Catching up on campaign 2 after not watching it for a while and omg this is so cozy 💖 the mighty nein are some of my favorite characters in the history of ever

If I start up a Critical Role Theory/Analysis Discord, would anyone be interested in joining?

So here is the thing: I got into CR at about the same time Campagin 3 started so I’ve only seen a little bit of campaigns 1 & 2… I have no idea who Ludinus is but if I ever see that cheeky mthrfkr 🤺🤺🤺

omg you love critical role toooo did you hear about Laudna and imogen!!! I lover your blog bc of cm took a tumblr break for a few years. Came back and in those years my wife introduced me to criticle role om love that you enjoy that too im an imodna stan allll the wayyy. (Also will for ever be a jemily, temily, and j'temily stan)

Helllllloooo Fellow Critter!

So great to have you here! While this blog is 90% Criminal Minds, I have a multi-fandom blog for DND stuff and other fandoms: @nonbinary-taralewis feel free to follow me over there too.

I love CR! My partner started watching CR in 2020 (Mighty Nein early episodes) and I got sucked in. We ended up watching ALL 141 episodes of Campagin 2 in 13 months.

I have since relistened to the entire campaign via podcast -- and I listened to all 141 episodes in two months lol (I listen to long pods on 3x speed)

Spoilers for C3 Under Cut

I haven't followed Bells Hells as closesly, mostly my partner gives me updates, or it's on in the background while I'm doign stuff. But YES, even though we haven't seen last week's ep yet -- IMODNA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SOOOOO rad! Laudna is my partner's fave CR character of all time. Hyped to see where Imogen and Laudna go from here.

Everyone is out here talking about that clutch divine intervention and shit but the real poetic justice of the episode was that damn ring of fire resistance being useful.

What’s that? The purple circus man is back? Lame. I’m here for overpriced magic items that get used against exactly one enemy.

Kord, lord of storms AND lesbians

MAJOR CRITICAL ROLE SPOILERS

Can I just say, thinking about that reveal this past episode, how much I loved seeing the casts honest reactions. Like so many things are tough about the new set up and prerecording, but having the cast just genuinely have no idea is so amazing. Plus, we as a Fandom got to melt for a couple weeks which is always fun.

I just can't stop thinking about how beautiful of a story element it is for Keyleth. The world was such a dark place for her specifically, and this is just its way of giving back a piece it took. Being able to watch Marisha see that for the first time, how amazing is that. Like I love that moment when she first figured it out because it was a pure moment of shock and joy. Keyleth gets a part of her story back, and that's incredible. Especially considering how it all ended for her.

Man. The mighty nein, fucking things up for the better.

Nott: Are you asking me to join your cult?

Jester: Well... I'm asking you to open your heart to chaos

I did a little Jester study today while watching CR! It’s been so long, I missed these nerdy ass voice actors </3

do you have any tips for getting into CritRole? I got into live plays mostly thru Taz and have been enjoying D20 as well, but CR seems to be more serious from the little I've watched? Humor was one of those things that really helped me settle into Taz and D20. The long episodes also make it seem daunting.

Hi anon,

You know, unless it’s something with a nonlinear structure like Discworld or something I’ll admit I’m always a little confused by questions of “how do I get into this thing” because like...you go to YouTube and you click ‘play’ and do so for between like, 90-odd and 200-odd episodes depending on whether you watch both campaigns or just one. And having written out my long and rambly response and said this like 5 times I want to say it here at the intro: there are a large number of reasons why I specifically am a bad person to ask, probably the greatest of which is I don’t know you or your life and I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t make any decisions based on what an internet stranger tells you.

With all that said: I’m guessing the answer you’re actually looking for is the answer to one or more of these questions:

“compared to TAZ and Dimension 20, is Critical Role significantly more serious?”

“is using the podcast a reasonable alternative to watching”

“Do I need to have seen Campaign 1 to watch Campaign 2”

“is it really the 4 hour episode length that’s the issue here?”

Feel free to ask me again with a more specific query if I don’t hit on the answer you’re looking for and also I still seem like a resource that would be helpful to you.

Answering the easier questions first: the podcast is a great option and I caught up on Campaign 1 primarily via podcast (I started watching with the start of the second campaign so I’ve watched all of that, though I’ve relistened to a few episodes as podcasts on long drives).

