‘A New Age Begins’ for Critical Role. Let’s hope it’s one for actual play and TTRPGs, too

How you feel about the finale of Critical Role’s third main campaign hinges a lot on what you think Critical Role — and actual play, and maybe even TTRPGs — is about. Is it an extended worldbuilding exercise? Is it a story told? Is it a game played? Is it just… content made by your parasocial faves?

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for episode 121 of Critical Role’s Campaign 3, “A New Age Begins.” The video on demand is now available on YouTube, with audio-only podcast available on Thursday, Feb. 13.]

If the measure of a good ending in actual play is the satisfaction of the players at the table, Critical Role ended with great success. Matthew Mercer’s table has always been, at its heart, a love letter to its players, and he has always insisted that they are the first and only audience he thinks about. Mercer ends every campaign with freeform epilogues that allow players control over the afterlives of their characters. And so if your pleasure is intimately tied to that of the cast, you join thousands who flooded live chat with joy that night. 

But it’s a disservice to Critical Role to reduce it to exclusively parasocial, sentimental pleasure. This is particularly true of a campaign that was logistically ambitious in its structures and design, that promised they were “taking more chances.” If Critical Role cannot be held up to any kind of critique, what actual play can? If we hope to talk seriously about actual play as something beyond “content,” as many now do, then we have to find a way to talk about quality, what elements succeed and which might not, and why. It may seem trivial, but the way we talk about Critical Role’s ending, and on what grounds we argue about it, will have an impact on the future of actual play — and all our expectations of it. 

Critical Role has had an outsized impact on the landscape of actual play. It wasn’t the first, nor the most celebrity studded; but thanks to the timing of a variety of backstage and technological realities, savvy business choices, and extraordinary strokes of luck, it became a juggernaut. It is still a small (by Hollywood standards) set of media companies with a massive (by tabletop standards) impact. Where Critical Role steps, reverberations are felt by both devoted “Critters” and critics alike.

I say this not as an outsider but one shaped by that impact. Critical Role is an important part of my scholarship, studying how Critters handled the enormous run time (in 2018 and then again in the 2020s) and editing close readings of actual play in major journals. I’ve interviewed cast and crew, other creators who cite the show as a major influence, and many with opinions about the show without ever seeing an episode. It was the foundation of my role as a public critic, starting with a piece on the end of Campaign 1 published exactly three years ago this week and continuing into coverage on this site and beyond. I’ve had undergraduates and senior (straight, male) colleagues express deep and baffling crushes on Liam O’Brien. I’m currently writing a book on actual play, which begins with “Exandria Unlimited: Calamity,” a masterpiece of the form. 

I have struggled with the question of aesthetic judgement for a long time. What is a “good” actual play? What makes one “bad” or “mediocre” versus not to my personal taste? These questions intersect with my prior scholarship on how expectations around endings evolve, and consensus on what makes a “good” ending changes over time. Debates about the ending of Critical Role’s third campaign — and the Exandria “trilogy” — are already in high gear and are unlikely to end anytime soon. 

I don’t know if I have many answers yet. But what Critical Role’s finale reminded me is that actual play is built on a contract with its audience. Actual play can get away with far more than traditional forms and go to weird and wonderful places because “the dice tell the story.” Once you remove that, eliminating evidence of chance through editing or by loss of gameplay friction, the contract changes. Then, you’re back to being judged by expectations from more traditional media. And that’s where we end up as dice rolls begin to dwindle well before the game shifts into epilogue. Notable elements like Orym’s fey-pact with the hag Fatestitcher were literally handwaved, no roll — or even argument — required. And as consequences receded, what has always felt like a complex, breathing world — with light and shade, with “adult” themes that went beyond sex jokes and millennial references — got just a little flatter, just a little more washed out by high-wattage brightness. In a game and show that had imbued player choices with heft, payoff felt thin on the ground — or off in the far horizon.

There are both critiques and defenses of those absences that seem counterproductive. For example, while the outbreak of the LA fires the first night of filming had some impact on the game, I don’t think it’s the only or even the biggest reason for the tone of the ending. We also have to be careful about arguing over absences — either by critiquing every plot point left unresolved, or by filling in explanations not presented to the audience. Critical Role has had great success in turning unresolved side plots into one-shot sequels, and the finale was a pointed exercise in establishing future hooks. At the same time, if we debate over the logics of the world and try to fill in such absences by debating what is “reasonable,” we’re no longer arguing about the story told or game played, but about the structure of the world created.

If we take Critical Role’s self-description as “storytellers” seriously (and I do), then we need to judge the story told. That means identifying essential parts of the narrative that emerged across 121 episodes, how they were handled, and the methods used to tell the story. That’s tricky for actual play, especially Critical Role, which does less preproduction plot strategizing than any of its peers. But it’s not impossible: there are still artistic choices being made. 

I often paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s lines about super-long 18th-century novel Clarissa when talking about Critical Role: If you read it for the plot, you will hang yourself. You must read it for the sentiment. One of Critical Role’s great strengths is the wealth of character studies crafted by Mercer and the founding cast. Critical Role reflects what The Retired Adventurer described as “OC [Original Character]/Neo-Trad” culture of play, which arose from fannish text-based role-playing forums and LiveJournal at the turn of the millennium. This style spotlights character interactions, treating characters as fully realized people rather than elements of a single contained artwork. This is also how fandom often treats characters, so it’s unsurprising Critical Role has a symbiotic relationship with fan work of all kinds that played a major role in growing the show’s audience.

