There's a gap in the market.
Time to start playing Dungeons and Dragons.
As you walk to the edge and you climb inside, what do you find in that well?
We're gonna be on the channel with Oscar winners talking about playing D&D.
And with respect, I find ill-advised.
What's up, buddy?
What's up, man?
When did we meet?
I want to say it would have been 2017?
Yes.
I was brought on to do an episode of I'm Actually with Mike Trapp.
Yep, Mike Trapp hosting.
Amy Vorpel and Brian Murphy.
Indeed, and it was specifically a D&D-themed episode.
And you were more or less the person on the laptop who wrote a lot of the questions were there for fact-checking.
Silvered Axe, as it is not a magical weapon, will actually not affect a Pit Fiend.
I believe it is immune to all non-magical weapons.
No, Matt found something that even the question didn't account for.
Great.
After the episode and even in between we had some conversations on set a little bit and kind of got to meet and just kind of.
It was rad as hell, man.
I had been watching Critical Role so I was working at.
I had just moved to Los Angeles, been in LA for about a year.
I think we were shooting this in August or September because it was right around the end of campaign one.
Correct, yeah. and it was around your bachelor party, or your nuptials, if I'm not much mistaken.
No, because that does play in later.
That does play in later.
So I think the end of campaign one and your nuptials also are within seven days, on either side of me starting full-time at CollegeHumor and starting to date, Izzy Rowland.
That's right, that's right.
Which all happened in the same momentous September.
Let us hope nobody finds time travel and ruin it for all of us.
I remember, like doing the episode, we had a few conversations and then, when we finished recording, you and me just started talking more and it turned into like 30 minutes of just bantering about home games and love of games.
We were kicking it in the parking lot of the IAC building.
And I remember being very much like the.
I had the attitude of like oh, this is a guy who's coming here working on the show.
I'm like a crew member of this show.
You've come here to participate as a cast member.
So I was like, I'm just gonna say one thing about Critical Role and be on my way.
I remember having such a good time meeting you that night that I remember going home and like telling Marisha, my partner, about it.
I was like this really fucking cool guy on set that was like I don't know very much.
Like reminded me of who I am, in a way.
I'm like, oh, I would have grown up with this guy and not been so shy and awkward.
That didn't change, but at least I got to explain that to her.
And then it was a short time after that, I was out for my bachelor party, which was a multiple location event, maybe like a month, a month and a half later or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
One of the stops was in Little Tokyo in downtown LA, and through happenstance I ran into you again on the street and it was like okay, the universe is doing something.
Something.
Yes.
And then it wasn't until the year after where you came and did Bloodkeep.
Bloodkeep.
That was so fun.
It was a ball, man.
Really, really fun.
Having been in the weird, unexpected trajectory of Critical Role now a few years at this time to watch just those conversations and those kind of initial, almost kismet bonding moments then to see you grow your own version of your stories with your crew of friends and watch it find its community and begin to succeed.
I remember even early on was like this is so cool that there's a space to do this now in entertainment, that we can just create this without having to wait on a system of gatekeepers in their late 70s that don't understand what the heck we're doing.
So that was delightful.
And then to be able to come and actually play there at the Dome with you was like another cool full circle of watching that ascension.
It was awesome, man.
It was really, really awesome.
What's that journey been like for you?
I'm going to say from the concept of having my own weird perspective from my side of things, the rise of you having to pitch what I know is a very hard thing to pitch in an unproven space really, and grow it kind of whether people are ready to or not, into what you built it.
Well homie, I mean, I'd be kidding if I didn't tell you that my market research document for Dimension 20 was like.
Here is what is happening in the actual play genre and here are the shows who are doing it perfectly.
Here are the shows that are doing it as well as it can be done.
And Critical Role was at the very, very top of that list.
This is the ideal version of what this medium can do, what this genre can do.
And the only thing we would look at is what are our limitations based on the infrastructure, logistical differences, that we're going to be a streaming platform.
So we're not going to have it be, it has to be SVOD rather than AVOD.
This is the exciting stuff that variety viewers want to see.
SVOD versus AVOD.
Let's go. we won't be able to be stream-lived to Twitch.
A lot of the creative choices that we made were leaning into limitations, which is often what you do as a creative person, right?
So we're like okay, we're going to lean into custom-made minis and sets and editing that into the thing because We have to edit.
We can't go live.
Our structure doesn't support going live.
So everything was like, okay, lean into that.
And then the other thing, of course, being like, because this is going to be College Humor's actual play show, we're going to get a lot of my pals which were UCB-trained improvisers.
I'd been playing with Emily Axford and Brian Murphy and Zachary Yama and Siobhan Thompson.
I'd been playing with Lou Wilson.
He's at two points.
No!
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I hate you.
You are a sick son of a bitch.
Gonna kill that dog.
The experience of what it was like for me in terms of pitching, that is, I had critical role to point to.
