No moment encapsulates this further than in episode 3, the Regal Wrangle, which is definitely not a gimmick infringement version of the Royal Rumble. In a stroke of insane luck, a critical fail immediately led to two massive successes, creating an almost impossible sequence of events that left me on the edge of my seat. Then another wrestler enters the match, rolls a critical fail and breaks their shoulder. The wrestling life comes at you fast.
At the time of writing, the first season is still ongoing, with the Bicycle Lane to the Colossal Tussle season finale reaching a fever pitch, so there’s still time to catch up. Given everything that’s going on in the world right now, No Rolls Barred is the perfect, light-hearted dose of entertainment for wrestling and gaming fans alike. Now, chant it with me:
C-B-DUB! C-B-DUB! C-B-DUB!
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