“Critical Role” Season 3 and Dungeons & Dragons Post-Lockdown

How Dungeons & Dragons went from tabletop to online, sparking an influx of new players

By: Abby Vela

As the chilly winter weather finally makes its appearance in the Twin Cities, many people are looking for something new to watch from the warmth of their own homes. Some may turn to Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services for entertainment. However, as of late October, many fellow students, along with millions around the globe, will be tuning into Twitch and YouTube every Thursday to watch the newest episode of “Critical Role,” a wildly popular Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, livestream.

D&D, the tabletop role-playing game, is one of the most recognizable fantasy games of all time and has been around since the 1970s. While the game has been around for longer than many of us have been alive, its steady output of new monsters and stories brings new players to the fray and keeps old players coming back for more. D&D, at its core, is a collaborative storytelling game. Like many other role-playing games, one person sets the scene (the dungeon master, or DM) while the rest of the group creates and role-plays as a character, rolling dice to determine the success of that character’s decisions. The characters, subsequently, create their own adventure within the fantasy world the DM builds.

“Critical Role” is one of the most well known and popular D&D shows to date. The cast began playing together in 2012 and began streaming their play in 2015; in their near-decade of play together, “Critical Role” has completed two campaigns, or “seasons,” and a multitude of mini-series. Beyond just playing D&D, the franchise has also created its own comic series, art collections, official D&D sourcebooks, and even an animated series titled “Legend of Vox Machina,” set to air on Amazon Prime in February of 2022. The first episode of campaign 3 streamed on Twitch and YouTube on October 21, and according to TwitchTracker, the peak viewer count reached over 212,000 viewers on Twitch alone. They even partnered with Cinemark Theaters to show the episode 1 premiere at select theaters in the United States.

The new campaign’s first episode, “The Draw of Destiny,” begins in the city of Jrusar, a community built on sky-scraping rock formations connected by wire gondolas, which overlooks a vast jungle below the clouds. Here we meet our newest rag-tag group of adventurers: Imogen, Laudna, Ashton, Dorian, Fearne, Orym, and Fresh Cut Grass (F.C.G. or Letters for short). Composed of a pair of best friends who are total opposites, a nonbinary punk and their loveable robot sidekick, and a familiar trio introduced over the summer in the “Exandria Unlimited” mini-campaign, the unlikely group of companions are brought together through a battle against sentient furniture and cutlery. When their combat skills are noticed by an older gentleman, Sir Bertrand Bell, who promises them “coin and clout,” the adventure truly begins.

What makes “Critical Role” so special? There are many answers to that question, but I think one of the major draws of this show, specifically, is the quality of the storytelling and role play. The cast of the show is composed of professional and well-known voice actors, headed by Matt Mercer, famous for playing Levi Ackerman in “Attack on Titan” and Jotaro Kujo in “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.” The show is a side hustle (albeit a time-consuming one) for a group of people whose day jobs are as professional actors and storytellers. Needless to say, the immersive storytelling, superb plot, and complex character development have a siren-like draw, especially for creatives and fantasy fans. Having amassed over 900,000 Twitch followers and 1.4 million YouTube subscribers, I’m definitely not the only one who thinks so.

The fantasy world that Mercer and “Critical Role” have created is one of the most complex and imagination-capturing worlds to be shared in D&D. With this comes the ability to mobilize an audience to play the game themselves. The sudden free time gained during quarantine, the need for escape, and the magic of video chat made playing D&D more appealing and more accessible than ever before.

Just looking at the numbers, the demand for D&D content and materials has dramatically increased since the fifth edition of the game was released in 2014, but especially during the pandemic. CNBC reported in March of 2021 that “D&D sales jumped 33% [in 2020]—adding to a six-year growth streak.” This increase in sales denotes a dramatic rise in popularity, though it’s not all that surprising. Without the luxury of being able to leave the house to hang out with friends, folks around the world found themselves deficient in ways to be social other than the daily Zoom call for work, meetings, or classes. Work and school were stressful and a constant reminder of the half-dystopian normal we found ourselves in. The escape from reality that D&D provides, whether playing or watching, was the perfect solution to these problems.