I had this document that said, in terms of televised actual play, you need to be looking at critical role.
Talking about how many of my friends at that time had been fans of The Adventure Zone and these different actual play formats that were taking off, and I came with that market research document.
But for the fact that I got to pitch an actual play show in the weeks following this huge finale of Campaign One the joke I told Marisha because Marisha came and did an Adventuring Academy
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She came to set the week that YouTube or Reddit or wherever had coined the term the Mercer Effect.
I'll tell you what, the Mercer Effect is me and all my friends having a fucking job.
That's the Mercer Effect.
Yeah, and it remains true it's it's.
It's wild to think back to like all these weird early steps and now how I'm very grateful, especially in this industry, that all these creatives can succeed and then come in like trade notes and merge our endeavors and really fun ways.
I don't know.
You hear from entertainment in a lot of ways how competitive it is and builds this atmosphere, this idea of you succeed at the detriment of others.
You know, climb the ladder and pull it up behind you, sort of a vibe.
And I think a lot of that stems from just the old school industry and how it's functioned for so long.
Now, with companies like ours, with Dropout people that have utilized the community and the internet to find support bases that aren't relying on those classic structures, that idea of succeeding at the cost of others is completely irrelevant and unnecessary.
And instead you all get to succeed by helping each other, supporting each other, sharing lessons and cool ideas, and it's
I don't know, it's been really exciting.
The fact that we've had you come to the Dome so many times, the fact that you got to come here and do Calamity and Downfall and Divergence, all of these times that we've jumped over to play with each other's show.
I always think it's the silliest.
My brother asked me one time where he was like you and this guy Matt, you guys do each other's shows, but you're on different networks or platforms, right?
And I was like, yeah, but we're huge.
I'm an enormous fan of his work and everything that he's built.
And my brother was like, so you don't see that as competition?
I was like, hardly.
Every time we've collaborated it's been going aside from the emotional part, which is we love to do it because we are friends.
It's also been just a net positive on a fucking quantitative level.
How much can I curse, a lot?
It's good.
It's giving me permission.
It's giving you permission.
And my brother went, wow, I guess that's right.
You guys aren't really competing against each other.
You're both competing against people who watch your shows going for a walk.
I think that's the log line, really.
That is the log line.
By the way, go for a walk.
It's great.
I highly recommend going for a walk.
But his point is well taken.
It's like, yeah, as we collaborate and succeed in this space, the space grows.
It becomes inviting and exciting and celebratory and warm.
And it's very cool.
So what do you feel like after many years of doing actual play and DMing?
Are the things that make DMing work?
Which, by the way, I also wanted to mention too.
If people aren't familiar, I'm realizing, like the lexicon,
Oh, yeah.
DM for Dungeon Master or GM, which means Game Master.
Game Master.
Which is similar.
It's the idea of a person behind the screen who's helping lead the adventure.
Correct, yeah.
A Dungeon Master is a person that's playing Dungeons & Dragons, and Game Master is somebody who plays another game and does not have Dungeon Master trademarked.
Fair.
What are the things that make this type of storytelling work?
If you're going to deep core principles as a creator, what headspace do you try to get in to get those delectable moments where someone locks in?
One, subversion of expectations.
It's just a storytelling aspect.
Following the thread of where everyone's going and having a part of your mind that's waiting for a moment that you can change everything and kind of knock their feet out from under them.
Have them returning to the hut to find it on fire, whether they're, you know, climbing a mountain and suddenly uh, the landscape begins to change.
It doesn't have to be radical, it can just be something momentarily surprising yeah, but just being open to that.
But that leads into my other big facet, which is just listening to your players.
Preparation, preparation.
You can do all the prep in the world, but once you're at that table, the most important thing is just listening to your players and following what they're excited about.
I remember being an improv student and having teachers take out a mallet and just hit you over the head with listening listening, listening.
Because it's so easy as an audience member to look at like a funny line that an improviser says and go wow, how quick or how clever.
And you're like, yeah, only in the context of having really heard what the other person said.
That subversion of expectation thing is crazy, because I think there's a reason that, like I mean, it's almost cliche to say, but the reason Jordan Peele is such an incredible horror director is because he's so funny, right.
Like those rhythms are identical.
The rhythm of like, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, joke.
Bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, horror.
It is so exciting in that way.
Being a DM is a bizarre job because you're sometimes voicing an NPC who has to, which means you're doing the job of an actor.
You need to reliably be that character and deliver a performance that is believable as that character, while also understanding that some of the things that character is saying need to be worded correctly to leave critical information.
So you're almost writing exposition.
You're like so you had that guy who's like hey, I'm walking here near a strange gem, you might notice.
You wanna get the gem?
You have that moment of exhibition coming in.
When you are DMing, you are an actor who is also actively writing while you are also directing, because a lot of being a DM is noticing if a player has been overly quiet, or sometimes a player says something and you want to drill down.
A player hints at something and you're like you should make an insight, check about that, because there's a secret being hidden from you there.
