With new television seasons, live shows, and a benchmark anniversary on the horizon, Critical Role’s Travis Willingham, Marisha Ray, and Sam Riegel reflect on the past, present, and future of the Dungeons & Dragons actual-play series heard ‘round the world in Paste's latest Digital Cover Story.
article by Casey Epstein-Gross
On December 19, 2012, voice actors Liam O’Brien (Gaara in Naruto) and Sam Riegel (Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) discussed their upcoming one-time foray into the world of tabletop roleplaying games on their podcast All Work No Play: O’Brien, who last played Dungeons & Dragons when he was a sophomore in high school, explains that, normally, D&D is experienced in the form of campaigns, which are “ongoing…serial dramas,” à la “Charles Dickens,” requiring players to “get together regularly” to continue the story.
Riegel, who had never played the game, responded in disbelief: “Really?! People do this?!” People do—but not 2012 Sam and Liam. They, alongside some friends and voice-acting colleagues, were going to play a one-off run with their friend Matthew Mercer (Levi Ackerman in Attack on Titan); just a one-and-done game, or as Riegel put it, a “self-contained short story.”
13 years, millions of viewers, multiple books, a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, a few sold-out stadium shows, a three-season Amazon Prime animated TV show (and another on the way), and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of gameplay later, it appears that their estimation may have been just a teensy bit off.
While that fateful first game (a birthday present from Mercer, who DM’d the game to O’Brien, who just wanted to recreate that good ole childhood nostalgia) took place in 2012, Critical Role did not become Critical Role proper until 2015—when Geek & Sundry’s Felicia Day, having heard about this gaggle of voice actors playing D&D together, invited the group to stream their campaign live on the company’s Twitch channel. That’s where Critical Role’s first campaign, Vox Machina, begins: in media res, three years into the friends’ home game. They had grown attached to the characters and world they had created, and didn’t want to leave it behind for the sake of a livestream that, in all likelihood, wouldn’t garner much attention in the first place.
Except, of course, it did: A few hundred viewers turned into more than 100,000, and then that soared into millions. (As of September 2024, the series’ first-ever stream has 23 million views on YouTube alone, and YouTube isn’t even the show’s primary platform.)
Eventually, Critical Role struck out on their own, forming an independent production company (Critical Role Productions LLC) and self-producing all their content. Next year, in 2025, the D&D actual-play livestream turned international phenomenon will be celebrating its official 10th anniversary. A decade might seem like a long time to spend every Thursday night rolling dice in front of a camera, but even with that milestone on the horizon, the eight friends at the heart of it all want everyone to know that Critical Role is just getting started.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am not, historically speaking, a D&D diehard myself. In fact, I came to Critical Role a severe skeptic, and only begrudgingly checked out the first episode of the crew’s second campaign, the Mighty Nein, six or so months ago, certain I’d watch an hour of it and never think about it again. I have since watched (or, often, listened to while in transit), about 480 hours of that campaign alone. In other words, it appears my estimation may have been just a teensy bit off as well.
I am far from the first to undergo such a transformation at the hands of Critical Role. Actually, I’m in very good company: Critical Role CEO Travis Willingham (Roy Mustang in Full Metal Alchemist), who is also the actor/mind/voice behind campaign characters like Grog, Fjord and Chetney, actually underwent a similar paradigm shift after O’Brien’s birthday game—which was Willingham’s first venture into tabletop roleplaying as well. “So much of my personal experience [with Dungeons & Dragons] was rooted in a pre-set bias about what it was, or that it was too nerdy or too cliche, or just not a thing that I wanted to be associated with,” he recalls. “And I was horribly, woefully wrong.”
