And here we are again with people insisting Critical Role is scripted. This says less about Critical Role and more about the style and skill sets of the people making the claim. The truth is what happens at the Critical Role table can happen without any scripting and in all honesty Critical Role is a pretty typical Dungeons & Dragons game in its nuts and bolts.
I guess I better go and argue why that’s the case.
**This contains spoilers for Season 3 Episode 33.**
What triggers this post?
A Critical Role session happened and two characters are currently dead. This happened in a fight that looked very difficult to win. This kicked off a few things.
People insisting Critical Role is scripted.
People are saying they have been traumatised (in the continual vein of trivialising words on the internet).
We, of course, have people making death threats.
Where I am coming from?
I want to make this clear before I start because this is one of those posts that can easily be dismissed as ‘a hater would say that’ or ‘a deluded fan would believe that’.
I happen to think I have a very balanced view of what Critical Role is.
Am I fan of Critical Role? Yes. I’ve been watching since mid-2015 pretty religiously. I did back-off lately and I’ve experienced it on a more leisurely schedule using the podcast. I have had a few long road and camping trips recently that has allowed me to catch up.
At the same time, I’ve always said that our role-playing campaigns at our table are better than Critical Role because they work for us better. The reason I say this is because Critical Role is doing nothing special once you accept you’re not a voice actor and there are other techniques to compensate for not being one (shift the focus from actor to author). Hell, I believe so much in this I started my series of author-focused play articles on my blog
But I can see from my gaming experience how what you see on Critical Role is not scripted.
It’s quite traditional
From a certain perspective, Critical Role is a very traditional Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The unique aspects of it are the fact the players are voice actors and the production now has a lot of resources behind it. If we take those things out of the equation for a moment what are we left with?
First, it’s a very high prep and DM-delivered game:
A high prep game. The campaign is highly prepared. It’s not a low-prep game. They’ve even altered the schedule of proceedings because of how much time is involved. Yes, some of the high production prep is accounted for by them having production staff but the more traditional stuff that every DM does is definitely in a traditional, high prep realm and done mostly by Matt.
A DM-delivered game. A Critical Role campaign isn’t a highly autocratic experience with the DM being God, but it is a very DM-focused method of delivery. The players are waiting to see what the DM’s plot is. The players are waiting to see what the DM does with the character backgrounds they have provided. I tend to think the well-acted scenes hide what might be a smaller amount of active player authorship in terms of deciding what the true, deep story is. That sits mostly on the DM side albeit he has taken in the character backgrounds as a foundation.
Second, behind the great acting and the excellent descriptive abilities is a lot of traditional decisions:
Traditional skill use. Skill use is terrible in Critical Role. So many rolls are called for which should just be assumed success. Then you have failures being described in a way that makes the characters out as extremely incompetent. It’s a terrible combination and it happens all the time. There is a reason Critical Role has a running meme about the characters hating doors because half-giant barbarians with prodigal strength kept failing to bash down normal inn doors. They never set stakes properly on skill rolls ever.
Long combats. They have long, quite tactical combats. Yes, they are surrounded by epic Dwarven Forged environments, grand descriptions and whatever else but the fights do take hours and the key ones can take whole 4-hour sessions. This is all fine. I love the long, big dramatic fights in Critical Role but let’s not mistake what they actually are. Good old, traditional Dungeons & Dragons miniature battles.
Traditional player choices. Not only do players often make quite traditional choices when one of them maybe tried to push the boundaries they get a bit of a slap down. The best meme is born from when Marisha Ray decided her 15+ level Druid could swan dive off a cliff into the sea. Okay, it was a fantasy high epic cliff but a 15+ level character is a ludicrously high-level character. She should have been able to swan dive off that cliff. Yet she was told she’d almost die and one comedy moment led to another.
They goof around a lot to the extent that 40-80% of any particular session can be very random at best or total and complete goofing off or procrastinating over plans. If the game was scripted all this would not exist.
This is my argument, that behind all the fantastic elements that come from the skill set of the players as dramatic actors, the Dungeons & Dragons elements can be very traditional and some of the elements aren’t even in the realm of what has become known as best practice.
That’s all fine, but it contributes to the argument it’s not scripted and they’re just having a fun, standard and more often than you’d think, dysfunctional, D&D game that works for them. Even if some of their decisions would not work well for me.
It’s not scripted
What you see on Critical Role is not scripted. It’s not scripted because we have dramatic moments in our game…but for one big difference. When the non-scripted stuff comes along that is infused with intense drama we’re not as good at acting it out. Beyond that, it’s easy to see how this comes about and the last thing that’s happening is some sort of script they’ve memorised like a TV show.
First, they are actors who deliver on a few skills.
The players can actually act which means when dramatic moments come along, however frequent or not, they are sincerely and amazingly acted. The fact the scenes come along is nothing that special, the problem is when they come along we’re not actors! So Critical Role makes the scenes any gaming group can see happening much better to the extent they can seem to be something not normal. They just deliver them better.
The players are great at processing dramatic text as the cast has day jobs that involve seeing scripts, memorising lines and then delivering them. This does not mean that’s what they are doing, but it creates a skill that is transferable. If I know a scene is likely to happen in our games I might think about what I want to say or how it might play out ahead of time. Imagine if you’re doing that and the people involved have how scripts are constructed, how the lines are delivered and the veritable beats of such drama in their very DNA and they are prone to not forgetting what they imagine? Yeah, it means what comes out of their mouths naturally differs from what comes out of mine or yours. Basically, they have a better skill set at speaking like dramatic characters rather than normal folks.
The players can crazily improvise; as a result, they can combine the above two skills and have a much better chance of succeeding on the spot without preparation or even knowing they are coming. They can also improvise building up to key moments in scenes in the game on the spot without lots of ridiculous preparation.
It’s these skills that allow the game, despite all the standard elements, the random burps and silly jokes to sound like it’s coming from a dramatic script even though that script does not exist. This doesn’t mean some things aren’t talked about in advance but that’s just players talking about stuff. Don’t we all do that? It’s not scripting for a couple of players to chat ahead of the game and say we really should deal with issue X this session as it’s been a while.
Gaming groups do that all the time.
And, Finally…
So, that’s it, Critical Role is not scripted. It is a combination of unique skills and an approach to a quite traditional game that results in a particular style of output. This makes sense, as running and playing role-playing games is definitely a practice. The practice of a wide range of skills and the pattern of those skills and the desires of the participants means the output is different at every table.
It’s just that, as they say on Taken, they are people with a ‘very particular set of skills’ and those skills mean they don’t need scripts.