So you're directing.
And then also the biggest thing, I think about Matt Colville, who's an incredible resource for DMing advice, who talked about how the dm's number one superpower is their control over the flow of time, which is like an editor yeah, your ability to nobody it's.
It's pretty gauche, i think actually, in terms of like how much the the, the pcs don't affect the flow of time, or like edit scenes.
A pc can say i leave, but it's the dm who goes.
We move to the next scene yeah, and as you finish this conversation, we shift to like, you are completely guiding that pace and if you're not aware of controlling that, sometimes it can get away from you and the players might not know how to get you to stop the scene because they've said everything they want to say.
And obviously all performers have elements of this, where even an actor knows to hit their mark for their lighting to be right.
But it is wild as a DM how many brains you're running at the same time.
What is your experience of that?
And then, especially moving into actual play, where suddenly you not only add all of that in, but now you add in producer, where you're looking at a clock and realizing that you gotta call the session at a certain point in time.
You know what I mean and may.
Ideally, maybe you're going to call the session at like a fun moment so that we leave people wanting like, leave an audience wanting more when we come back next time, running all those different engines, do you feel like that has become second nature or intuitive at this point?
And is there one you find yourself leaning on more than others?
Is there a place that is there a comfort seat where you're like i kind of live in director brain more, i live in actor brain more.
For one thing, one of the driving aspects of all those is the anxiety brain.
That one is about a 15 minute buffer leading up to any session and about 10 minutes into any session past its start.
About a good 25 30 minutes of anxiety, brain kind of taking over.
One.
I think that helps me kick out all the rest of the world stuff, because when suddenly I get nervous about the session in front of me which I've been doing every session since I started playing that definitely helps kind of set the table in a neutral way.
I think I probably, even though as a voice actor and people a lot of Critical Role's initial kind of rise to attention was, like this guy does a lot of crazy voices.
Oh, this guy, he embodies these characters because he makes silly voices.
Like, yeah, that's definitely part of the skill set.
That's a comfortable place for me to fall back on.
I don't think it's where my brain is usually.
I think my brain is usually in director slash edit mode.
Yeah.
And part of that is listening to the players.
Like, I have a place I want them to go or a place that I think they might be searching for.
And then if they make a different choice that might lead them in a different place.
How do I guide the story in a way that keeps it moving forward?
And then edit-wise, especially when I have seven, sometimes more, players at the table, conversations and scenes can go long enough to the point where I think the necessary information, or at least the momentum of this, could drive in a more exciting way if I find the right moment or beat to shift or once again surprise them or change the expectations.
And so a lot of it is listening to where they are in the moment, watching what people are engaging with, where they're expressing they're wanting to take the story.
And at what moment can I either end the scene and bring us elsewhere with that shift of time?
Or how can I shift the moment with some sort of juxtaposition that changes the expectations and raises the stakes of the moment?
Reducing what you can do to silly voices is rude, frankly.
And it's not just voices.
Have you heard this guy make a door noise?
It's crazy.
This guy makes the best door noises in the business.
I spent a lot of time alone as a kid.
But I love the invitation to empower the people who have watched our shows to then create their own worlds and their own stories.
It's really hard to do that with other media.
You can be like, hey, you like this movie?
Cool.
Well, now you gotta get the equipment for it and you have to get the classes and you gotta learn how to, and it's like you can do that.
But that's a lot to ask.
With tabletop games, you can literally buy a book or two and that same weekend be in your new world with your friends and be doing the exact same thing that we're doing.
It's a really funny thing because I was just talking to a friend of mine about Prep preparation how to prepare a session.
Because I think people would be surprised when you talk about being a dungeon master, which is a brand new job in entertainment.
That kind of didn't exist more than a decade or so ago.
You go like, wait, so are you improvising or are you writing it?
And you're like, por que no los dos?
I'm very much doing both, right?
You're scripting out these beats and adventures.
If there's a magic item, I need to know what it can do.
If there's a monster, I need to know how hard it hits.
But also I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that once a session, these guys do something that I never could have anticipated.
And so within that context, thinking about listening, I often have voiced that I have a very improvisational approach to dungeon mastering, largely because I have seen a lot of newer DMs trip on the shoelaces of their own over preparation.
I wonder in my head sometimes over what is a bigger challenge for a new dungeon master.
If it's a bigger challenge to be like how many DMs are coming after their first session if they're trying this new scary thing being like i thought i was armed to the teeth.
I had nothing.
I was out there with a pillowcase.
I got nothing going.
I needed more gas in the tank, i needed to work more on my dungeon or work more on my monster stat blocks, versus something i've seen from time to time which is people coming in and going like okay, you arrive in the realm of gelgador, a tavern before you with a small well behind it.
And someone goes like, I go in the well, I jump down the well, what's in the well?
And they go, I have the names of all 20 staff members of the tavern.
Please go in the tavern, right?
