Critical Role, Or: How I Learned To Stop Living and Start Loving D&D
Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2019 7:09 am
I guess this could go under either Movies/TV or Games, but I'll put it here.
My only memory of Dungeons and Dragons was that a friend of mine in grade-school played. I joined him for one session, and when my parents found out they freaked because this was the height of the Satanic Panic and they were fooled like most gullible Christians into believing a nerdy game involving warriors and dragons was going to turn a kid into an occult-loving satanist, or something. Somehow, my playing video game RPGs, which were all based on D&D, completely escaped their notice.
Fast-forward 23 years later and I'm messing around on YouTube, and somehow I'm getting recommended some D&D stuff. I click and start watching some people play their first games. It's kinda fun and entertaining, so I click on some other D&D videos. Next I'm watching a guy teaching high school students how to play it and DMing for them. It's equal parts awkward, hilarious, but still very entertaining. I finish that, and then I discover Critical Role...
I've yet to decide if this was the greatest or worst discovery of my life.
Critical Role is a group of professional voice actors (including Ellie from The Last of Us) playing D&D. Each episode is about 3 hours long. There are currently about 175 episodes. I've spent the last 3-4 days doing little but watching it... and I'm only 11 episodes in. It's ridiculously entertaining, but I'm not insane enough to actually recommend this to anyone... but in case I disappear for the next several months and don't emerge until my hair's down to my ass with a beard down to my nuts and my whole body smelling of stale Doritos and Root Beer... you'll know where I've been.
With that out of the way, I think what I'm loving about this is that it combines so many different elements. One the one level, it's fantasy storytelling of the kind I loved as a kid with my heavy diet of novels by Tolkien and many others. On another level, it's gaming, taking everything I love about video game RPGs and making it even more complex because the options are only limited by how you can imaginatively use what skills, spells, items, weapons, etc. you have. On another level, it's acting and improvisation, people getting into characters and becoming them, so much so that you can really tell they're nervous at the prospect of characters dying during big battles, which can easily happen with bad planning or a day/night of bad dice rolling. At the end of the day, though, I can't remember the last time I've laughed this much, or been this dramatically riveted. There's a real element of danger here when you know so much comes down to chance and improvisation, and that very bad things happening is a real possibility.
Part of me regrets that it took me this long to discover D&D. What I wouldn't give to have gotten into this as a kid, and I'm rather pissed that my gullible parents that I couldn't. Of course, it's never too late, and I know there are ways to play online or find local people, and I may try it out. But for now I'm happy just watching and learning and probably raving about it into this message board void.
My only memory of Dungeons and Dragons was that a friend of mine in grade-school played. I joined him for one session, and when my parents found out they freaked because this was the height of the Satanic Panic and they were fooled like most gullible Christians into believing a nerdy game involving warriors and dragons was going to turn a kid into an occult-loving satanist, or something. Somehow, my playing video game RPGs, which were all based on D&D, completely escaped their notice.
Fast-forward 23 years later and I'm messing around on YouTube, and somehow I'm getting recommended some D&D stuff. I click and start watching some people play their first games. It's kinda fun and entertaining, so I click on some other D&D videos. Next I'm watching a guy teaching high school students how to play it and DMing for them. It's equal parts awkward, hilarious, but still very entertaining. I finish that, and then I discover Critical Role...
I've yet to decide if this was the greatest or worst discovery of my life.
Critical Role is a group of professional voice actors (including Ellie from The Last of Us) playing D&D. Each episode is about 3 hours long. There are currently about 175 episodes. I've spent the last 3-4 days doing little but watching it... and I'm only 11 episodes in. It's ridiculously entertaining, but I'm not insane enough to actually recommend this to anyone... but in case I disappear for the next several months and don't emerge until my hair's down to my ass with a beard down to my nuts and my whole body smelling of stale Doritos and Root Beer... you'll know where I've been.
With that out of the way, I think what I'm loving about this is that it combines so many different elements. One the one level, it's fantasy storytelling of the kind I loved as a kid with my heavy diet of novels by Tolkien and many others. On another level, it's gaming, taking everything I love about video game RPGs and making it even more complex because the options are only limited by how you can imaginatively use what skills, spells, items, weapons, etc. you have. On another level, it's acting and improvisation, people getting into characters and becoming them, so much so that you can really tell they're nervous at the prospect of characters dying during big battles, which can easily happen with bad planning or a day/night of bad dice rolling. At the end of the day, though, I can't remember the last time I've laughed this much, or been this dramatically riveted. There's a real element of danger here when you know so much comes down to chance and improvisation, and that very bad things happening is a real possibility.
Part of me regrets that it took me this long to discover D&D. What I wouldn't give to have gotten into this as a kid, and I'm rather pissed that my gullible parents that I couldn't. Of course, it's never too late, and I know there are ways to play online or find local people, and I may try it out. But for now I'm happy just watching and learning and probably raving about it into this message board void.