Critical Role to Use D&D 2024 Rules For Campaign Four, Expands to Three Tables and Thirteen Players

Critical Role will continue to use Dungeons & Dragons as the play system for its upcoming campaign, with the cast expanding to three distinct tables consisting of a total of 13 players. Today, Critical Role announced new details about its new campaign, which is set to air on October 4th. The new campaign will feature the full founding cast members as players, alongside several new players. In total, the cast includes Laura Bailey, Luis Carazo, Robbie Daymond, Aabria Iyengar, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Matthew Mercer, Whitney Moore, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Alexander Ward, and Travis Willingham, with the previously announced Brennan Lee Mulligan serving as GM.

The campaign itself will be run as a "West Marches" style of campaign, with three separate groups of players exploring the world. The groups are divided into gameplay styles, with a combat-focused Soldiers group, a lore/exploration-focused Seekers group, and a intrigue-focused Schemers group. All three groups will explore the world of Araman, created by Mulligan for the campaign.

Perhaps most importantly, Critical Role will not be switching to Daggerheart for the fourth campaign. Instead, they'll be opting for the new 2024 ruleset of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Daggerheart will be represented at Critical Role via the Age of Umbra and "other" Actual Play series, as well as partnerships with other Actual Play troupes.

 

[SlyFlourish]

How might we determine if there’s a sponsorship or not? If Critical Role starts advertising D&D Beyond or uses D&D branding at all, is that a good sign that they’ve taken a paid sponsorship? If they don’t show a lot of D&D branding or any sort of DDB use, would that be a sign there isn’t a paid sponsorship?

Other than one of the two groups simply stating that there’s a paid sponsorship going on, what would tell us that there is or is not?

And does it really matter one way or the other? Does it change your view of CR to know they take paid sponsorships like this? We know they take money for ad spots already, right? And tons of money for general ads on Twitch and YouTube. They’re a multi million dollar company — quite a bit more than a bunch of nerdy voice actors playing D&D.

It honestly doesn’t bother me one way or another but I’m not a huge Critical Role fan. I’m just fascinated by the whole thing.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I can't say I've personally seen people say that 5e succeeded because of CR, if anything I've heard of more people get pointed towards D&D because of Stranger Things. There are noticeable bumps on the search graphs after Stranger Things and BG3 come out in their respective media. CR is more of a slow burn (like the rest of the actual-play groups.)

I started playing D&D again without actual-play influence, but I can completely understand how people would have gotten into D&D (and TTRPGs more generally) because of CR.

“More and more people are finding out about Dungeons & Dragons, not through family and friends, which has always been the way that people find out about most things in our culture,” says Greg, “but now, streaming is the number one reported answer for how people find out about and want to get into Dungeons & Dragons. It surpassed friends and family for the first time ever that we’ve known in our surveys.”

Insight Check: Greg Tito of Wizards of the Coast Talks About The Future of D&D

It’s not a stretch to say that Dungeons & Dragons is at the height of popularity, from a certain campaign currently gracing billboards in Los Angeles to a number of livestreams both official and unofficial now on Twitch. At this year’s Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, Washington, Dungeons &...

nerdist.com

“Over half of the new people who started playing Fifth Edition (the game’s most recent update, launched in 2014) got into D&D through watching people play online,” says Nathan Stewart, senior director of Dungeons & Dragons.

The rise of D&D liveplay is changing how fans approach roleplaying

From Stranger Things’ Dungeons & Dragons obsession to the YouTube and Twitch players becoming online celebrities, RPGs are now public entertainment

web.archive.org

 

[thatOneLinuxDM]

Insight Check: Greg Tito of Wizards of the Coast Talks About The Future of D&D

It’s not a stretch to say that Dungeons & Dragons is at the height of popularity, from a certain campaign currently gracing billboards in Los Angeles to a number of livestreams both official and unofficial now on Twitch. At this year’s Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, Washington, Dungeons &...

nerdist.com

The rise of D&D liveplay is changing how fans approach roleplaying

From Stranger Things’ Dungeons & Dragons obsession to the YouTube and Twitch players becoming online celebrities, RPGs are now public entertainment

web.archive.org

Thanks, this is fascinating, but it's still predominantly anecdotal as opposed to the search graph peaks for Stranger Things and BG3. It doesn't refute my original point that streams are going to be more of a slow burn either?

I'm not dismissing CR or other streamers at all (see my original post,) I'm just pointing out that they're a smaller part of the picture across the lifetime of D&D 2014.

Also, unfortunately, that article is from 2018 so it would be much more interesting to have relevant data from 2024/5, I'd love for WotC to release that. With my data analyst hat on for a moment, a point in time snapshot like the article is fine as a data point, but it can't be used as a measure of future growth or different markets.