And there's a that, like preparation, tends to create a gravity.
Well, that makes you want to redirect your players towards it.
Do you have your like, Your philosophy of how you have to navigate all the work it takes to be ready and all the strength of spirit it takes to throw that work away?
Part of it is, like many things, comes with experience.
And sometimes you have to fail to learn better.
If you have a few rougher sessions, so did I.
Many.
Part of that experience is trying it out and giving yourself the permission to stumble and maybe not be your strongest out of the gate, because you can't expect yourself to be perfect, especially when it's your first time playing with players and not knowing how they engage with the game and the story.
Don't be afraid to stop and take breaks in the game and then check in.
No one expects for you to come in there and be like I'm now going to regale you with the best theater you've ever experienced.
Why was I so scared of that for so many years?
Why so many years of DMing, was I like.
If I tell my players that what they just did was so crazy that I need 15 minutes, they will kill me.
Yeah, because we didn't know any better.
But that's part of what we're trying to do in this space is to dispel some of this, because learn from our mistakes.
We made them for you.
We came up in an era in which, unless you were playing at a game store, you had a hard time finding anybody to learn from.
There are so many amazing resources for people that want to try to play these games and tell stories this way for the first time.
And it's so encouraging to see in actual play how possible this is to tell these stories with your friends.
But conversely too, I also agree that the best thing to do is go fail.
Pacing is such a fascinating thing to think about.
That really is like the editorial job of a dungeon master.
I was just reading about.
It's one of my favorite concepts that I think about a lot, Especially because I think people that come to the genre, one of the first things they'll do is be like whoa, the episodes are like two or three or four hours long.
And you go like, yeah, that's the medium.
Like the average length of a scene in film and TV is like two to five minutes.
And the average length of a scene in actual play is like 12 to 20, I think.
That's about right, yeah.
There's a concept that Akira Kurosawa talks about and actually I think is in a lot of Miyazaki movies as well called ma, which is-.
I love Ma.
It's an incredible thing where there's a sequence, before the final battle in Seven Samurai, of rain falling on the village and cutting to buckets filled with rainwater and looking through the town and stuff like that.
As the action has been building, and building, and building, and then we get here and then it suddenly stops.
Why?
I feel like there's a through line in the things I'm railing against a lot when I do interviews like this, which is the really soulless instinct to optimize.
That same principle of number go up of like.
Well, for the movie to be exciting, everything's gotta be exciting, right?
Maintain momentum.
Keep it going forward.
Maintain momentum.
We've had these conversations with our animated series and it's been a fight and many hard-won moments to allow those moments of Ma.
To take a quiet beat and live in the world and feel it, breathe and remind yourself that the stakes don't matter unless you are reminded what you're fighting for.
Literally what Kurosawa said.
He said, you've just seen three or four battles in the village at this point.
This is going to be the most violent climactic one.
This is the final battle.
If I don't let you watch the rain fall on this peaceful village, how will you know what violence is?
I used to nanny this very sweet little boy.
We go to the playground.
He's running around.
Kids are play fighting with each other.
And he's running in a circle around the entire playground with his arm fully extended like this.
He's got a fist out.
He's running.
I was like, hey, bud, are you being a knight?
Is this your lance here?
And he went, no, I'm punching.
Nothing is more serious than a little boy whose game has been misinterpreted.
You know, like, a tiny little boy who's like, you moron.
He goes, hands out, he goes, no, I'm punching.
And I went, oh, why are you punching like this?
And he went, this is the part of the punch that hurts the most.
Now that logic rules.
It's pretty great.
But it is a child's logic.
It is literally, Not being cognizant that all of the strength of the punch comes from the windup.
All of the horror of the battle comes from the rain.
You can't subvert what is not an expectation.
You have to have the thing build up and then release.
And the optimizer instinct, the number go up instinct is this is the part of the punch that hurts the most.
Let's stay at maximum extension constantly and it create.
You think well, if this is the part that's exciting, let's do the exciting thing non-stop and you go.
Hey, anything you do non-stop is boring, right like it's really hard to fight that optimizer instinct to go.
I know you want this to be a formula.
I know you want to remove all risk.
I know that you want to make this guessable predictable, that visionaries might be able to say how it's all going to go and we'll never be afraid for another moment.
But that's not and it's certainly therefore not art.
Absolutely.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
What I also love too, on the topic of learning.
As the space evolves, and this medium evolves classically, the game master and the players come from a place of being very separate.
You have the game master as the director and the judge and kind of rules.
The world, this idea and the players are just pieces on the game board.
That has evolved over time to be far more collaborative.
From a lot of the indie game spaces and more modern tabletop games.
There's been a wonderful shift and we brought a lot of that into our recent RPG release Daggerheart, which is empowering the players to build on the narrative along with the GM and finding places for the invitation.
To take your earlier example of the nervous GM, when the player's like I'm going to go in the well and the GM doesn't have anything prepared, the GM can say, as you walk to the edge and you climb inside, what do you find in that well?