Prior to that game, half of the eight main Critical Role founders had never touched Dungeons & Dragons before: while Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer had previously played with Taliesin Jaffe (The Flash/Barry Allen in various video games) and Marisha Ray (Margaret in Persona 4: Dancing All Night as well as the Creative Director of Critical Role, and also, adorably, Mercer’s now-wife), Liam O’Brien had only a cursory high-school experience with the game, and Sam Riegel, Travis Willingham and his wife, Laura Bailey (Abby in The Last of Us: Part II), all sat down at the table for the very first time that evening. Ashley Johnson (Ellie in The Last of Us franchise) joined the next game. None of them have wanted to get up since.
Critical Role’s astronomical success is, at once, completely mind-boggling and entirely understandable. Why would so many people spend hundreds of hours watching some nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons? I know I asked myself that when I first stumbled across their YouTube channel. Now, over 100 episodes into their second campaign later, I am intimately familiar with the answer. I’m sure there are many fans (or “Critters,” as they’re often called) who were drawn to the actual-play by D&D itself, but speaking as someone who wasn’t, I can say with relative certainty that Critical Role is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen before, and that is a good thing.
It’s an entirely new narrative medium that combines appeals to so many different sensibilities that it’s almost surprising it took this long for the format to take off. It’s the worldbuilding of J.R.R. Tolkien with the parasocial intimacy of Youtuber friend groups, the sheer chance and mercuriality of professional improv with the dramatic chops of life-long actors, the slow-burn of intricately written novels with the narrative agency of… well, nothing, actually. What Critical Role offers isn’t just an amalgamation of different draws, but an entirely new form of storytelling: one in which the story feels like it’s written in real time by the characters within it, in which the fictional world is actively being shaped by its inhabitants as it actively shapes them in turn.
“It’s odd to explain, but [the characters] do kind of have their own autonomy as time goes on,” says Ray. “I think that’s something that is really a gift with this medium, and with playing it through a Let’s Play: you can have that organic development, and these characters take on a life of their own.” Her Vox Machina character, Keyleth, ended up falling in love with O’Brien’s character Vax’ildan—and none of that was planned in the slightest. It was just the way the narrative, the dynamic, naturally developed. As a long-time sucker for well-written character growth, Critical Role is my veritable Holy Grail. There are no shoehorned developments, no sudden heel-turns, just the realistic slow-burn of humanity all the way down—and it’s a long way down too, considering the massive length of Critical Role campaigns.
Riegel believes this is one of the reasons that Critical Role resonates with audiences so much: “The world’s content is getting shorter and shorter, everything becoming more and more short-term. I think there’s a real desire for longer stories, more in-depth stories, more in-depth characters.” Critical Role offers precisely that.
But it also offers something else, something no other storytelling medium can: uncertainty. Matthew Mercer builds the sandbox he lets his players run around in, but once they’re inside, the only true authorial force is the roll of a die. Exandria, the vast world of Mercer’s creation, can be turned on a dime by an ill-timed bad roll, or a particularly fortuitous good one. “There are so many great plans that should have worked and really didn’t,” Riegel says, immediately conjuring up memories of the innumerable bizarre plans that went unimaginably awry over the course of the three main campaigns. “This is a world of chance. We don’t know what’s going to happen. When something goes right, it’s just as surprising as when it goes wrong.”
With the structure of the game being as it is, there’s no such thing as a second take, a do-over. There’s no reloading a save file like a player of a video game, no rewriting a decision like an author realizing a story isn’t going in the direction they wanted. No matter what happens, the narrative has to keep moving forwards, and compared to other storytelling mediums, that in and of itself is strikingly unique. While so much of modern media is preoccupied with constructing a perfect character arc, reaching a satisfying conclusion, Critical Role’s story doesn’t have that luxury. As Willingham puts it, “Whereas other media is scripted, with beats that are planned out to take you on a defined journey—not only do we not know what we’re doing, but we’re all just hanging out with each other at the table,” and that’s how the story develops.
“It’s not just that the characters have a lot of agency, although they do, and not just that they are being piloted by, essentially, different writers as they go, although they are,” Riegel says. “It’s that we’re making decisions on the fly and then… that’s it! That sticks! We could be playing a game one night, and we have to pee, so we just say something, just because we really gotta go pee, and then… that’s it! That’s what happens in the story for the rest of the whole campaign!”
