You Find Yourselves in a Tavern:
Dungeons and
Dragons (DnD) and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) in general have seen
a huge burst of popularity in recent years. As a part of this, many people have
taken to playing their games in front of a camera and inviting audiences on the
internet to watch and enjoy the tailor-made stories within. Of all the tables
streaming the dramatic highs and lows of their games, two giants emerged. The first
is Critical Role (CR): a group of prolific voice actors who put their
talents to use giving characters unique personalities and evoking mental images
of brilliant worlds with just words. Later came Dimension 20 (D20): a
professionally produced game with a group of comedians, most of them improv professionals,
showing off the craftsmanship of their design team while exploring topics both
lighthearted and deeply intense. Both have incredible stories, and I know from
experience that both require a large time commitment to watch, but in today’s
world we don’t have a lot of time to spare. So which one is worth your time and
possibly your money? I’ve watched both so you don’t have to. Let’s roll
investigation and find out.
Barter and Trade:
One big concern
for most people wanting to start watching a TTRPG show is accessibility, both
in how easy it is to watch the show and how easy it is to follow along with the
plot. If you are working with a tight budget, then you won’t want to spend
without good reason. Luckily both CR and D20 have episodes on YouTube to watch
for free, though D20 only has three full seasons of their show on YouTube as
well as the first episode of many of their other seasons. The rest of their
content can be found on their home platform, the streaming service Dropout,
which requires a $7 monthly subscription. Alternatively, CR has all three of
their major campaigns on YouTube for free, and they stream their shows on
Twitch, YouTube, and their own streaming service Beacon, with Twitch and
YouTube being free to watch.
Enter if You Dare:
Cost of the
content isn’t the only issue to be concerned with; one must also consider how
easy it is to follow along with the plot and how invested they should be in the
characters. With a total of three multi-year long campaigns finished, CR has a
lot of background lore that is needed to understand much of what happens in
later episodes. In fact, in their third campaign, “Bells Hells,” much of the
storytelling includes callbacks to both of their previous campaigns. This means
that to know what is happening in Campaign 3’s plot, or why one non-player character
showing up was such a huge deal for the table even though the current player
characters didn’t know her yet, would require watching the previous two seasons,
which have a total runtime of 447 hours and 550 hours respectively, with
episode length ranging from four to six hours. Campaign 2 doesn’t have that steep
of a lore learning curve, thankfully, and is often recommended for first time
watchers, but that still leaves Campaign 1’s substantial content to go back
through to follow the plot of Campaign 3. The team behind CR have made it somewhat
easier to catch up on the first campaign through their animated Legends of
Vox Machina show which trims down much of the unneeded scenes and plots
from the campaign and produces the same overall story with a much better flow,
though it does require an Amazon Prime subscription to watch, which as of the
time of this writing was $15 monthly.
Dimension 20
has a current total of twenty-six seasons, most of which are self-contained
worlds, characters, and stories. Nearly all of the episodes of D20 are edited
down, trimming the runtime of the game down to a couple hours per episode, with
their live-shows as an exception. Seasons also range in number of episodes,
from four to 20, and only six of the seasons require watching a previous season
to understand. With the trimmed down episode lengths, it’s much more manageable
to watch D20 and get caught up on just the seasons you want. Let’s use D20’s
twenty-first season: “Fantasy High: Junior Year,” as an example. To get caught
up in the story you would only need to watch “Freshman” and “Sophomore Years,”
and they have a run time of 28 and 52 hours respectively. Catching up on the
first two seasons of “Fantasy High” would take roughly a fifth of the time it
would take to catch up on CR’s first campaign alone. It is worth noting that
D20 does offer “Fantasy High’s” first two seasons on YouTube for free as well,
making it easy to watch without paying and gives you time to decide if you want
to spend money to watch Junior Year. Ultimately, it comes down to how much time
and money you want to spend on getting into the show. CR is free on YouTube,
but it does take a massive time investment to catch up with, meanwhile most of
D20 is locked behind a paywall, but it’s easier to catch up on the much shorter
seasons and episodes. Which is more important is up to you.