You don’t need to see campaign 1 to see campaign 2; there are some things where campaign 1 knowledge is helpful but none where it’s necessary (and if you don’t intend to watch campaign 1, it’s easy to read the wiki or critrolestats to fill in the gaps) . I like both campaigns but starting with C2 might be an easier investment (not really in terms of length as it’s almost up there by now, but it’s a little smoother to start since they’re used to the format and it begins at the beginning instead of midway through a campaign).

Now: is it serious or funny?

Other than early TAZ Balance when they were mostly goofing around, I don’t think TAZ is explicitly comedy any more so than Critical Role is explicitly serious. I’d put much of Critical Role at the same general position on the funny to serious scale as TAZ Amnesty, and the average Critical Role episode is in my opinion funnier and less dark than The Suffering Game arc of TAZ Balance. In fact last night’s episode of Critical Role had some elements that reminded me of The Suffering Game in it and I was like “oh this is fucking dark”.

While we’re at it, while Dimension 20 is explicitly comedic, The Unsleeping City went fairly dark towards the endgame, and Fantasy High, especially the current livestreamed campagin, has gotten fairly tragicomic at times as well. It’s hard to maintain a long-running campaign that doesn’t have real emotional stakes, even if you’re also trying to be funny, and if someone somehow managed that I wouldn’t want to watch it. Similarly if you’re a group of real friends playing a long-running campaign it’s hard to never have any jokes. I think Critical Role is perhaps less silly at times, but it’s capable of being very funny as well as very serious.

Finally, on episode length: yeah they sure are long episodes. There’s no real getting around that, unless you want to skip around in which case I, a compulsive completist am the wrong person to ask.

You can watch episodes in halves (or quarters, it’s your life). The episode break is a reasonable place to take a real-life break, and that’s how I watch the current campaign - I watch to the break or almost to the break on Thursday night, and then from my stopping point to the end on Friday.

Finally, I should also note that the length of individual episodes only becomes relevant when you’re trying to keep up with weekly episodes. I’m currently very slowly working through Rusty Quill Gaming. Their episodes are just under an hour, but there are still almost 150 of them. I mean, CR also has a huge number of episodes so this comparison isn’t very helpful, but my point is total runtime is the actual daunting thing, not the length of an individual episode. I don’t want to diminish how intimidating it can be - I didn’t start until the second campaign began precisely for this reason - but no advice I would give will shorten that runtime.

Shoutout to my favorite nine assholes. You made qarantine so much less shitty and I miss you.