They open the door to that and then empower the player to either be a little shit and go.
I find all the gold in the world in a purple sword.
And you can be like and, as the daydream fades, you stand there holding your dick in your hand in an empty well.
You know, punish them for overreach, but start teaching them that they can contribute to this narrative too.
I love that.
I feel like that is a definitive Matt Mercer moment of you going like what is, as you go to the well, what do you find within it?
Because all I could think in my heart was going all right, wise guy, what's in the fucking well?
Oh, Captain Well wants to find some hidden shit.
Okay, what's up, my man?
This is where there are different schools of thought.
Different schools, different stylistic thoughts about what might be in a given well.
It's so fun.
Sometimes you don't want to be angry about playing lint in a game.
Sometimes you're trying your best to make that lint matter.
I know, I was just surprised they invited us and not noted Dragon Master Katie Maravich to this.
We should get Katie in on this one.
I think she's actually waiting in the green room.
As we make our way into Los Angeles, California.
As a piece of lint, do I have like a natural affinity for the landscape of Los Angeles?
Okay, you're really trying.
You're trying to believe in this so hard.
You watched your game not only become a TV show, but become like that TV show became like a television show, became an animated show.
What was that experience like?
I've heard stories over the years of how many television shows and movies had some spark of inspiration at a home game.
There's a lot of talented writers directors, performers through the history of film and television who came up in the 70s and found their love of this storytelling form through DD and then used those lessons to make all the rest of their career.
They just didn't tell anyone about it because, like we said earlier, it was a little embarrassing to say you played DD for a long time.
It was wild to be at a place where we had told these stories that lived in our brain and our imagination so viscerally.
And as lovers of animation and as voice actors, it was like, we always joked, even before we were streaming it and we were playing it at home, man, that whole sequence would be so cool.
I could visualize it in animation and what the fight scene would look like.
It would be so neat.
And through the growth of Critical Role, we kind of had those moments of going, Can we try this now?
Can we give it a shot?
And so, yeah, we developed and pitched it around.
And like a lot of classic pitches in the industry, a lot of spaces were like, thanks for coming in.
We don't really get it.
And we're like, okay.
So our last bastion was to see if the community wanted to speak on that behalf while we were debating if it was going to be worth it or not, because nothing's more embarrassing than launching a big Kickstarter and have it fail miserably at the cusp of trying to make something happen that you've worked so hard on.
But we did.
We did a whole Kickstarter campaign and we're very grateful that the community showed up to show yes, we do want this.
And so, as much as it was us excited to develop it, The majority of its success was the people that had been following our stories and showed that this was something that needed to be made.
Some kind of arcane weapon has crossed our border.
War is coming, and you're our only hope of stopping it.
You got the wrong people.
And that changed the conversation entirely.
The classic media pipeline suddenly was paying attention and a lot of the people we had spoke to previously came back around going We get it now.
We totally get it.
Didn't you say that last time?
That's egg on our face.
Apologies.
We got to have a lot of those meetings again, and we're lucky to find a partner that enabled us to creatively drive this in a way that we didn't think we'd ever have either.
It's been a wild and wonderfully fulfilling experience to take something that was so close and so personal and be kind of in the driver's seat of building the expansion of that creative family, to bring so many talented writers in and show them what we've done and having a lot of them weirdly already know and be aware or fans of it and then bring their special flavor to the mixing pot.
And then, in this adaptation collaboration, take something that was so beloved to us and adapt it into its own beautiful, more grandiose and digestible form.
Let's be real.
Hundreds of episodes at three four, five hours an episode can be a little intimidating for some people to jump into the world of Exandria.
So having these adaptations has been a wonderful way to show people what we're so proud of in a way that doesn't require so much investment and bring in a whole new audience, which has been a delightful facet of that.
So it's been extremely creatively fulfilling, also a big learning experience.
We come in with our mindsets and what we have to offer.
But also part of that collaboration is leaning into the collaboration.
Drive the creative as much as you can, but also respect and appreciate what other people bring into that experience and facilitate an atmosphere of excitement through even the hardest points of trying to get things done in time.
You're doing this now, too, bro.
We've been talking for years.
You're now adapting your Dimension 20 IPs.
You've got Webtoons coming out, other things I'm sure you can't talk about.
For sure.
For me, also, I'm from New York, and we did a show at Madison Square Garden.
We raised 100000 for New York Cares and did one of the largest instances of their winter coat drive ever.
We did this last January.
And it was crazy because the season we were doing was the Unsleeping City, which is magical, New York, like urban fantasy.
There's a secret hidden world of magic behind things.
And the characters in that worked in homeless outreach.
And we had this to be able to like go to this incredible charity and partner with them, raise all this money, do this huge show at this time when people were coming together to like seeing all the fans and then being in this place where I don't know man, I got a hot dog at a cart that I'd walked by every day for years on my way to work on 8th Avenue.