“I think there’s a certain amount of authenticity that comes with it,” Ray agrees after a laugh. “We’re riding by the seat of our pants, so these choices that we make are genuine because we’re just… reacting in real time to what is happening around us. And then there’s always two stories happening at once: there’s [the fictional narrative of the campaign] and then there’s almost a meta narrative of us as friends, as Travis said, just hanging out. Sometimes I make choices just because I want to make Sam Riegel laugh.”
And there’s the other particularly unique facet of Critical Role’s appeal: In addition to watching this fascinating Game of Thrones-style narrative that writes itself in real time, you’re also watching a friend group of eight intensely likable professional actors cracking each other up by pulling from a seemingly bottomless well of dick jokes—dick jokes that, in turn, get woven into the fabric of Mercer’s extensive narrative tapestry. Critical Role is steeped in the core friendship of its founders so thoroughly that it’s baked into the foundation of every moment; it’s an intensely collaborative process.
“That’s really what the show is,” Willingham says. “Showing people what friends can do when they get together with this kind of a format and some really vivid imaginations… We’re all such different people, personalities; I think one of the biggest feathers in our cap is that we were not cast. Like, we weren’t put together, you know? It wasn’t like ‘oh, let’s make sure we cover different bases, we’ll get the guy that plays a lot of sports [referring to himself] with the goth king [almost certainly referring to Jaffe].’ We just have immense love for each other as players and as people, and it’s this very rare lightning-in-a-bottle feeling. We’re here to make each other laugh, and we’re here to surprise each other, to catch each other off-guard, and that’s where the magic lies.”
This was evident even when speaking with the trio of Riegel, Ray and Willingham—who are, as Riegel jokes, by far the most important (they’re the “critical” of Critical Role, he quips, with the other five members being the “role”). Our conversation, not unlike those that make up Critical Role’s beloved Thursday night streams, not infrequently dissolves into extended bits and gags, for the sole purpose of, again, making each other laugh. (“It’s crazy that we’re approaching the 10-year anniversary,” Riegel says, “and we’re all in our mid-20s.” After a round of laughter, this naturally prompts an extended tangent about ritualistic sacrifice: As it turns out, the company’s new streaming service, Beacon, is actually “our phylactery,” says Willingham, referring to a D&D construct that, essentially, allows mages to live forever: “We are digital succubi.” So that’s what they mean when they say they’re just getting started—it’s a secret reference to their newfound immortality.)
Plain and simple, talking to them is just fun, and so is watching Critical Role. It’s hard not to get sucked into the series’ charm (perhaps Willingham has a point about the whole succubi thing)—simply put, people love watching friends be friends, and the cast of Critical Role are pretty great ones. “It’s why people used to like boy bands,” Riegel cracks. “Except, we’re now a boy band, and there’s girls, and… and I’m the bad boy.” (After teasing him for having the gall to call himself a bad boy, Willingham and Ray get in on the bit: “He’s got frosted tips and a bandana,” Willingham jokes. “He’s dangerous. He’s got a checkered past.” Ray adds: “He’s even got piercings.” Sometimes, I pipe in, he even wears a leather jacket.)
This dynamic is often genuinely wonderful, the close relationship between the Critical Role crew and their fanbase affirmed at the end of every episode as Matthew looks warmly at the camera and tells the audience: “We love you very much.” But this can also be a double-edged sword. Parasociality is a very real issue for all celebrities in the digital age (just look at Chappell Roan’s recent struggles), but Critical Role’s format lends itself to an even more intense version than most: fans watch the cast sit around a table, as themselves, to hang out with their real-life best friends for hours at a time. The specter of parasociality was especially present during and even after the pandemic, Ray says. “So many people were trapped at home, not seeing their friends or families, so we kind of ended up being almost like a surrogate for many people. Overall, I think that was a very great thing, and I’m so glad we were this regular, reliable source where every Thursday you could count on us coming on in your living room. But there are, of course, going to be challenges around that.”
