I sense a journey I’ve been on since the second half of 2015 is coming to an end. That journey is being someone who watches Critical Role. It’s been a good run. Seven years watching a Dungeons & Dragons stream that involves weekly 3 – 5 hour episodes is pretty crazy.
This is also a story of how someone’s fandom ends.
How I discovered it
I can thank Wil Wheaton, Laura Bailey and Geek & Sundry for discovering Critical Role.
The first actual play stream I discovered and watched was Titan’s Grave. You can still watch it as it’s on the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel. It’s an actual play that took a more edited approach to proceedings rather than just turning the cameras on and airing the raw footage live.
That might have been the end of my streamed actual play flirtations if it wasn’t for the fact Laura Bailey was one of the players and I followed her to Critical Role. I started watching Critical Role and even hit the backlog, as there weren’t as many back then since it only started in March 2015 and this was circa July / August.
The bigger question is probably why I got hooked?
Why I got hooked
When you read about why people started watching Critical Role it’s easy to spot a trend. It seems there is a core of people who started watching it when going through a challenging or traumatic period in their lives. How many is hard to say because the only people likely to talk about it are people who have something meaningful to say.
The truth is I was one of them.
No offence to the magnetism of Laura Bailey, I would not have started watching Critical Role if it wasn’t for the fact I was abruptly separated from my wife of twenty years at the end of June 2015. I fell deeply into two experiences shortly after.
- Elite Dangerous to the point of taking part in a months-long shared expedition to the other side of the realistically modelled Milky Way galaxy
- Critical Role to the extent I’d dedicate myself to watching people play Dungeons & Dragons for 3 – 5 hours every week.
On the surface, these two things don’t seem related, but I think they are. They both allowed me to engage with a group of people at a distance and just lose myself in the experience of something over a long period of time without leaving my house.
I’m not obsessed
I liked to pretend I wasn’t obsessed with Critical Role. It was just like watching a TV series I liked, right? I didn’t create content surrounding it. I wasn’t cosplaying characters from it. I wasn’t discussing the show with other people. I wasn’t part of the community.
I was probably still a bit obsessed or maybe a better word is dedicated.
I’d periodically get up at 0300 in the morning to watch it live. At first, this was because I was doing weird things post-divorce like sometimes not bothering to go to bed and sleeping on the sofa. Then it became about seeing the key, dramatic episodes as they happened. The final phase was sometimes I’d just wake and couldn’t get back to sleep so why not? Whatever the reason, waking up at 0300 to watch a circa four-hour show is hard to describe as anything but dedication.
Ironically, this sounds a lot less extreme than it did back then, as now people regularly stay up until 1-2 in the morning to watch the latest Disney+ shows as they drop.
Peak dedication was travelling to the US in peak season to see the show live. Yes, I actually travelled to the US when flights cost double their normal amount to watch people play Dungeons & Dragons live. I have no problem with that. It was great. I went via Florida so there was time before and after the event to relax in the pool and visit the Universal theme parks (all praise the annual pass). I got to sample Gencon. I didn’t just watch a live Dungeons & Dragons game.
So, yeah, I’m prepared to admit, while I’ll defend to this day that I wasn’t obsessed, I’ll happily accept I was pretty dedicated.
Going cold turkey
I think there have been a number of things that have marked the slow tapering off of my journey with Critical Role.
I no longer need it. It’s possible I ceased to need what Critical Role was giving me a long time ago. This is maybe the disadvantage of something you find that serves a need during a more challenging part of your life. Once that challenge is gone the need for things you accumulated during that period wanes as well, possibly becoming a bit hollow? To Critical Role’s credit, it survived me not needing it for a long while and continued to be interesting.
Peak Critical Role. The trip to see the live show was glorious and great but it was certainly peak Critical Role. I think I subconsciously knew at the time this was some capstone to the experience. Something I wanted to do and once I got to do it there was a small sense of ‘and now I am done’. After that, it was a slow downward slide. I think the only thing that caused it to extend for another two years was Covid and seeing out the end of campaign two.
The campaign transition. I think the transition from campaign two to campaign three did me in. This is a combination of feeling campaign two ‘did a Game of Thrones’. They certainly chose to end it sooner rather than later to push forward with a new structure that placed less pressure on Matt Mercer. It did impact one character arc specifically, which was unfortunate as it was the most interesting one. You can combine that with me being less enamoured with campaign three’s character slate.
It’s got competition. The content landscape has changed dramatically over the course of my seven-year run with Critical Role. There is more streaming competition. Not from other actual plays as no other actual play has managed to appeal to me, but from the ever-increasing number of TV shows available through an ever-increasing number of streaming options. This means Friday is sometimes taken up with other things and this has undoubtedly reduced the appeal of Critical Role as a way to spend that time.
Exandria Unlimited. The extension of Critical Role into a multi-GM and campaign experience has made it less interesting. The extra shows make sense. I don’t necessarily feel the need to watch them. So why is it a factor? It’s hard to say. I watched Critical Role because it was a simple window into the game of a likeable group of people. I think Critical Role the brand is on a long journey to remove the primacy of that as the core experience. All the changes make perfect sense and I wish them every success. It does change the experience.
The Legend of Vox Machina. Once you get passed the first two episodes (no idea what they were thinking there) the animated series is brilliant. It’s so brilliant I came to the conclusion it’s the best way to experience Critical Role. Let’s face it, it was the distilled good bits without having to experience it as months and years of 3 – 5 hour episodes with a lot of general play. The animated series was like an alternate play through in which the campaign wasn’t a sprawling, traditional Dungeons & Dragons campaign but a Fate campaign played with high narrative velocity. The Critical Role actual play was a bit harder to watch after that.
As you can see it’s not one defining moment involving me proclaiming in anger that I’m done. It’s just something that waned in importance as it and my life has changed. In truth, this is how most things you’re dedicated to end and there is nothing to be angry about, no sense of betrayal or being left behind.
Does nothing truly die?
Does this mean I’m done with Critical Role completely? I’m four episodes behind now. There is literally no way I’m trying to watch circa 16-hours of material in an attempt to get back on track. As something I watch every week, it’s done.
It’s possible what might happen is I change how I engage with it.
I will give some of the shorter-run specials a go to see if they are interesting, the first one was utter garbage. I will probably choose to listen to those in the podcast format while I am driving or doing something else at a time convenient to me rather than being a bit closer to ‘keeping current’.
I’ll admit I’ve done this with Exandria Unlimited: Calamity while driving and camping literally this weekend and, despite scheduling this very post for this weekend, that proved to be absolutely fantastic. A Critical Role show with narrative velocity who would have thought it?
So yeah, it’s not like I’ll never engage with it again, but the full-on, aeons long and unfocused campaigns are undoubtedly over.
And, Finally…
When you’re a fan of something, even a dedicated one, there sometimes comes a time when that dedication wanes. This is a good thing. You can celebrate the time in which it was a part of your life and then move on. You enjoyed it while you enjoyed it. It served a purpose in your life until it didn’t.
There is no point in being wracked by anger or loss. Embrace the change that has come along that changes the landscape. It helps that I don’t attach my sense of identity to the things I am interested in but more to the outcomes of those things and sometimes you no longer need the outcomes.