While not all D&D players go as hard into the particular method of role-playing as these “nerdy-ass voice actors,” the loose rambling structures of much of Critical Role reflects how many folks now experience the shape of D&D. It’s a game infamous for ending more often due to scheduling conflicts than narrative closure. There is a single campaign that has been running almost as long as I’ve been alive, and Joe Manganiello takes his one character and throws it into any game he plays. Endings are hard in D&D precisely because they are rare, especially in extremely long-form play like Critical Role. 

And so when they do occur, DMs give them an enormous amount of weight. Mercer has repeatedly noted the extraordinary nature of what he’s been able to build across the last decade and more. When speaking to my students in a TTRPG class in 2023, he likened the third campaign to his Avengers: Endgame.

He knew, though audiences didn’t, that Campaign 3 was designed as the final chapter of a trilogy, ending Exandria’s “Era of Reclamation” and giving notable screen time to almost every player character across all three campaigns while not, say, killing fan-favorite Jester Lavorre before her wedding one-shot this fall at Radio City Music Hall. 

It also included many experiments: three of the campaign’s player characters were introduced in the first “Exandria Unlimited” (EXU) miniseries led by Aabria Iyengar, paving the way for additional EXU miniseries tie-ins led by Iyengar and Brennan Lee Mulligan. A mid-campaign shake-up temporarily split the “founding members” across two different tables, introducing a half-dozen new guest players. Given the ways that Critical Role has repeatedly discussed plans to “pass the torch,” it’s hard not to read these innovations as part of a soft launch of new table compositions, perhaps taking more inspiration from its peer Dimension 20, whose original Intrepid Heroes now come together once a year for a batch-recorded 20-episode season.

Bringing such a complex tale — interwoven with two equally complex prior campaigns — to a safe landing is a tall order for any DM, but especially one famous for letting players make their way as they please through a sprawling, detailed world. And so the campaign was marked by a persistent tension between the kind of rambling, character-centered style that had become a hallmark of Critical Role (especially in Campaign 2) and the increasing urgency of world-shaking events that demanded their attention and intervention — a hallmark of Campaign 1, though now with much lower-level players. The prior two campaigns had also focused on final adversaries who wished to become gods. Campaign 3 pivots in an important way, focusing instead on a god-eater, and because that adversary was introduced early on (episode 43), the campaign became dominated by debates about the nature of divinity that ran in circles for dozens of episodes.

This is where Critical Role’s strength — that Exandria often feels like a real, complex world — collided with the needs of a D&D campaign (a clear adversary, clear plans of action, forward momentum). It was compounded by another appeal of the show: the vicarious pleasure audiences take from Mercer’s ability to surprise his players and the audience simultaneously (as noted in the campaign’s theme song: “who knows what will happen/he might”). Because Mercer wants to craft a world that feels alive, and do so without robbing his players of the pleasures of discovery, he has to trust that those players will move the game forward without his guidance — as they have done in the past.

But the confused way D&D handles religion and divinity — polytheism as imagined by midwestern American Protestants — turned the question of how to handle this particular cosmic horror into a glue trap, paralyzing the players for dozens of hours of circular existential debates. Gods once mechanized (or digestible) become just another power bloc, and for players used to a system where in the end you are “basically gods,” the line gets blurrier still. And as D&D’s messy cosmology added friction to much of the campaign, D&D’s mechanics also don’t have the necessary friction for the interpersonal beats that make Critical Role compelling. Players are left to improvise these on their own, which is why every campaign has ended with a largely freeform epilogue where Mercer plays the role of the world’s logics to provide necessary constraints. 

The resolution of romantic subplots were fascinatingly nuanced, working hard to feel realistic rather than fairy tale. But the effect is somewhat jarring against the brightly lit background of the rest of the campaign’s resolution. Divine magic is not gone, nor are the powers of the Ruidus-born, and even Imogen’s time as a host of Predathos has not left a mark. Because there has always been a “next campaign” for Critical Role, as well as sequels, spinoffs, and more, many in the audience look ahead to “C4” or some other place where narrative satisfaction and payoff will come. 

I don’t think trilogies work that way. But platforms do — and differentiating between what is part of the genre of actual play versus what is beyond it in scope is one of the ways we need to revise our understanding of what Critical Role is as it enters its second decade. Critical Role provided the template for a decade of actual play, from its visual layout to its branding as a “bunch of friends playing RPGs in each other’s living rooms.” It has positioned itself as an accident, a miracle — which is, in a sense, true. The history of actual play is littered with compelling shows that never got an ending.

As a new genre or form develops, audiences and artists develop alongside it. Reviews and debates are part of this process of growth and maturation. No living genre stays the same but adapts and changes over time. Critical Role is bigger than the actual play that started it all, and the form of actual play itself has also grown beyond its initial form.

Most importantly, as we enter the second decade of Critical Role, it’s long past time for us to note that Critical Role, like every other successful actual play, isn’t effortless; it’s the result of hard work and skill, by cast and crew. It is sprezzatura: the appearance of effortlessness that only comes from long training and long experience working together. Sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn’t, and all of it is now supported and smoothed because it is a platform, the basis for a massive transmedia web. Even if this third campaign doesn’t end up with an animated adaptation like The Legend of Vox Machina and the upcoming Mighty Nein animated series, the players know they will return to these characters in prequels, sequels, world books, and more.

If we talk about skill and work, focusing on the human-scale story rather than the platform world made, then we can have meaningful conversations — meaningful critique — that enrich us all. We might be able to imagine actual play beyond the system that is good for branding but not necessarily the best one for storytelling. And we might be able to do all as fellow players, rather than raising up new gods or (Dungeon) masters.

source https://www.polygon.com/critical-role/524508/actual-play-review-end-ttrpgs