Critical Role: Matthew Mercer Feels Uncomfortable With This Part Of The Fandom

Ever since it began in 2015, "Critical Role" has been steadily growing more and more popular. As one of the first online actual play titles of its kind, the series has not only gotten to ride the surge in popularity of tabletop roleplaying games like "Dungeons & Dragons," but has also been able to partly define what many viewers expect from other shows like it. Meanwhile, the first two seasons of Amazon Prime Video's "The Legend of Vox Machina," which is based on the events of the first "Critical Role" campaign, have only brought more viewers to the original series that inspired it.

The past eight years have, in other words, been extremely kind to "Critical Role" and its cast members. That said, with immense success inevitably comes a few problems. For "Critical Role" Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer, the series' popularity has had one notably negative side effect. As he's often been the first to note, the quality of his and his fellow cast members' "D&D" campaigns has unintentionally raised amateur players' expectations for their own games to unrealistic heights. In a recent interview with Slate, Mercer discussed the unfortunate phenomenon at length.

"We're actors, and performance is a place that we exist in for our work and for our training. And we now have thousands of hours of playing 'Dungeons & Dragons' behind that," Mercer explained. "You can't expect to be there on your first session. One of the downsides of the growth of 'Critical Role' is a lot of people put me on a pedestal that I didn't want, and that makes me really uncomfortable. I hate to think that I'm being used as a cudgel for new players."

The quality of the storytelling on "Critical Role" has earned it plenty of praise and criticism over the years. Many have accused it of creating unrealistic expectations for new "Dungeons & Dragons" players, while others have genuinely raised questions about whether "Critical Role" is scripted (spoiler alert: it's not). Elsewhere, certain veteran "D&D" players have coined a term known as "The Matt Mercer Effect," which refers to the ways in which some rookie players now tend to unfairly compare their own Dungeons Masters' techniques to Mercer's. 

In his interview with Slate, the "Critical Role" DM acknowledged the attention and scrutiny he's received for his impact on the "D&D" community. "There are many people who tell me, every day, that they hate how I game master," he observed. "There are people who laud me far more than I deserve and people who hate me far more than I deserve." Years ago, the "Critical Role" cast member even commented on a Reddit post about "The Matt Mercer Effect," writing, "Every table is different, and should be!" At the time, he added, "There is so much fun variety to how a TTRPG can be played, [players are] limiting their chances to enjoy it by trying to 'play it just like us.'"

Ultimately, viewers aren't meant to look at "Critical Role" as a guide for how to play "D&D." Instead, they should view it as just one example of what a high-level game can be. It's meant to entertain and inspire — not create unreasonable expectations. The same goes for Mercer himself, who may be a legendary name in the "D&D" community now, but whose style shouldn't be held as a standard that all other DMs are forced to meet.