And you're like walking by Madison Square Garden.
The ways in which this thing that started so intimate, so humble, so passionate, and silly and goofy, but also sincere and earnest.
And then suddenly it expands past what you could have ever predicted.
And for you guys again, the honor and joy and privilege of you guys inviting me to come play in your world and I think Matt, especially the gift of coming and being able to play games in Exandria, you know Calamity downfall, divergence how meaningful those games were to me and then to come in for campaign four and and build this world from the ground up and try to give you the experience as a player at the table that you've given so many people and it's very, i don't know man, i'm having the time of my fucking life.
Man, it's a ball.
I'm so glad.
Can i, can i express to you my favorite part of that?
Uh, that madison square garden show?
I don't think i ever told you this.
Yes yes yes, yes.
Wait yeah, Matt was, you were there in the skybox with my mom.
I wasn't gonna miss that for a second.
My favorite part of that show was not watching your intro.
It was watching your mom watch your intro, because I was sitting right next to her in that box and we got to talk, leading right up to the beginning and to the point where your mom had to shush a few people in the box because she's like this is my mom moment, shh.
But like getting to watch her expression, getting to watch that, like that pride, that emotion, that joyful acceptance that this boy that she forged is now showing a generation what it means to collaboratively tell a story in front of a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.
It was incredible to be in the backseat to that moment for her.
I can't imagine, like, I experienced this as all being very surreal.
That's the woman that put a player's handbook in my hands, who went and ordered the pizza for all this who, literally the first day I ever DM'd, I had all my friends over.
I was 10 years old and I looked over at my mom afterwards and she was like sweetie, how did it go?
And I went, that was the most stressful day of my life.
I'm a 10 year old.
It was the most stressful day of my life.
Can we schedule another one for next week?
And that has not stopped.
I remember my folks being like.
You know what I love about you playing these games.
Brandon is.
One day, whatever you actually end up doing, you'll have transferable skills from this to that other thing.
It's true.
Skills don't need to transfer.
It's the exact skills.
It's a one-to-one.
Yep, you cheat-coded it.
Well done.
Do you have any instances?
Because you've been playing this game like me since we were kids, is it a complete surprise that an opportunity to perform DD for an audience comes up?
Or did you ever have an inkling, in all those years of being a DM just for your friends, that there was something here that maybe was bigger than just the people at the table?
I will say I never considered it as a means of consumable media, let alone on a successful level.
Especially, a lot of my experience before streaming Critical Role was in doing web sketches and classic media, in which case the internet at the time was very much It's kind of returned to in some ways.
You know your attention spans about 30 seconds to five minutes.
Anything beyond that is sheer folly to try and present in a successful way.
And so the idea of doing long form unedited storytelling.
You know was it was.
It would be a silly idea.
I never would have thought it would be success successful in that degree.
What I did believe was it was an underappreciated invitation to be creative in a world that tells you you can't be.
Our society has been very steeped in the concept of teaching you how to not play as an adult.
And even to the point where the outlets we do have for play are classically looked down upon.
Video games, oh, these kids don't go outside.
No, it's a way they engage their imaginations and get to exercise that part of exploration through narrative or gameplay.
Always felt that tabletop games was kind of a cheat code for collaborative play for people that had a harder time finding those avenues in life.
And it was that for me growing up and a lot of people that I cared about.
It was a place where we could really bond and learn to care for each other, especially as men.
I consider myself a pretty sensitive boy.
I think a lot of friends would say the same finding spaces where people, especially men, who maybe didn't have a lot of invitations to be as expressive or to show that sort of bond or connection.
It enabled a way to kind of explore those facets of really appreciating each other, of sharing these great moments together, of helping each other and you know heroic, dire circumstances through this imagined narrative and through that learning to trust each other more and more.
And seeing it underserved and misunderstood on a larger scale culturally was frustrating.
It had an opportunity to resonate with a lot more people than was assumed it could.
I didn't think it would resonate on this scale in a larger media outlet like Twitch, and then now through all the weird things we get to do.
The business aspect of it really caught me off guard.
And I think we're still figuring every time we get caught up to the last concept of like okay, I think now we understand what we have.
Another door gets kicked open and it's like slow down.
Yeah.
Slow down.
We're going to be on the channel with Oscar winners talking about playing D&D.
Right.
That's happening literally right now.
It's crazy.
And with respect, I find ill-advised.
It's crazy.
It's awesome.
10 years of doing this near weekly, having the opportunity to have expanded this like family of creatives and dear friends that include you know you abria erica, all these these, these people that i, i really care for and have gotten to know well, and to have the opportunity now to be like hey, I really appreciate your work.
We've built this space to create a multitude of very specific kind of experiences that maybe you don't have the opportunity to tell.
Would you be interested in taking my chair and to have you not just consider it, but to then come in here and sprint with it to build a whole new world, to craft a multi-tiered multi-table, intricate narrative?
