Watch Us Roll by Shelly Jones;

Author:Shelly Jones;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

Critical Fails

Fan Reactions to Player and Character Choices in Critical Role

Christine Dandrow

It’s an interesting position, because the livestream TTRPG format feels like a bridge between scripted TV dramas and “unscripted reality TV.” […] In the case of Keyleth and [Critical Role], although the players are doing their best to act as their characters, there’s plenty of time you see the players as themselves, and see them react to the game as themselves, and the community’s criticism of a character can have the unfortunate habit of morphing into criticism of the player as a result.—Anonymous participant

Critical Role is a weekly livestreamed web show in which groups of professional voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons, a phenomenon also known as an “actual play podcast” due to its nature as a game turned into entertainment for viewers. Fans of the show, who call themselves Critters, experience a sort of dual fandom in which the media they consume contains elements of both the actor and the character at different times and occasionally simultaneously in a very explicit way. By livestreaming their game, the cast of Critical Role complicates the role of the fan. Are they a fan of Sam Riegel, Scanlan, ­Sam-Riegel-as-Scanlan, or some combination thereof? Because the nature of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) is such that the ­player-character relationship is not stable (Mackay, 2001), it can be difficult for fans to interpret which actions and beliefs are being espoused by whom. This specific type of entertainment—not just tabletop roleplaying games or livestreamed gaming, but the combination of the two—is so new, having only gotten popular in the past few years (Hall, 2018), that there are not firmly understood frameworks for understanding the ­fan-cast relationship. This study (which consists of a qualitative questionnaire) is concerned with how fans of Critical Role understand their relationship to the show’s cast and characters.

Because there is not yet much research on actual play podcasts or their fans, I first place this research within studies of TTRPGs, then I turn to studies of television fandom as active audiences in order to contextualize the modern ­fan-producer relationship. I then discuss the limited research about fans who watch online video games (including livestreamed games) and how this impacts livestreamed TTRPGs. Ultimately, I argue that livestreamed TTRPGs, as a melting pot of entertainment types, have further complicated the ­fan-producer relationship and altered the way fans perceive narrative and entertainment (as well as whether ­in-game victory is a requirement for quality of both).

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