The Adventure Along the Way:
Accessibility
isn’t the only factor to decide on what you want to watch, there’s also what
the show is about, the content, and the creative teams behind it. As far as
stories and plot are concerned, as mentioned previously, CR has 3 main
long-form multi-year campaigns, and several mini-seasons and one-off games not
connected to the broader lore. As each campaign is played over the course of
hundreds of hours over several years, the players and the game master, Matthew
Mercer, have the time to develop their characters and the fictional world
around them in ways that feel natural and organic. Four hundred and forty-seven
hours of developing the first adventuring party, Vox Machina, and the
characters have been so thoroughly thought through and fleshed out that the
players feel the same heartbreak their characters do. I joined the audience
feeling that heartbreak and sharing the shock of a plot-twist Mercer blindsided
everyone with. When I watched, at times I felt as if I were watching a professionally
acted drama series. The story is similar to watching The Lord of the Rings
extended editions, if Peter Jackson had translated literally everything in
Tolkien’s books and appendices and The Silmarillion to film.
Comparatively, D20 is not as well developed from a character perspective. Due to having shorter seasons and stories, character arcs and development happen much faster and it’s not always possible to become emotionally attached to an adventuring group or a certain character because there just isn’t enough time with them. The stories, however, are much more thought out even if they’re made up on the spot by game master Brennan Lee Mulligan. The characters and the players are quickly set up with a plot hook and a common goal uniting them. Doing so makes it easier to develop the plot quickly and still have it make sense and be well-received. It’s similar to an anthology show, but instead of a different story each episode, it’s a different genre and story each season. Mulligan tackles adventure, after-school special, mystery, eldritch horror, and many other genres. To put it simply, CR asked the question: would people watch our long-form DnD game? While D20 asked: what if DnD classes were high school classes or what if New York City was also magic or what if Game of Thrones was set in Candyland? When I began watching these shows I started with CR because I had the time to spare for it. Now that my life has gotten busier and my time is more valuable, I find myself enjoying D20 more and more. The mostly self-contained narratives of each season are easier to pick up and watch or set down and come back to later.
Behind the Scenes:
Finally,
production value might not be as important as story and access, but it is still
important. Critical Role began with the players’ home game, the one they
played before the cameras were rolling. The first campaign, especially the
early episodes, really felt like a home game being played in front of cameras,
including when a problem player was removed from the table permanently, which
anyone who’s played a long-term game of DnD would know happens occasionally.
For much of CR’s first campaign, they were really an amateur show. While they
were professional voice actors, they were not a professional production crew
and relied heavily on their parent company Geek & Sundry to produce the
show, which is why all of the first campaign and the early portion of the
second campaign are still on the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel instead of their
own channel.
Meanwhile, D20 has included higher production values from the beginning, with their set design team building their studio, called The Dome, and playing a game of DnD with the idea to edit it and treat it like an actual show. The miniature figurines and battle-maps of D20 are handcrafted by a team of designers with the purpose of enhancing the story, not just for the players but for the viewers at home as well. Recently for both shows the production value has gone up, CR has only grown in popularity and, after an incredibly successful Kickstarter for their animated Amazon series, have been able to build the DnD game room of their dreams to enhance the experience for the players and the audience. The Dome on D20 has also improved, being moved and redesigned at one point where they now project images on the walls of the Dome or stuff it to the brim with fake flowers because of the whims of a guest game master. The set design has also increased with more intricate maps and interactive secrecy screens for the game master.
End of the Journey:
So which DnD
show is right for you? I can’t tell you, but I can say they both offer many of
the same things while having their own unique ways of delivering them. Critical
Role has so much content to get through, but it is all free on YouTube. Its
story has a very in-depth world and natural character development, and Mercer
has expertly woven individual character threads from his players into a
beautiful, if quite large, tapestry of each campaign. Many of the episodes are
skippable filler and travel, but there are nuggets of good story in each one. It
is telling that when adapting the first campaign into the animated show, many
of the good story and character bits that occurred in travel episodes were
combined with many of the story beat advancements to save time and edit down
the story to be more manageable. Dimension 20 has easy to watch seasons
with episodes edited to cut out some of the gameplay unnecessary for moving the
story forward, though most of it is unfortunately locked behind a Dropout
subscription. The stories of each season are relatively self-contained and do
contain unexpected twists due to being unscripted with professional improv
actors. If you have a little extra cash and not a lot of free time on your
hands, I recommend D20. On the other hand, if you are low on disposable income
and have a lot of time lying around, CR is worth the temporal investment, in my
humble opinion. Whichever one you pick, I promise you will enjoy yourself
immensely.
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