“There can be an ownership factor that we have to grapple with, especially in terms of characters—and even ourselves as people—doing things that don’t align with the narratives in people’s heads,” Ray continues. “But it’s also a reminder that, once again, this is still our home game at the end of the day that we just kind of turned a camera on during, and we’re going to do what we’re going to do, for better or for worse.”
Although the audience itself has only grown in number and fervor since the stream’s humble beginnings, the cast does think dealing with the parasociality has gotten easier over time. “In the beginning there was a steep learning curve for all of us,” Willingham says. “The rise in success, in notoriety, especially online and on social media, certainly had its lessons for how we can interact better with our audience and with the community, but also how we can protect ourselves too. In the early, early years, we were certainly much more out there [online, interacting with fans], almost to a little bit of a detriment. Over time, we developed healthier habits in how we engaged digitally with everybody, and I think that was good for us, especially since a lot of us [such as Riegel, O’Brien, and Willingham and Bailey] are parents, and we have children now. Balance is something we constantly have to consider. We’re all so driven and so passionate about these stories that we just want to throw our entire selves into every single hour that we can, and that’s why it’s so important to be able to check in with each other and make sure everybody’s good, that there’s a healthy balance being maintained. But it’s always an ongoing conversation.”
But balance can be hard. “We, pretty much all of us, eat, sleep, and breathe Critical Role in some form or fashion,” Ray says. (Who needs sleep? Not Marisha Ray, apparently: “Eh… sleep is relative”). Critical Role is eight full-time jobs, and then some—as of 2021, the company had over 40 people in its employ, a number that surely has only increased from there. “We count ourselves lucky every day, because while so much of this is hard work and dedication, there’s a lot of luck in there as well,” Ray smiles. “We try not to take it for granted. I think that’s why we all kind of have this driving force to make the most of it while we can—while people still, for some reason, love watching us play D&D every Thursday night.”
And people love watching them play. In 2019, Critical Role fans made Kickstarter history and broke the site’s record for the most-funded TV or film project ever, pledging over $11.38 million toward a fully animated adaptation of the Vox Machina campaign. The Kickstarter’s initial aim, which seemed lofty to the members of Critical Role at the time, was to raise $750,000 to fund the production of a single 20-minute Vox Machina animated special. That goal was surpassed in under an hour.
Soon after, Amazon Prime ordered two full-length seasons—24 episodes, which is 14 more than even the updated Kickstarter campaign financed—of the Titmouse-animated series that has become The Legend of Vox Machina. For Critical Role, it became suddenly apparent that the sky itself was the limit—that, really, the sky itself was just the beginning.
“We are also constantly evaluating ourselves, like, how can we push the medium?” Willingham says. “What are some things we haven’t done before? What would excite our audience? What excites us as players, and as fans of this space?” He additionally teases some future long-term plans that “everybody is going to be extremely excited by,” calling it “something that our fans have never, ever seen before.”
The distant future aside, the next few months already hold exciting developments for Critical Role: the October 3 release of the third season of The Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon Prime is hardly a week away, and the first season of Amazon Prime’s animated series of the Mighty Nein campaign is on track for next year (“unless bad things happen,” Riegel says only a little ominously). Meanwhile, the third campaign, Bells Hells, is currently hurtling towards a dramatic climax that will likely have ramifications not only for its characters but all of Exandria—including for the main characters of the previous two campaigns, Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein. Ray confirms that it feels like a “big shake-up for Exandria” is en route, and that recent developments in the storyline have resulted in the crew “newly imagining these three campaigns as their own little trilogy.” And due to the scheduling of the two animated series and the third campaign, the cast of Critical Role is essentially working simultaneously on all three parts of this trilogy at once. To quote Willingham: “It gets a little screwy.” (“Or ‘tricksy,’ as Marisha would say,” Riegel adds, grinning at Ray.)
