hi! i've been wanting to start watching critical role and i wanted to know if it was a good idea to start with the new campaing (exu calamity) or if i needed to go all the way back to the beginning.

Well, in my opinion, Calamity is an EXCELLENT place to start, and no, you don't need to watch anything else first! Although I will say the tone/story structure/style of it is shaping up to be quite different than the main campaigns tend to go. In a very, very good way!!!! I'm massively enjoying both for different reasons, but good to not necessarily take it as a representative sample of the primary 3 campaigns.

As for any other tips on starting, you definitely don't need to watch campaign 1 to watch 2, 2 to watch 3, and so on. There are references here and there you might miss, and worldbuilding you might need to double check, but the characters and arcs generally make sense on their own. C3 has had more callbacks to C1/C2 than campaign 2 did, so there's that. But I'm also a sucker for the C2 party, so take that with a grain of salt.

The first EXU campaign and its follow ups (DMed by the lovely Aabria Iyengar) are also very enjoyable and can be watched standalone, although the same warning as Calamity applies- unique table, unique DM, unique story structure. (And, ofc, extremely good).

Overall: Calamity would be a great place to start, I think. If you wanted to dive into the other campaigns, things will be different, so don't feel afraid to shop around and see what works for you, I suppose? Everyone has their own recommendations about which of the primary campaigns to start with- we're still pretty early on with C3, so it would be doable to hop in, vs the others you might need to be more flexible about spoilers/fine with skipping chunks of the campaign if you wanted to expedite the process.

I have.. no idea if this answered any of your questions or not. Either way, welcome! Watch and catch up however works best for you- wikis and episode recaps and fan content are lovely ways to catch up on things if you can't put aside 4+ hours. I'm sure folks will also provide more helpful tips and advice in the replies/reblogs, so: feel free to sound off!