Critical Role Campaign One

After the Raven Queen knows how many hours, I've finished the first campaign of Critical Role, probably the most popular D&D game podcast/streaming show.

I've been keeping up with campaign two as it's been going, meaning that I'm fully caught up on the game.

It's pretty interesting to see how it evolved over time. I remember in early episodes feeling that it was very mechanical, involving a ton of combat that wasn't terribly interesting to listen to, but I think the special juice of having people watching the game really encouraged the players to take their characters seriously and make for a compelling story experience.

It certainly doesn't hurt that the folks at Critical Role are a bunch of accomplished voice actors, and if you give actors big emotions to play, it's like catnip (believe me, most of my friends are actors.)

I'm a story-minded person in general, and RPGs are of course the game genre most concerned with storytelling, which is probably why you might notice that most of my posts here are about story or world-building. Certainly, the mechanics of a game can be a fun puzzle or challenge of skill, but to me, the reward is in seeing the story progress - whether it's the culmination of some epic battle against the forces of evil or some small personal struggle to defeat one's inner demons. (And of course, the fantasy genre, which is the most popular one for RPGs, often has a person's inner demons turn out to be literal demons that might destroy the world.)

I think that RPGs, particularly the player-driven tabletop variety (though if done well, digital RPGs can do this too,) blend the interactivity of a game with an emotional connection one expects out of other media like books, movies, or television. I don't want to get into spoiler territory because there's literally weeks of story to get through if you want to experience all of Critical Role's first campaign (at least the part they streamed.) But the end of the campaign leaves basically the whole cast teary-eyed and you'd have to really not be paying attention or have a heart of stone to think that was unwarranted.

Games are a medium that always struggles with whether or not it is art. I'll grant that it's often unfair to compare its storytelling capabilities as its sole artistic merit, as I think that elegance of gameplay is just as much an art form as cinematography or editing, but the way that a tabletop RPG functions as collaborative storytelling has the potential, if you have people who contribute to that story earnestly, to be incredibly touching.

I would love to be able to run a campaign like the one that they did. And of course I'm loving the second campaign.