“Because Matthew has ended up orchestrating Campaign Three to be the climax of all three campaigns, where it’s all intertwining and intermelding,” Riegel says, “We’ll sometimes play a Campaign Three game and learn something brand new as characters that makes us have to immediately turn around the next morning and call the writers of [Amazon Prime’s] Vox Machina or Mighty Nein to be like, ‘Hey guys, we actually have to change something? We just learned that this thing we thought about the gods was not true, so we have to actually go back and rewrite this part before we ship it to get animated…’” Ray laughs, saying she actually had that exact conversation earlier that morning.
“We’re making iterative content based on a source material that is still being created in real time, and that is wild,” Ray says. (“And the source material is your husband, and he won’t talk about it with you,” Sam deadpans to Ray, who jokingly grumbles about Mercer’s frustrating refusal to tell her anything that would ruin the element of surprise. The eternal curse of dating a DM…)
One of the benefits of this odd arrangement, though, is that it allows for the series to foreshadow events that no one, at the time of the source campaign, had ever even considered. “There might be things we want to try and set up earlier in Exandria by working them into the first series,” Willingham says. “We have fun figuring out what those seeds are. How do we plant them? How can we keep our audience guessing?” He doesn’t want the animated series to read like “play-by-play recountings” of events fans have already seen; “We want to make it fresh and interesting for those that were with us from 2015-2018, and then also tee up a world that is even more exciting when we consider everything that has happened since [the original campaign] as well.”
He adds that an “unusual byproduct” of starting production on the animated series is that the consequences of character actions in-game began to feel more significant, often in a bit of a daunting way: “There started to become this sense of, like, ‘Oh, we need to do something cool’ or ‘I don’t want to mess it up,’ or ‘I don’t want to put us in too precarious of a situation for the other characters.’” Pressing that big red button feels scarier when there’s the weight of not only an audience (and a relatively judgmental one, at that) but an entire television series’ future resting on every decision made. That kind of fear can be paralyzing, which is why the Critical Role cast have had to learn to shut it out in favor of just playing the game the way they want to, the way they would back in 2013, at their home games. “Even if you make a bold choice and you roll a one and it goes horribly wrong, that can sometimes be more fun than if you succeed,” Willingham says. “We have to remind ourselves sometimes that even though there is this amazing group of Critters watching in the audience, it doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect about what we’re doing.”
“And we are still not perfect,” Riegel says. “We kind of still suck. It’s great.”
Overall, however, it hasn’t affected gameplay as much as one might think; the cast are certainly aware of the pressure, but when it comes down to it, they’re still the same people who sat down at a dining room table for Liam’s birthday twelve years ago. “We’re too goofy,” Willingham laughs. “Nothing’s going to change the way that we play our game.” Riegel adds: “We’ve always envisioned these characters in our minds as we play, so it almost feels like a natural segue to go from our imaginations to cartoon screens.”
While that might not be one of them, there are a lot of complications involved in adapting any source material into a TV show, and the massive length (with each campaign clocking in well over 400 hours) and D&D-specific mechanics of Critical Role make for even more of a challenge than most. Take the central role of magic in Dungeons & Dragons, for example: there are so many crucial moments throughout the campaign that revolve around it, and yet, what actually is its material form? A particularly climactic incident towards the end of the first campaign involves the use of a high-level casting of the spell “Counterspell,” which, as Ray says, “is such a weird, intangible concept. What does that even look like? There are so many forms of magic in Dungeons & Dragons, so trying to map them out such that their manifestations look different is something that’s absolutely discussed a lot—particularly with the Mighty Nein, because [that party] has even more spellcasters.”
