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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9772801" data-attributes="member: 6988941">The first episode seemed like an awesome game for everyone involved but not likely to be something I watch much more of."Other people playing D&D" is something that has to be at least partially a second screen activity for me or I'm just never going to find the time to get through a whole campaign. I tried to second screen this while playing Crusader Kings III, a game which, when there's not a war or a very high stakes event chain is about as low in attention demands for me as any activity I might try to watch this during, and I couldn't follow any of it. I had to find a youtube video to walk me through who the characters were afterwards. The actual show seemed like the opening chapter of a novel artfully introducing characters through scenes and interactions, which I appreciate when I'm reading or sitting to watch a movie or prestige television drama, but my relationship with liveplays is more like throwing on a sitcom. I don't want to do the work of unteasing whom these folk are, I just want obvious trope characters getting into situations. It's not that I don't love some well earned moments of drama or character development, those are, of course, amazing. But it feels like Critical Role has hyperfocused on the moments of earned drama that used to be highlights as a light seasoning on a fight monsters and get into hijinks show, and are just dumping a drama spice jar's entire contents onto every episode. Yes it began with a funeral, but I'm in a Daggerheart group that started with a funeral the other day, but that just meant about five minutes of melodrama before we were killing monsters, dropping one-liners, and getting into shenanagans. In other words, exploring characters' grief in depth is a choice and while I can see how it is a rewaring choice for an actor or for an attentive viewer, I'm not always an attentive viewer when the "show" is a four hour D&D session.I don't know quite why it is that I could get all the way through campaign 1 but bounce off all the subsequent Critical Role efforts (I did get like 40-some episodes in to campaign 2 and enjoyed it but then lost my place and haven't been back to it, and I only managed 4 or 5 episodes into campaign 3). I think it's partly just that I was still learning to play and run the game when I started campaign 1 and so the mechanical gameplay side of things engaged me more at first and I was invested by time my interest in that stuff diminished. But if the "excited new D&D player jazzed to see how the game is supposed to be played" variant of me from a decade-ish ago encountered this opening he also would have probably bounced off of it because there was so little gameplay involved. I am actually a little confused now why they didn't just play Daggerheart if they are only going to bust out actual game mechanics once in a blue moon in the midst of their strange semi-improv theater show, but I assume the first episode (with characters to introduce and most the unexpected things for the players arising from their interactions) isn't really representative of how most of it will play.Anyway I'll give it another chance, but don't have high hopes for it becoming part of my regular entertainment diet. If a show is going to make this level of attention demands of the audience episodes need to not be 3 hours long. Hopefully I'll catch it in scripted, digestible cartoon show form in like 5-7 years.</blockquote>

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