robus
Lowcountry Low Roller
Actors at least know how and why to go after what they want in a scene and always have an objective to strive for. Which in turns actually pushes the story forward and makes the drama compelling. Most of these other streams have just regular people listen to a DM narrate what's going on for 2 minutes and then respond with stuff like "I open the door." Not exactly the most interesting thing to listen to in the world.
I think this is key and probably why the game feels so "unrealistic" to many D&D regulars. Certainly in my game my players rarely talk to each other in character about their characters, there's literally no curiosity about the characters themselves, it's just onward with the adventure. Now some of that is because two of the players have pre-gen characters from the starter set (so little investment in the chars themselves), but still their lack of interest in developing their characters has been an interesting contrast to what happens on Critical Role. Basically I feel like I have to do most of the "creating" in the game (which is normal I know) but thanks to the creative contribution from the Critical Role players Matt gets a lot of hooks for him to develop so it ends up being a very virtuous cycle. He gives them hooks for immediate adventures and they in turn give him hooks for future developments. It's very cool to see.