That’s far from the only difference between Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein. Whereas the former campaign begins with its central heroes already knowing each other and setting off to fight evil, the latter spends many of its first hours chronicling the tales of a group of weirdos who don’t particularly like, let alone trust, one another and are only bonded together by their collective distaste for authority. The narrative structure of the campaign is different as well, with the Mighty Nein story being much more “sandbox” style, driven by the characters’ desires (or, often, aimless wandering) more than any overarching narrative, which makes it that much harder to translate into a medium as necessarily streamlined and linear as television.
“We had to crack out more than just our single whiteboard this time,” Willingham says. “The Mighty Nein campaign spanned continents, created new magic sets, and had, really, a much more complex and socioeconomically driven storyline. We had to figure out what we wanted to hit in those first two seasons, how we wanted to approach it, and how it would make sense to an audience. Because, even as players, at times, the sandbox feel of the Mighty Nein could feel confusing, like we didn’t quite know where we were going to go or where we needed to go. For the television series, it’s our job as producers and directors to make sure that we are giving a singular focus about what’s threatening to our characters, what they want, and what’s getting in the way of them achieving those things.”
That being said, however, Willingham makes sure to clarify that it will definitely “still be the Mighty Nein story.” (This one’s for you, Twitter: “I think in some of our previous commentary around it, we had said it’s a brand new story or something, and that might have been the wrong choice of words!” Yes, Critters, they saw your collective freak-out last month; don’t worry, that phrasing was hyperbolic. The show will still be the Mighty Nein you know and love!) “There’s just a new approach,” he continues. “A new approach to how the characters come together, how we hit the story beats. It’s going to be everything that everybody wants, but there will be some big changes. We started with a group of heroes in a tavern in the Legend of Vox Machina, and we will not be repeating that for the Mighty Nein… It’s been an iterative process, but one that we’ve loved, and while our fans might be surprised at first, we know that it’ll be something they love.”
And apparently, Critical Role has an extensive future planned for the small screen, even apart from the main three campaigns. Riegel talks about exploring “more film and television opportunities that don’t necessarily involve projects that are in Exandria.” This isn’t just a pipe dream, but a future that, while distant, is already well on its way to realization. Sam reveals that Critical Role is “already developing shows that are completely different IPs: some original, some from really cool creators. A couple of things are adjacent to Exandria, and then there’s a few things that are totally different in every way, shape and form.”
The dream, though, would be a video game, which “all of us are hungry to make,” Willingham says. It makes sense, considering so many of them got their start in voicing video game characters, and are so enmeshed with that world. “We’re constantly developing and talking with future potential partners about that as well.”
Evidently, the company has, by this point, expanded far beyond their main Exandrian campaigns. As made evident by the July launch of their streaming service Beacon (a move that allows the company to maintain further creative control instead of relying on third-party platforms), Critical Role is now an umbrella for a myriad of properties, series, and worlds: in addition to numerous one-shots, Critical Role and its production banner, Metapigeon, have created and/or enveloped numerous roleplaying-focused miniseries such as family-friendly campaign The Re-Slayer’s Take, ex-Rooster Teeth podcast Tales from the Stinky Dragon, the space-western epic Midst, and the investigative horror series Candela Obscura, a series that features Critical Role’s original TTRPG system of the same name, published by the company’s newly founded publishing label, Darrington Press. Candela Obscura was their first official self-developed system, but won’t be their last: the long-awaited, sprawling system Daggerheart, which is intended to be a peer to D&D itself.
Fans have long speculated about the seismic shifts the release of Daggerheart might have on the Critical Role empire, with some theorizing that the company might pivot away from D&D entirely. That is, perhaps, a bit dramatic. “You will for sure be seeing Daggerheart played by the Critical Role crew, but that certainly does not mean that we are going to be putting our Players Handbooks on the shelves,” Ray reassures.