We're all a little crazy, I guess you could say.
You more than most.
But also many people that pull it off.
It's been such a joy not only just to watch what's been happening, but to occasionally be able to come in as a player.
Anybody out there who's been a GM and then a player takes over to let them be a player is such a gift.
And if you're a player, go GM a game for your GM.
Give them a chance to play.
A hand from an invisible figure reaches forward as the invisibility is dropped and a black clad member of House Taconis, reaches their hand up immaterially through the skin under his jaw, reaches inside his head and pulls his skull out of his head immaterially.
I had an interview last year where somebody asked like you know, Critical Role, you've built this media empire.
You're doing, you know, animated stuff.
You're developing live action, interactive books, comic books, the whole thing.
What's next?
And I was like, I got nothing.
What a mean question.
It is.
And it seems so classically industry.
But maybe I'm just not ambitious enough and I'm okay with that.
But I did it all, man.
I've already far exceeded anything I thought I would ever be able to accomplish in my life.
So everything else is gravy.
And now the responsibility of this platform to me is how best can I enable it to show off other people's passions and other people's stuff?
And this is just an extension, an example of that.
And I'm just so happy.
It is a rare thing to both be as gifted and prolific as you are and to truly embody and exemplify celebrating everybody around you, which is like which I think you are.
You are an emblem for that for lifting people up, for providing those spaces, for Taking a Herculean skill set and constantly communicating.
This is for you too.
Everybody, I want you to have what I have.
It's a beautiful thing.
And, like you're saying, it's very interesting because we're here doing this interview in this context.
We're having this conversation in this context, which you only have because of its significance in this world.
And there's ambitions, relationship to success and what this all means.
I am a very ambitious person.
And the constant mantra for me that you just said is, everything past this is gravy.
My ambition is I wanna run a little bit faster today than I ran yesterday.
That's my ambition.
If I love this, I wanna do it the most that I can.
Ambition as acquisition, I think is a net negative for the human species.
I think that that idea of If you don't know how to have enough, that is a problem that some could say is destroying the planet.
Yeah.
On many scales.
On many scales.
The ability to know what is enough.
And like you're saying, getting that question sometimes of like, what's next?
What's the next big thing?
How are you growing?
Because if you're not growing, you're shrinking.
And shrinking is death.
Numbers have to go up.
Numbers have to go up, right?
Number go up, number go up.
Is you go like, well...
I think that in terms of what is next, I just want to keep going on adventures with my friends.
And it's a wild thing.
Two, in terms of larger industry, and we talked about the incredible adaptations legend box machina, mighty nine, you know you guys are there are these these bizarre ways in which this hobby is now opening doors in hollywood in a way that who could have anticipated it?
But you're walking into those spaces and through those doors and i think it's really helpful for for people to hear that like, Whatever your ambition is, I have made every choice to avoid success at every turn.
Imagine, imagine a 10 year old kid being like, there's a gap in the market.
Time to start playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I've nailed it.
I see the opening on the field.
Like, no, man, no.
I picked a game that got your head put in toilets and I played it hard.
And then I said, time to get serious.
Let's do free improv in a basement.
Yeah.
I've seen conversations or there have been discussions about, like how long this was plotted, about how Critical Role was all manufactured as ultimate goal.
And going back to that point, it was like, Ooh, fucking new, bro.
It's wild to look back on how this whole thing has happened, but to that same degree, through this, building platforms in which we're not reliant on external systems.
We started on Twitch and YouTube and we still stream to those places.
But it's also very dangerous from a business standpoint to put all of your stakes into a platform that you don't control.
You all, thankfully, had the foresight when you were creating Dropout at the get-go.
And in the fallout nuking of College Humor, those of you that climbed forward, the right people, climbed up and rebuilt a much better space.
That is now doing better than College Humor ever did.
Absolutely.
And a lot better than a lot of people in this space have been trying to do for 20-plus years.
And that's a testament to creatives having the opportunity, through a community that will support them, to build a space and have the right people in leadership to do so.
We took a lesson from even Dropout to build our beacon platform to help us decouple from relying on outside platforms.
And it's already been a wonderful place to invite opportunity, invite a community to support us and now give us the opportunity to, through this platform, possibly bring in other partners and give them a place to live too.
Where you have ever felt your play at the table being impacted, you know, from the sort of silly or glib of like lol, that's going to be a t-shirt to the quite large, of being like oh, the choices we make here could be happening in an animated show seven years from now.
Right like, do you have that on your mind when you're performing, not when we're performing?
After the fact, there'll be a moment like, oh man, that'd be so cool to see in a cartoon.
Maybe we can.
But it's never in the moment.
I think the weight of responsibility has definitely felt not at the table.
Like okay.
Well, I hope people like this campaign because a lot of people's healthcare is relying on it.
It's the new responsibility of.
Through success comes continued responsibility and wanting to do right by everybody who is part of that collaboration.
