D&D General Critical Role Investigation Into Complaint

A couple of weeks ago, Critical Role was accused of commissioning work from one of their community members, but of not paying for that work. The company immediately undertook to investigate the claim, and made this statement, indicating that no work was commissioned or received from the person in question, and no such agreement was in place.

The person who made the complaint referred to online bullying within the Critical Role fandom.

The full announcement reads:

 PRESS RELEASE

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A couple weeks ago, an individual made statements online claiming that he provided work for Critical Role without payment. Critical Role took these allegations seriously and immediately sought to investigate the situation. After an extensive investigation directed by outside counsel, it has been concluded that Critical Role never established, or intended to establish, any employment, independent contractor relationship, consulting arrangement or any other type of work-related contract with that member of the community.

This individual voluntarily reached out to Critical Role with concerns around his own experience with online bullying. Critical Role does not condone online bullying or harassment of any kind, and an employee within the company listened with the sole purpose of being an understanding ear. The correspondences on Discord reflect an empathetic dialogue with a concerned member of the community and not the providing of any professional services to Critical Role by this individual. Nothing in the communications established any professional, employment, or contractual relationship with Critical Role. After months of casual interaction, the individual made an inquiry to the Critical Role employee about possibly being engaged by Critical Role as a consultant to the company. Upon receiving this request, the Critical Role employee immediately and clearly declined the request.

The importance of helping cultivate and encourage positive and inclusive spaces for Critters has always been a huge priority for us well before this interaction. Although we understand that there is only so much we can control within unofficial online communities and platforms, Critical Role has been working on new policies to ensure that we’re clear with you about what we stand for, and more importantly, what we do not stand for. You’ll hear more about this in the coming months.

Thank you for your ongoing support. Harassment of any kind is unacceptable, so please be kind, and don’t forget to love each other.

Critical Role

 

[Mercurius]

Yo, we're doing a ZEITGEIST setting book later this year. Plenty of conspiracies in there. Not sure if it's controversial enough. I mean, people have pretty heated philosophical disagreements, and the intro adventure has someone trying to commit murder because they don't like an author's latest work. Does that count?

Only if it makes people mad.

 

[DemoMonkey]

The really great thing about social media in general and Twitter in particular is that it allows mobs to be formed (in virtual space) faster than at any time in history.

And we all know the reasoned and enlightened progress that mobs always bring us.

I, for one, welcome our new mob overlords!

 

[Umbran]

... the rest of me wonders if they actually legit mean it and, if so, why they feel that way?

There's a pretty strong argument that human social skills and cognitive patterns (like, our various cognitive biases, our tendency to put emotional stakes n the ground when we make assertions, etc.) are such that, in fact, modern social media is not something we can handle on a large scale. And that while there are good uses for the tool, the negatives far outweigh them. Basically, we are not ready for this tool, and we do squat-all to make ourselves ready for it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Reddit ... I still have no clue how to navigate Reddit. I mean, I know there must be stuff in there that is relevant to me and high quality. But how would I go about finding it?

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

https://twitter.com/askhistorians

When looking for a relevant topic I usually just Google "askhistorians [TopicName]".

Twitter is more like hundreds of different people, each playing a different song all at the same time.

The great thing about Twitter is that you choose who to follow. If you choose bad follows then Twitter will be bad. If you choose good ones then it will be good. It's my favourite form of social media. I find it best for threads and succinctly made points rather than debate though, so perhaps it's not what you're looking for.

 

[PrinceMorganti]

As someone who has a love hate relationship with how Reddit works... Reddit is both forum at the smaller scales, and full on youtube comments section at the larger scales. It is actually the worst of all worlds when it comes to being a reasonable way to do social media.

However, it has great subreddits with all kinds of cute animals. The RPG and RPG adjecent subreddits make good additions to things like EnWorld and RPG.Net and such. Any singl e topic subreddit is also going to be mostly ok depending on that specific subject. For actual discussions its blah. For headline curation and surface level thoughts its also ok, at least in my experiances.

The important thing though is to actually customize your feed and get away from /all.

 

[jmartkdr2]

(snip)

Hiring outside counsel costs significant money and is typically only undertaken in the face of quantifiable litigation risks.

It could also be essentially a PR decision - they want to reinforce the idea that they take issues like this seriously, and that they're certain that this complaint has no merit - and they went the extra mile to make sure of that.

In other words, "internal investigation" might not have been a strong enough response, so they went a step further and hired an outside lawyer.

If you have the money to do that, this makes some sense.

 

[MarkB]

As someone who has a love hate relationship with how Reddit works... Reddit is both forum at the smaller scales, and full on youtube comments section at the larger scales. It is actually the worst of all worlds when it comes to being a reasonable way to do social media.

However, it has great subreddits with all kinds of cute animals. The RPG and RPG adjecent subreddits make good additions to things like EnWorld and RPG.Net and such. Any singl e topic subreddit is also going to be mostly ok depending on that specific subject. For actual discussions its blah. For headline curation and surface level thoughts its also ok, at least in my experiances.

The important thing though is to actually customize your feed and get away from /all.

I went through a period of using Reddit for discussion of videogames I was into, and there were some good experiences. But it's all driven by the popularity contest, the need to stay at the top of the Hot feed or see your topic fade into obscurity. Once I found myself making posts and comments more on the basis of whether they'd attract those Likes than whether they were actually useful or informative, I quickly fell out of love with it.

 

[PrinceMorganti]

I went through a period of using Reddit for discussion of videogames I was into, and there were some good experiences. But it's all driven by the popularity contest, the need to stay at the top of the Hot feed or see your topic fade into obscurity. Once I found myself making posts and comments more on the basis of whether they'd attract those Likes than whether they were actually useful or informative, I quickly fell out of love with it.

Yeah. I rarely comment, i mostly use it to curate headlines and look at animal pictures. I like reading the comments to take a pulse on the crazy though. Coz I have issues lol..

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I like forums.

Forums allow people to have a decent discussion on a particular topic − sometimes even a productive one.

Twitter is more like hundreds of different people, each playing a different song all at the same time.

Reddit ... I still have no clue how to navigate Reddit. I mean, I know there must be stuff in there that is relevant to me and high quality. But how would I go about finding it? And the way the comment ranking works, even if I find something neat, its hard to have a conversation about.

Yeah. Forums have benefits.

By cultivating and curating what pops up on my timeline, my experience of twitter is basically the same as my experience here, but broader in topic, and more immediate in conversations.

I get people replying to things I said 5 years ago in both places though, every once in a while.

 

[Storyteller Hero]

If there's no contract, and no submittable evidence of commissioning work, then this could be as simple as an amateur getting pranked on the internet by a third party, or a person with mental health issues making up things.