That’s not to say, however, that no changes are in store for Critical Role now that it’s approaching the tenth year of its tenure—but they’re less changes than they are expansions. “We do have the desire to mix it up,” Ray says, “and that’s why we brought in Robbie Daymond [whose character Dorian Storm has become a permanent fixture of the third campaign]. We really want to bring in more fresh blood.” (Willingham: “And when Marisha says fresh blood, she means ritualistic sacrifice.”) She continues: “And whenever you add anything to this big cauldron, this chemistry we have going on, it’s going to alter it in some way, shape, or form, and that’s also very refreshing—to take this world that we have known for so long and breathed so deeply, and have someone come in with a fresh set of eyes.”
Getting burnt out on a passion project after it morphs into a responsibility is a tale as old as time, but a decade later, Critical Role is still going strong, in part because of its willingness to shake things up—but also simply because its founders just love what they do, almost as much as they love each other.
“I mean, the catalyst of it all is the brilliance of Matthew Mercer,” Willingham says. “I think if the setting had somehow become stale or stagnant, then we might be in trouble. But every time we go to sit at the table, Matthew has prepared a gourmet meal of imagery and location and new characters—like, we often forget that we’re on camera. We have to remind ourselves to close our mouths, stop chewing, don’t pick our noses, because it’s really hard not to just watch Matthew do his thing and be in awe of the tale that he is spinning. We’re all in a gravitational pull around him, and every once in a while we collide, and that’s where the good stuff happens.”
“It helps that we spend time as friends outside of Critical Role, and that keeps things fresh,” Riegel says. “And we, just… sort of all support each other’s weird ideas? So whatever anyone wants to do, we sort of just…do! That’s why we make all these weird shows, do all these weird promos, make all these weird ads.”
Of the campaigns themselves, Willingham adds, “I mean, if playing a 400-year-old gnome [Willingham’s current character, Chetney], a demon from the Hells [Riegel’s current character, Braius], or an undead creepy lady [Ray’s character, Laudna] is not enough to make it super interesting, then certainly our choices will be… I would say, also, that we are full of stories, and even as we’re playing the current campaign, it would be dishonest to say that, as players, we aren’t constantly thinking of new characters or new storylines we want to try.” Even after the third campaign concludes, there’s still so much more that the cast wants to explore in the future—in other words: don’t worry, Critters.
There is a real desire to expand the Critical Role IP beyond just the names of Riegel, Willingham, and Ray (the “critical”) and Mercer, Bailey, O’Brien, Johnson, and Jaffe (the “role”). As Ray says: “The conundrum that we run into from time to time is that Critical Role is this group of eight people. Those two have become synonymous. So how do you grow what the definition of Critical Role is beyond the original eight founders?”
That’s the mindset that has prompted Critical Role’s ever-growing accumulation of new content, new players, and new stories. “We want to continue to honor that,” Ray says, “and to bring in more people, and tell stories from other perspectives.” This might mean opening the doors to not only other players, but other Dungeon Masters and other game systems (both from Darrington Press and beyond) as well. “Even though we are, as Sam said, youthful mid-twenty-somethings,” Ray laughs, “We won’t be able to do this forever.” (Willingham makes a face at this). “So a lot of what we want to do is bring in fresh faces, fresh perspectives, and push the boundaries of what Critical Role can mean to our audience.”
But part of the goal is also to expand the bounds of that audience—and not because the company just wants more viewership revenue. That was never Critical Role’s raison d’être. As Willingham puts it, what Critical Role really wants is to “see how much more of a mainstream audience might be untapped”—not just for their series, their shows, but “for the stories and the interaction that goes on when you sit down at a table and roll dice with friends.” In other words: for D&D and TTRPGs in general, for the concept of joint storytelling (story-making) as a genuine platonic love language. And despite the modern renaissance of D&D in popular culture (which Critical Role served a, well, critical role in bringing about), “there is still a lot of work to be done in showing that there is a seat at the table for everybody,” from the jock to the goth kid.
“We’re always going to be trying to push the envelope and show that this can have appeal for all sorts of people. That’s what we task ourselves with,” Willingham continues. “It’s a lofty goal. But, you know, if you’re not aiming high, I don’t know what you’re doing.”