Edit: Just to add, I'm not saying that every Stranger Things fan or BG3 player is going to immediately go out and buy D&D, as with the streamer example, it's just interesting data to include. My own experiences are also anecdotal so as far as data goes, they're effectively irrelevant because the sample size is too small and bespoke.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Thanks, this is fascinating, but it's still predominantly anecdotal as opposed to the search graph peaks for Stranger Things and BG3. It doesn't refute my original point that streams are going to be more of a slow burn either?

I'm not dismissing CR or other streamers at all (see my original post,) I'm just pointing out that they're a smaller part of the picture across the lifetime of D&D 2014.

Also, unfortunately, that article is from 2018 so it would be much more interesting to have relevant data from 2024/5, I'd love for WotC to release that.

It came from big longitudinal surveys they ran back then. Way bigger surveys than we typically see in this hobby. It wasn’t anecdotal.

WOTC definitely has more at stake making sure these observations are right than we do.

I don’t know what evidence we have to day that things changed since then. If anything, streaming grew in popularity. If you have equally wide reaching data to the contrary, I’m all ears.

Google search data shows spikes that correlate with those releases. Surely they are huge boosts for the brand and game (which is why we had a vecna adventure and get to buy a sourcebook pushing Baldurs Gate for the fourth time in ten years). But the steady growth of popularity due to streaming wouldn’t show up as spikes like that.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Here’s another:

"It's widely agreed that [the most recent edition] is the most successful edition of D&D ever, and that is largely accounted for from the success of streaming and live play," Bilsland said.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/07/nx-s1-5489813/dungeons-dragons-dimension-20-critical-role-madison-square-garden-stadium

 

[thatOneLinuxDM]

It came from big longitudinal surveys they ran back then. Way bigger surveys than we typically see in this hobby. It wasn’t anecdotal.

WOTC definitely has more at stake making sure these observations are right than we do.

I don’t know what evidence we have to day that things changed since then. If anything, streaming grew in popularity. If you have equally wide reaching data to the contrary, I’m all ears.

Google search data shows spikes that correlate with those releases. Surely they are huge boosts for the brand and game (which is why we had a vecna adventure and get to buy a sourcebook pushing Baldurs Gate for the fourth time in ten years). But the steady growth of popularity due to streaming wouldn’t show up as spikes like that.

It sounds like you're mostly agreeing with me, which I do appreciate, I promise.

In terms of surveys, my main point is that we don't have recent data, and again, with my favourite hat on, I would love to see that data and for it to be made public. Even if we ignore the self-report bias (can't have everything unfortunately.)

The only data we have to go off is the public data, streaming has grown in general in the 7+ years since that data (article,) I agree, but equally (and as with the ST and BG3 examples) we can't directly match consumers to those who actively play D&D without evidence that WotC is unlikely to provide. As much as I would like to believe that an old dataset is still relevant, we just can't take that for granted.

Unfortunately, all I have to go off is my own experience here (and the 'interest' relative data which is biased.)

 

[TiQuinn]

I don’t think you can disentangle the success of 5e from the rise of streaming, CR as the biggest, and most well known AP any more than you can disentangle the success in the broader TTRPG market from Kickstarter/Backerkit. All of these forces worked together in my eyes to lift all boats.

 

[AlViking]

nah, they did not shift at all, but maybe you misunderstood my point


agreed, that is why I called it platform independent


no one says it has to be a one person job, much like most apps aren't one developer either. Heck, many commercial TTRPG products aren't either


never said there was, I said there is no real difference between doing so as a designer of TTRPGs / supplements or as a developer


I was not comparing WotC to MS, my point was

You were responding to a post where I was responding to this post Post in thread 'Critical Role to Use D&D 2024 Rules For Campaign Four, Expands to Three Tables and Thirteen Players' Critical Role to Use D&D 2024 Rules For Campaign Four, Expands to Three Tables and Thirteen Players where the argument was that D&D is somehow actively harmful to other games (other than competition).

The post claimed that D&D's market dominance was just the same as the dominance of Windows. I don't see much similarity in how they became dominant or in the restrictions software developers have and people who publish products for TTRPGs.

If you're publishing D&D supplements, that's your choice. Nothing stops you from publishing your own game in addition to that product. Nothing stops you from focusing solely on stand-alone games. For software it's different, you have to choose the platform(s). That's all I was trying to say, software development is never done in a vacuum, developers are always dependent on something else.

 

[thatOneLinuxDM]

I don’t think you can disentangle the success of 5e from the rise of streaming, CR as the biggest, and most well known AP any more than you can disentangle the success in the broader TTRPG market from Kickstarter/Backerkit. All of these forces worked together in my eyes to lift all boats.

Right, and I'm definitely not trying to do so, as I said to SlyFlourish.

 

[thatOneLinuxDM]

Here’s another:

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/07/nx-s1-5489813/dungeons-dragons-dimension-20-critical-role-madison-square-garden-stadium

This is interesting, again, but it's not data. I like the citations, they're an interesting read.

Again, it doesn't sound like we actually disagree on anything? But I concede that I could be missing your point.