Critical Role
Critical Role is an American web series in which a group of professional voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons. The show started streaming partway through the cast's first campaign in March 2015. Campaign one ended in October 2017 after 115 episodes, and campaign two started in January 2018 and ended in June 2021 after 141 episodes. A number of one-shots were aired in the hiatus between the two campaigns. After campaign two was completed, the spin-off limited series Exandria Unlimited aired from June 2021 to August 2021. The third campaign premiered on October 21, 2021.
For other uses, see Critical Role (disambiguation).Critical Role
- Jason C. Miller
- Colm McGuinness
- Sean Feica
- Peter Habib
- "Critical Role Theme Song" (C1)
- "Critical Role Too" (C2, episodes 1–43)
- "Your Turn to Roll"(C2, episodes 44–141)
- "It's Thursday Night"(C3)
- "Twin Elms" (C1)
- "Welcome to Wildemount" (C2)
- "Welcome to Marquet" (C3)
United States
English
Approximately 180–300 minutes per episode[1]
- Geek & Sundry (2015–2018)[2]
- Critical Role Productions (2018–present)[3]
March 12, 2015 –
present
The series is broadcast on Thursdays at 19:00 PT on the Critical Role Twitch and YouTube channels and the Beacon streaming service, with the video on demand (VOD) being available to Beacon, YouTube, and Twitch subscribers immediately after the broadcast on their respective platforms. The VODs are made available for the public on Critical Role's website and uploaded to their YouTube channel on the Monday after the live stream. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the show had broadcast live, but has been pre-recorded since its return for episode 100 of campaign two.
The cast own the intellectual property from the show, and the show also lends its name to the studio owned by the cast—Critical Role Productions. The studio has produced Critical Role since 2018. A number of licensed works based on the show have been released, such as several comic books and two official campaign setting guides. The Legend of Vox Machina, the animated series based on the first campaign of Critical Role, premiered January 28, 2022 on Amazon Prime Video. Mighty Nein, an upcoming animated series based on the second campaign, was announced in January 2023.
Background[edit]
Critical Role is a creator-owned streaming show where the cast play an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with Matthew Mercer serving as the show's Dungeon Master for the seven other cast members.[4]
The group's first campaign began two years prior to the start of the series as a one-off, simplified Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition game for Liam O'Brien's birthday.[5][6][7] At the time O'Brien was acting as Mercer's voice director on Resident Evil 6. Mercer had been encouraging O'Brien for some time to join a game, but O'Brien had been declining up to that point due to his new child. He eventually agreed to do a game for his birthday, and the bulk of the cast were present at that first session.[8] The players enjoyed the game so much that they continued to play it while switching to the Pathfinder ruleset.[9][10][11][12] O'Brien spoke with Ashley Johnson while the two were working on The Last of Us, and invited her to the campaign's second session.[13] The home-game ran for two years, with the cast meeting approximately once every six weeks and playing for up to 8 hours at a time.[14]
After Felicia Day heard about the private home game from Johnson, she approached the group about playing it in a live-streamed format for Geek & Sundry. The version G&S pitched would have had the players switch over to a video game to resolve combat. Mercer was against this, preferring instead to continue to play at the tabletop as the group had been. The players also vowed to halt the show if it compromised their enjoyment of the game.[15] Geek & Sundry would ultimately host the show until February 2019.[10][12] In order to streamline gameplay for the show, the game's characters were converted from Pathfinder to Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition before the web series began airing on March 12, 2015.[16][17] There were initially eight cast member players; Orion Acaba left the show after episode 27 of campaign one.[18][19] His character, Tiberius, appeared in the first seven issues of the prequel comic series Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins.[20][21]
Fans of the show are termed "Critters". The name was suggested by O'Brien during the Q&A session at the end of episode 10 of campaign one, which was popular with the chat at the time.[22][23][24]
Production[edit]
Format[edit]
Critical Role is a mixture of a weekly show and a modern gaming Twitch stream.[11] Each episode usually runs for three to five (in some cases six) hours and is streamed live on Critical Role's Twitch and YouTube channels on almost every Thursday, with possible breaks from the show being announced at least one week prior to the broadcast.[57][58] The VOD is made available for subscribers of Critical Role's Twitch channel immediately after airing and before being uploaded to Critical Role's YouTube channel the following Monday, where it can be watched for free.[59][50][31] Starting with the third campaign, the main campaign of Critical Role does not air new episodes on the last Thursday of every month; instead, other content by the studio airs in its time slot.[60][61][62] In February 2024, the option to access to the VOD immediately after airing on the YouTube channel was added for YouTube subscribers.[63] In May 2024, Critical Role began to also broadcast on the studio's streaming service Beacon with VOD access immediately after airing for Beacon subscribers.[53][54][55] These additional platforms did not impact the distribution on Twitch or the free YouTube VOD which is available after a delay.[63][64]
