Critical Role

What happened

Around 2013, voice actor Matthew Mercer finally persuaded his friend and colleague Liam O'Brien to play a game of Dungeons & Dragons. For O'Brien's birthday Mercer ran a simplified fourth-edition one-shot for a table of fellow voice actors who would form most of the eventual cast; Ashley Johnson joined from the second session. They enjoyed it so much that it became a campaign, switching to the Pathfinder rules and meeting roughly once every six weeks for sessions of up to eight hours.

After Johnson mentioned the game to Felicia Day, Day's company Geek & Sundry asked to stream it. The players insisted on keeping the game as it was, a group at a table rather than a video-game adaptation, and agreed to stop if the cameras spoiled their fun. To streamline play for an audience the characters were converted to fifth-edition D&D, then less than a year old, and Critical Role premiered on Twitch on March 12, 2015, joining the adventuring party Vox Machina in the middle of its story. Fans named themselves "Critters." The first campaign ran 115 episodes, ending in October 2017.

Why it mattered

Critical Role made tabletop play watchable. Its episodes run three to five hours, yet audiences stayed for the performances: trained actors improvising in character, and a Dungeon Master voicing an entire world. Its production choices, above all the composite screen showing players and DM side by side in separate camera boxes, became the dominant layout of the Actual Play genre. It arrived just as fifth edition was bringing lapsed and new players to D&D, and critics have credited actual play, with Critical Role at its head, with helping to drive the tabletop resurgence of the 2010s; the show became a showcase for official products and for the digital toolset D&D Beyond, a long-time sponsor (see Virtual Tabletops).

The cast also built a business. Critical Role Productions, incorporated in 2015, split from Geek & Sundry in 2019, moved the show to its own channels and studio, and retained ownership of its intellectual property. In March 2019 it launched a Kickstarter for a 22-minute animated special; the campaign closed at about $11.4 million from 88,887 backers, then the most-funded film or television project on the platform (see Crowdfunding & the Kickstarter Era). Amazon acquired streaming rights, expanded the order, and The Legend of Vox Machina premiered in January 2022; The Mighty Nein, based on the second campaign, followed in November 2025. Official sourcebooks for its world of Exandria appeared, including Wizards of the Coast's Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (2020).

Legacy

The show has kept expanding. Campaign two (2018–21) and campaign three (2021–25) ran for 141 and 121 episodes; live shows have filled venues from Gen Con to London's Wembley arena and New York's Radio City Music Hall; and in 2024 the company launched its own subscription service, Beacon. When a 2021 leak of Twitch payout data circulated, Critical Role was among the platform's top earners, receiving about $9.6 million in gross payouts over two years before taxes and costs.

For its fourth campaign, begun in October 2025, Mercer stepped aside from the DM's chair in favor of Brennan Lee Mulligan of Dimension 20, with an expanded cast and a new world. The handoff marks how far the form has come: Critical Role did not invent actual play, but it turned it into an industry (see The Actual-Play Boom) and made a professional Game Master into something close to a celebrity.