Of course, there were some aspects of the traditional D&D experience that players had to forego during the pandemic. There was no play table that everyone could crowd around with the pen-and-paper character sheets, combat maps, and dice trays. There wasn’t a safe way for a group of people to be in the same room without putting each other’s health at risk. Yet, oddly enough, this turned out to be a blessing for many new players.

To a new player, all of the maps, dice, figurines, set pieces, and in-person roleplay can be daunting. It’s understandable; it takes an incredible amount of time, money, and experience to create the set-up that we see in shows like “Critical Role.” Wanting to play D&D is one thing, but knowing when and where to start is a whole other mountain to climb. Quarantine just so happened to be the perfect catalyst. 

Moving the in-person tabletop online stripped the game down to its bare bones. Data collected by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in March of 2021 reported that many seasoned players disliked having play sessions online as the game lost the “physical interaction with tangible objects.” Without the face-to-face gameplay, there was no use of monster and character figurines nor intricate maps and terrain models. 

But for those who had never played before and didn’t have all of the fancy extra bits, getting into D&D seemed more tangible.

Quarantine forced many players to go back to the basics: making a character, role-playing, and rolling dice. Although the cosplay and the fancy sets and the professional acting experience of the cast of “Critical Role” made immersion in the fantasy illusion all the easier, none of it is essential to the game itself. The act of playing D&D went from seeming like a lofty goal that only professionals could do well to something learnable and fun for everyone, even without all of the tangible atmosphere building. 

Additionally, the lack of face-to-face interaction took some of the pressure off the role-play, especially for those new to that type of acting; from the comfort of their own home, a player could fully immerse themselves in their character and the game without the subconscious fear of looking stupid. Even when you’re new to the game and don’t fully understand the mechanics, D&D is still fun! It’s a learning experience, and stripping the game down to its core allowed new players to begin their learning without feeling intimidated.

Not everyone can have the vivid imagery and storytelling skills of Mercer, especially not as a first-time player or DM, and it wouldn’t be fair to make that comparison. It had actually become such a common occurrence in the D&D community for players to compare their DMs to the “Critical Role” DM that the “Matt Mercer Effect” became a well-known term. That being said, I think that the collective experience of playing a normally face-to-face game fully online created a sense of solidarity between players and their DMs. Sometimes players aren’t fully aware of the extra work that goes into DMing. Keeping the story going and enjoyable while in lockdown was something that became novel and much appreciated.

Coronavirus affected all of us, from new players to the cast of “Critical Role.” At the same time that we everyday players couldn’t get together and roll 20-sided dice with our friends, all the professionals that we watched on our screens every Thursday night were in the same situation. In a video that was released a few days before the first episode of campaign 3 titled “Campaign 3: Behind the Set,” we get to watch the cast recount their first time seeing the new table and filming space. “At that moment, we realized,” Mercer said. “‘Oh, we’re back at the same table again,’ and then we all just reached out their hands again. It was more emotional than I think we were expecting.” There was something so utterly and beautifully human about watching these people who are idolized by the D&D community have the same feeling of overwhelming joy in seeing their friends and sitting at the same table to play their funny little nerd game. We all felt this joy in one way or another.

I had only begun playing D&D during lockdown, but in that time, I have joined multiple long-running campaigns and have even game-mastered my own homebrew campaign. It’s a surreal experience going from online-only to in-person and seeing the reactions and rolls of all of my party members. That being said, having my first play experience was one of the best things I could have asked for. The nights when my friends would hop on a Discord call and play D&D together were some of the most fun we could have had during lockdown. We got to see each other, check in, and have fun learning to play a game that we never thought we would be able to play. Whimsical shows like “Critical Role” act as the spark for many people’s interests in the tabletop, but in the end, playing D&D with friends, no matter the mode, is one of the most enjoyable adventures that one can experience.