Critical Role has included advertisements since October 2015 with sponsorships announced at the start of each episode that "usually also appear in the visual overlay of the show".[65] Sam Riegel is typically the cast member who reads these advertisements.[65][66][67] Academic Jan Švelch commented that "Riegel's comedic approach to sponsorship announcements, which often involves only loosely related skits, has become a running gag of Critical Role".[65] He also highlighted that "the most prominent sponsorships include long-term collaborations with D&D Beyond, Wyrmwood (gaming tables and dice trays) and Dwarven Forge (miniature terrain)".[65] Additionally, a number of Critical Role's streams have also served as a donation drive to support nonprofit organizations such as St Jude, 826LA, Extra Life, and Doctors Without Borders.[68]
Filming and set design[edit]
Matt Jarvis, in the UK print magazine Tabletop Gaming, highlighted "what has changed significantly, even from Critical Role's beginnings, is its production values. The audio and video quality of the first few episodes [...] has since been polished by professional lighting, microphones and sets".[69] The cast played at a shared table when it was still a home game, however, the first set at Geek & Sundry separated the cast onto three tables. The set, nicknamed "Felicia's Bedroom", had numerous issues including poor audio, cameras which blocked the player's eyelines and long distances between the tables. O'Brien has stated that it "felt like a child's diorama for a school project". The distance also made it challenging for the cast to see the battle maps. The show moved to another set early on, which featured a "stony, moodily-lit backdrop".[70]
A custom game table which allows the cast to sit together was added to the set in July 2017.[71][72] It was designed by Wyrmwood so that the cast can "see each other and interact with each other" while they are filmed from multiple sides.[72] Mercer is positioned behind a gamemaster's screen in the inset portion with space for his notes; in the center of the table, there is an area for the miniatures and maps used in combat.[72][73] Critical Role was initially filmed at Geek & Sundry, but moved to its own studio in June 2018.[74][28] From 2016 to 2019, Critical Role was also available on Legendary Digital's Alpha platform.[75][76][31] The Alpha version featured a number of digital "enhancements" including "special real-time dynamic character sheets, damage and heal animations, and visualizations."[75][77] This version is no longer accessible as Alpha was shut down in March 2019.[78]
Reception[edit]
Viewership[edit]
Viewer responses to the show have been overwhelmingly positive,[12] with many fans, nicknamed "Critters",[157][23] creating content such as fanart, fan fiction, character-inspired music, and fan-created merchandise for the show. Fans also send in many gifts for the cast and crew, resulting in occasional "Critmas" episodes during which the gifts are opened and distributed.[158]
By January 2016, each episode of the show had been watched for more than a million minutes on Twitch, totaling over 37 million minutes watched for the whole series.[9][159] By 2018 the weekly live game had roughly 30,000 viewers, and each episode was receiving hundreds of thousands of follow-up views on YouTube.[160] Additionally, the Critical Role YouTube channel, which was only started in 2018, had over 500 million views as of September 2022.[161] By the time the 100th episode was launched, the channel had amassed over 68 million views overall,[94] reaching over 224 million views as of December 2020.[161] As of January 2021, the first episode of campaign one has been watched 15 million times on YouTube.[162]
In 2021, Variety reported "historically, C.R.'s Twitch channel has attracted 60,000–75,000 live viewers for each episode. Factoring in on-demand plays on Twitch and YouTube, the total per-episode audience has ranged from 1.2 million to 1.5 million, according to Willingham." The Critical Role audience has grown significantly on Twitch and YouTube year over year. With 1.1 million followers on Twitch, Critical Role is one of many successful enterprises; Twitch's 50 most popular streamers have 4 million followers or more.[86] In October 2021, Business Insider reported that the official Twitch channel had 828,000 followers and 13,530 active subscribers while the official YouTube channel had 1.4 million subscribers.[50] In May 2024, The Washington Post reported, based on data provided to them by Critical Role Productions, that "YouTube viewership of Critical Role has increased by 125 percent since 2019, peaking at more than 188 million views on the channel last year".[163]
Critical response[edit]
In a January 2016 article, Polygon described Critical Role as a "thoroughly modern" show with a business model that is still developing.[9] In September 2016, Russ Burlingame of ComicBook.com highlighted that the show has a "stellar cast" with good "chemistry".[10] Burlingame commented that it has also "evolved from a pretty simple and low-fi operation in the early days to something much more elaborate and with better production values as time goes on".[10] Early on the show caught the attention of the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, who discussed it at length on two occasions on their official D&D podcast in 2015 and 2016, along with cast members Matthew Mercer, Marisha Ray, Liam O'Brien, Laura Bailey and former member Orion Acaba.[164][165]
Andy Wilson, for Bleeding Cool, highlighted Critical Role as "the best show [he has] watched all year" in 2020. He wrote, "I've said repeatedly that Critical Role is the future of television, and specifically praising their response to COVID that continued their show in a safe way where no one has gotten sick. Let me pause there for a moment: no one has gotten sick. They have been smart and responsible and safe. [...] But even more important is what they did this year. They are, weekly, one of the most-watched streams on Twitch. [...] They gave fans something to look forward to every week– an incredible feat given the endless monotony and despair of socially distant quarantine life."[166] Noelle Warner of CBR commented on how the show has become more polished since the first campaign with the cast spending "far less time on activities in-game that viewers might consider dull to watch" and instead focused "on creating compelling narrative moments between Matt Mercer's carefully crafted encounters".[167] Warner stated that "the main show itself has become more theatrical than ever, with cast members carefully planning their every move and leaning hard into the show's classic, jovial improvisation — which may be heavily curated improvisation but is still spontaneous nonetheless".[167] She highlighted that some fans view the show as having lost something that made it "magical in the first place" by shifting to a more "polished presentation"; however, Warner viewed the evolution of the show in a more positive light since it "has done a phenomenal job of maintaining its voice and vision as the years have gone on".[167]