Til then’ <33333

BEGININGS - HOW TO GET STARTED? Ok, so you got yourself the standard 4 person group of players, you’ve been voted captain of the proverbial ship and you’re all excited to get the ship sailing. But starting out, especially when you’re a new DM, or even only circumstantially elected to be one, running a game can look as intimidating as this nice Beholder art above (Don’t start with a beholder btw, for the love of all that is holy). It was the same for me, it is the same for most people, I would imagine. First thing you need to know is that no one does a great job right from the get go. Half the fun is in learning from your mistakes and growing through trial and error. Here’s how things went for me in those initial stages and what I learned. Now, the ideal situation, and one I was lucky enough to have, is that all of the players you have are new to the game as well. That way you can all discover the wonders of dnd together and even if you make a mistake as the dm, chances are that they won’t notice. Besides, they’ll also be making a bunch of mistakes so it all balances out. Don’t fret about it too much. It also helps if you’re all friends to begin with. I know often times that simply isn’t the case, but it’s at least worth mentioning.  Living where I live, in Croatia, having next to no support for dnd, I was pretty lucky to find friends interested in playing pretty much right off the bat. Sure there were a few campaign restarts and member changes in the first few months, but quickly enough, we formed the core group of 5 people and decided on me as the DM. And don’t get discouraged if you don’t succeed in finding a group right away or if you have a bad experience or two to start with. Sometimes those things just happen. I also had a failed game that I tried on Roll20 online first. But going past them with held entuziasm pays off in the end, trust me.  How do you start?  First of all, you have to pick a setting to play in. Like I mentioned in my previous post, the setting can be fantasy, sci-fi, modern, post-apocalyptic, prehistoric - whatever you want it to be. What I would reccomend is to go with something you are most familiar with. Maybe you always wanted to play in the Forgotten Realms alongside Drizzt and Bruenor. Maybe you’ve seen all the generations of Star Trek or loved Firefly and sci-fi is more your scene. Maybe you’re already so far down the rabbit hole that you’ve made your own setting with cities, civilizations, cultures, religions, calendar and all. Whatever it may be, having a preestablished knowledge on the setting helps you create what you want to start a game, as well as maneuver through the setting with more confidence once you start playing.  For me, that setting was Exandria - Tal’dorei - Matt Mercer’s world from Critical Role. Now, I’m sure a lot of you were introduced to dnd through Critical Role, I was too, and I could go on about CR for a hundred pages, but that’s a topic for another post. I am, however, gonna explain why that setting worked for me and maybe you can take some lessons from that.  For starters, I’d watched through the whole first campaign of CR so I was pretty familiar with the world already...I knew the prominent cities, popular npcs, their voices and manerisms, latest world events.... and Matt’s Tal’dorei campaign guide just came out so the choice of setting came quite easily to me. The guide is a great piece of material to build your own personal campaign on without having to start from scratch. It describes most of the significant places in Tal’dorei (the main continent of the world - Exandria), gives you historic reasons why and how they are there, but leaves plenty of space for you to express yourself and implement your own ideas. As I’ve come to learn about myself through this experience, I love adapting published material for my own needs in the campaign, as well as coming up with my own inventions. And that’s the thing. If you don’t know what type of dm you are when you’re starting out, you don’t have to. You will constantly evolve and sooner or later find you own style.  Anyway, we went with Tal’dorei - Exandria. By that point, of the group, only I had watched Critical Role and I was excited to bring a dash of everything I thought was great about the show I was watching to the rest of the bunch. It always helps to be doing something you really love - you tend to go that extra mile and make the extra effort to produce the best result you can. That’s true with most things in life.  Now, almost 2 years later, one of the players took the bait and has already watched through the whole first campaign (I am so proud :)) while others haven’t (mostly due to lack of time to spend on 4-hour episodes), but they enjoy playing in the setting nontheless. When you have the setting you want to play in, and that sort of includes general worldbuilding already (which is a topic in and of itself to explore), it’s time to think about how to start the campaign itself. That’s gonna be the topic of one of my next posts as you join me on the journey of the campaign we’re playing. I’m gonna go into different ways you can start a campagin and how and why I started mine the way I did. It’ll sort of be the intro into our game and the first post of The Croakers Campaign Chronicles. It’ll be the retelling of the story, as well as my personal DM insights into how it all transpired.  Thanks for reading and, as always, I hope you’ve gained some inspiration ;)

kinda over cr campagin 2

i just really don’t care anymore. i was already barely hanging on having to deal w/ it always being The Liam Show all the time, but now that the most unique character (a half-orc, southern-drawl-havin’, sea-sailin’, evil-snake-overlord-servin’ warlock) has just become another boring british-y paladin im mcfucking over it.

mite pick it back up when traveler-con happens as jester is the only character i care about now but until then, im clocking out.

THE WHOLE SECOND HALF OF THE EPISODE WAS THE DATEEEEEE

Hello! Um yes, I was just wondering if anyone had some voice of reason they were not using that I could borrow? You see, I’ve only gotten 4 hours of sleep in the past three days and I finally have the chance to get a nice full 8-10 hours of sleep tonight...thing is, there’s that 7hour long Critical role episode tonight, ya know, the last episode of this campaign. Yeah, I wanna watch that. Now I know that I can literally watch it at 8am tomorrow while I’m working, I’m lucky like that with my job. I could go to sleep and be rested and also have something to keep me busy tomorrow. Or, OR I could stay up until my eyes bleed and I can’t tell if I’m crying from the, I’m sure to be, very emotional close of this story, or if the tears are my bodies way of begging me to just go to bed. I could stay up and be a part of the live tweets, and blogs, and chats because I’m an extrovert who’s been locked away for over a year and the smallest amount of interaction with others makes me feel less like I’m crawling up the wall. I can contribute to the conversation and really feel like a proper part of this amazing community. And then I will get MAYBE and hour of sleep.

hey!! :D for the ask game thingy: 🌸,✨,💕

🌸- Favorite Caduceus moment

Probably him scaring Calliope with the bone flute! It was so nice to see him be able joke around with his family again, and get to achieve the crystal to save the blooming grove.

✨- Best use of magic

I have to say the dunamantic magic long rest. What an amazing moment, beautiful visuals from Matt and the mini beacon shattering? The way briging essek and investigating the long rest chamber back in aeor payed off here? amazing

💕- Favorite CR show other than the Campagin

Hmm I dont know if Talks counts, but for this ill say it doesnt, and ill say Narritive telephone! While I havnt watched much of round 2, round 1 was perhaps the only thing that could get me to laugh so hard in the middle of quarentine.