I never thought we'd be in a position where somehow a company that started with playing DD, we have employees, you know, and good people, that we care about deeply and do everything we can to share in that prosperity and take care of.
And that is a weight of its own, you know.
But I would say that's never lost on us.
But we're also very careful to silo our experience at the table from the rest of the world.
The best compliment that you can get paid if you do this kind of work is someone saying I saw you do it and then went and did it myself.
It's the absolute best.
I talk about with touring, which has been a wild part of this as well.
There are parts where you're like I've kept the candle lit.
It's just like my home game.
And then sometimes you walk out into an arena and you're like, this is not like my home game.
Nope.
You try and capture as much as you can.
But once you cross that threshold and you hear the thousands upon thousands of voices, you're like oh, I get sports now.
Oh, no.
I was in the audience with Iz when Travis rolled those two Nat 20s as Grog.
I've never heard a human noise like that in my life.
It was shockingly loud.
People went berserk.
Actually the show's been doing arenas and there's, There's thousands upon thousands, upon thousands of people.
You walk out, and I remember a friend being like, what's the part of that that's the coolest?
And I was like for me touring in the live shows.
The coolest part is at intermission the house lights go up and you peek through the curtain and you see all the people cosplaying as the characters from your show.
Absolutely.
You're a cosplay, sick dice swap, exchange numbers.
Let's get together, like even especially in this time period too like the ability to have uh shows or or storytelling that like celebrates groups of people that warrant celebration and need to be reminded that they have people that are their supporters and champions and people that celebrate them and accept them, and in a time where there are forces trying to make people feel alone, you can have 20 000 people adamantly proving that they are not alone.
Is it tomorrow?
No, it's not tomorrow.
Then i cannot die in terms of thinking of like advice for young people.
I moved to la it's very much to pursue a career in entertainment.
It was really, you know, go west, young man, seek your fortune.
Got here siobhan thompson, who i knew from new york, having a birthday party on the rooftop of a hotel in hollywood somewhere, And I got cornered at the party which sounds aggressive, it was lovely by Emily Axford, who had been my favorite Herald Night performer.
She was on this team called Ragnarok in New York.
And she was like, you play D&D, right?
And I said, yeah, I run games.
And she and Siobhan and Zac Oyama and Murph were all there.
John Wolfe, who's a producer at Dimension 20, and Travis Helwig, who works for Crooked Media, all started in that home game.
All of them came onto this show.
It was this crazy conference of events but, like you're saying, you know.
I also, man, I love this game so much.
There was that great moment the first time we were all playing.
I was playing with improvisers who all had that comedic gift and it was fun.
Everyone made their characters.
In the very first session, I had that moment of they'd met a beloved NPC and they were laughing.
They went off to go find some goblins in the woods somewhere and they came back and there was smoke rising over the hut of the beloved NPC.
And I was like by letting slip that she is a witch of this old thing.
It seems the baron's men have descended on her hut and burnt it.
And I watched all these comedians who for 45 minutes had been like, ha ha, what happened?
And lock in.
And like watching someone who is like a true, like lightspeed talented, funny comedian be like by my life or death, I will see justice done here this day.
And you're like, got him.
The vast majority of people who are close to me in my life I've come.
I've either met through inviting them to a game, or I knew them and then I wanted to game with them, to become closer.
Yes.
You know even the founders of Critical Role with me.
I kind of knew the majority of them as acquaintances in the voiceover industry.
Many of us knew each other and we had collaborated on the same, like video games and cartoons, and we'd see each other in the booth or passing at an event and be like Hi.
Yeah.
Good to see you.
I'll take care.
And I was always the awkward kid.
It was like, man, everyone's so cool.
How do I talk to them?
And I, I dropped the question at times.
So would there be like a social gathering, a work gathering?
I'd be like, Hey, well, if someone here ever like played D and D or play any role playing games.
And if one of them said like, I've never played, but I mean, how does that work?
I'm like, okay.
So let's just take 10 minutes.
I'm going to talk to you about how great this thing is.
And then if you come play with me, we can become friends.
It was very much that sort of an exchange.
And that's how all of us got together.
I offered to run a game for Liam O'Brien who, at the time, I only really knew as this talented voice actor who was directing me in a video game, who I wanted to get to know better.
And so I offered to run a game for him and he was like, okay.
Yeah, I'd love that.
Let's invite a few other people.
And so in came Sam Riegel, in came Laura and Travis and Ashley.
They're all people that I knew, but we weren't friends.
But I was so excited to bring them into my life through this game.
And now they're my favorite people in the world.
Yeah.
And that is a consistent thread through the majority of my friend circle.
And I've continued to hear stories of people who, through watching our content and following us through the years, have had the same exact experience.
Yes.
Meet them at conventions, meet them at events and hear how they're like.
Thanks to this game, thanks to your game, which is always wild but wonderful, they've then created their own games.
Yes.
And then found their found family.