Rebekah Krum, for CBR in November 2023, highlighted how the Exandria campaign setting was created by Mercer for the first campaign and that "though they started out using a standard pantheon of D&D and Pathfinder deities, all other elements of Critical Role's worldbuilding were and are homebrew".[168] Krum stated that at the time of Critical Role's premiere "most professionally produced actual plays were officially licensed by or connected with Wizards of the Coast and set in the preexisting Dungeons and Dragons world, featuring settings like Eberron or the Forgotten Realms. By basing the series in a homebrewed world, Critical Role ensured that all viewers had access to the same lore information, regardless of their level of experience with Dungeons and Dragons".[168] Cheryl Teh of Business Insider highlighted that the third campaign has many callbacks to the previous campaigns which is "nerdy nostalgia at its finest" – "the depth of Critical Role lore over three campaigns is a testament to how it's becoming sustainable as a long-term phenomenon".[169] Chris King, in his review of Exandria Unlimited for Polygon, commented that "despite Critical Role's commercial success, criticisms of the show have been mounting over the years—first, that the cast wasn't diverse enough and, second, that there was really no easy way in to understanding this world without starting all the way back at the beginning".[170] King felt the show did not succeed as an entry for new fans, however, "Exandria Unlimited is still a big step in the right direction. [...] Iyengar's work here goes a long way toward proving that Critical Role doesn't always need Mercer at the head of the table to succeed."[170] King wrote, "Exandria Unlimited has been able to retain what makes Critical Role so beloved by so many fans, while bringing new voices to the table. [...] It's not an adventure for the uninitiated, but instead an interstitial adventure filled with pre-existing lore and in-jokes to old campaigns, and no clear starting point for new fans to connect with. But it's still a lot of fun".[170]
Academic Jan Švelch, in a 2022 article examining the mediatization of tabletop role-playing, commented that Critical Role's "approach to tabletop role-playing is notably traditional in terms of a clear preference of in-person play with physical accessories except for the use of D&D Beyond as a digital replacement for paper character sheets. In other words, Critical Role promotes and celebrates analog play despite its mediated form. Furthermore, Critical Role's aspirational status among role-playing communities, exemplified by the so-called Mercer effect, is not limited to the cast's acting and storytelling skills, but arguably extends to the lavish presentation of its gaming table with artisan-made accessories and detailed battle dioramas. [...] Critical Role makes full use of this new mediatized reality of tabletop role-playing and its underlying economic logics, providing both spectator entertainment and extensive physical merchandising".[65]
Dungeons & Dragons resurgence[edit]
in 2020, Sarah Whitten of CNBC stated that the resurgence of Dungeons & Dragons began with the release of the new 5th Edition in 2014 which intersected with the "Let's Play" genre of online videos – Critical Role introduced "a whole new audience to" Dungeons & Dragons and helped "bolster the renaissance of the 46-year-old role-playing game".[171] Whitten wrote, "Critical Role isn't just a source of entertainment, it's teaching people how to play Dungeons & Dragons in the same way someone might watch a baseball or football game to gain a basic understanding of the rules and then start playing".[171] In a 2015 interview with Polygon, lead D&D designer Mike Mearls commented about the show: "It was really cool, as a guy who works on Dungeons & Dragons, to open up my Twitch app on my iPad and see Dungeons & Dragons in the first row."[172] Critical Role has been credited by VentureBeat as responsible for making actual play shows "their own genre of entertainment", and has since become one of the most prominent actual play series.[173]
A 2020 qualitative study examining the modern resurgence of Dungeons & Dragons stated that participant responses highlighted Critical Role's "high quality production value and noteworthy depiction of social fun and fantasy tropes" which "cultivated a burgeoning interest in D&D play that they believed contributed to the game's resurgence".[174] The authors commented that "the criticality of Critical Role was repeatedly mentioned by participants and reveals successful convergence culture in action and the impact this has had on drawing more interest and players towards D&D. [...] The progression of Critical Role from a home tabletop game, to live broadcast, to mass-media partnered animated series, to in-canon campaign guide, exemplifies the prolific impact that convergence culture has had on D&D's modern resurgence and popularity".[174]
However, critics have also highlighted the impact of the "Matt Mercer Effect" on Dungeons & Dragons.[175][176][177] Named for Critical Role's Dungeon Master, Matthew Mercer, the "mercer-effect" is the belief that all TTRPG/DnD players expect an experience with the same narrative, immersive, and gameplay qualities as Critical Role.[175] Luke Winkie of Slate commented that: