How you feel about the finale of Critical Role’s 3rd main run hinges a lot on what you think Critical Role — and actual play, and possibly even TTRPGs — is about. Is it an extended worldbuilding exercise? Is it a communicative told? Is it a game played? Is it just… content made by your parasocial faves?
[Ed. note: This communicative contains spoilers for episode 121 of Critical Role’s run 3, “A fresh Age Begins.” The video on request is now available on YouTube, with audio-only podcast available on Thursday, Feb. 13.]
If the measurement of a good ending in actual play is the satisfaction of the players at the table, Critical function ended with large 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 all run with freeform epilogues that let players control over the afterlives of their characters. And so if your pleasance 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 peculiarly actual of a run that was logistically ambitious in its structures and design, that promised they were “taking more chances.” If Critical function 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 gotta find a way to talk about quality, what elements win 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 function has had an outsized impact on the scenery 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 inactive a tiny (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 1 shaped by that impact. Critical function is an crucial part of my scholarship, studying how Critters handled the tremendous 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, another creators who mention the show as a major influence, and many with opinions about the show without always seeing an episode. It was the foundation of my function as a public critic, starting with a part on the end of run 1 published precisely 3 years ago this week and continuing into coverage on this site and beyond. I’ve had undergraduates and elder (straight, male) colleagues express deep and baffling crushes on Liam O’Brien. I’m presently 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 simply a “good” actual play? What makes 1 “bad” or “mediocre” versus not to my individual 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 3rd run — and the Exandria “trilogy” — are already in advanced gear and are improbable 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 distant with far more than conventional forms and go to weird and wonderful places due to the fact that “the dice tell the story.” erstwhile you remove that, eliminating evidence of chance through editing or by failure of gameplay friction, the contract changes. Then, you’re back to being judged by expectations from more conventional 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 virtually handwaved, no rotation — or even argument — required. And as consequences receded, what has always felt like a complex, breathing planet — with light and shade, with “adult” themes that went beyond sex jokes and millennial references — got just a small flatter, just a small 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 any impact on the game, I don’t think it’s the only or even the biggest reason for the speech of the ending. We besides should be careful about arguing over absences — either by critiquing all game point left unresolved, or by filling in explanations not presented to the audience. Critical Role has had large 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 planet and effort to fill in specified absences by debating what is “reasonable,” we’re no longer arguing about the communicative told or game played, but about the structure of the planet created.
If we take Critical Role’s self-description as “storytellers” seriously (and I do), then we request to justice the communicative told. That means identifying essential parts of the communicative that emerged across 121 episodes, how they were handled, and the methods utilized to tell the story. That’s tricky for actual play, especially Critical Role, which does little preproduction game strategizing than any of its peers. But it’s not impossible: there are inactive artistic choices being made.
I frequently paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s lines about super-long 18th-century fresh Clarissa when talking about Critical Role: If you read it for the plot, you will hang yourself. You must read it for the sentiment. 1 of Critical Role’s large strengths is the wealth of character studies crafted by Mercer and the founding cast. Critical function 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 kind spotlights character interactions, treating characters as full realized people alternatively than elements of a single contained artwork. This is besides how fandom frequently treats characters, so it’s unsurprising Critical Role has a symbiotic relation with fan work of all kinds that played a major function in increasing the show’s audience.
Image: Critical Role
While not all D&D players go as hard into the peculiar 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 frequently due to scheduling conflicts than communicative closure. There is simply a single run that has been moving almost as long as I’ve been alive, and Joe Manganiello takes his 1 character and throws it into any game he plays. Endings are hard in D&D precisely due to the fact that they are rare, especially in highly long-form play like Critical Role.
And so erstwhile they do occur, DMs give them an tremendous amount of weight. Mercer has repeatedly noted the extraordinary nature of what he’s been able to build across the last decade and more. erstwhile speaking to my students in a TTRPG class in 2023, he likened the 3rd run to his Avengers: Endgame.
He knew, though audiences didn’t, that run 3 was designed as the final chapter of a trilogy, ending Exandria’s “Era of Reclamation” and giving notable screen time to almost all player character across all 3 campaigns while not, say, killing fan-favorite Jester Lavorre before her wedding one-shot this fall at Radio City Music Hall.
It besides included many experiments: 3 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 divided the “founding members” across 2 different tables, introducing a half-dozen fresh 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 fresh table compositions, possibly taking more inspiration from its peer Dimension 20, whose first Intrepid Heroes now come together erstwhile a year for a batch-recorded 20-episode season.
Bringing specified a complex tale — interwoven with 2 equally complex prior campaigns — to a safe landing is simply a tall order for any DM, but especially 1 celebrated for letting players make their way as they delight through a sprawling, detailed world. And so the run was marked by a persistent tension between the kind of rambling, character-centered kind that had become a hallmark of Critical Role (especially in run 2) and the expanding urgency of world-shaking events that demanded their attention and intervention — a hallmark of run 1, though now with much lower-level players. The prior 2 campaigns had besides focused on final adversaries who wished to become gods. run 3 pivots in an crucial way, focusing alternatively on a god-eater, and due to the fact that that adversary was introduced early on (episode 43), the run became dominated by debates about the nature of divinity that ran in circles for dozens of episodes.
Image: Critical Role
This is where Critical Role’s strength — that Exandria frequently feels like a real, complex planet — collided with the needs of a D&D run (a clear adversary, clear plans of action, forward momentum). It was compounded by another appeal of the show: the vicarious pleasance audiences take from Mercer’s ability to surprise his players and the audience simultaneously (as noted in the campaign’s subject song: “who knows what will happen/he might”). due to the fact that Mercer wants to craft a planet that feels alive, and do so without robbing his players of the pleasures of discovery, he has to trust that those players will decision 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 peculiar cosmic horror into a glue trap, paralyzing the players for dozens of hours of circular existential debates. Gods erstwhile mechanized (or digestible) become just another power bloc, and for players utilized to a strategy 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 besides don’t have the essential friction for the interpersonal beats that make Critical function compelling. Players are left to improvise these on their own, which is why all run has ended with a mostly freeform epilogue where Mercer plays the function of the world’s logics to supply essential constraints.
The resolution of romanticist subplots were fascinatingly nuanced, working hard to feel realistic alternatively than fairy tale. But the effect is somewhat jarring against the brightly lit background of the remainder 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. due to the fact that 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 any another place where communicative 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 1 of the ways we request to revise our knowing 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 surviving rooms.” It has positioned itself as an accident, a miracle — which is, in a sense, true. The past of actual play is littered with compelling shows that never got an ending.
As a fresh genre or form develops, audiences and artists make alongside it. Reviews and debates are part of this process of growth and maturation. No surviving 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 besides grown beyond its first 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 all another successful actual play, isn’t effortless; it’s the consequence 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 due to the fact that it is simply a platform, the basis for a massive transmedia web. Even if this 3rd run 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, planet books, and more.
If we talk about skill and work, focusing on the human-scale communicative alternatively than the platform planet made, then we can have meaningful conversations — meaningful critique — that enrich us all. We might be able to imagine actual play beyond the strategy that is good for branding but not necessarily the best 1 for storytelling. And we might be able to do all as fellow players, alternatively than raising up fresh gods or (Dungeon) masters.
