Mercer, Ray And Willingham Talk 10 Years Of Critical Role At C2E2
Critical Role is celebrating its 10th anniversay by playing live shows in Chicago, Sydney, ... More Melbourne, Indianapolis and New York City.
Ten years ago, a new form of media was born. Critical Role birthed the modern day actual play by gathering a group of friends at a table to play Dungeons and Dragons. It helped that many of these friends were very talented voice actors and that the public was hungry for a show that demystified D&D.
I caught up with Critical Role Co-Founders Matthew Mercer, Marisha Ray and Travis Willingham at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, also known as C2E2. C2E2 was the site of one of the first Critical Role live shows outside of Los Angeles and it was a stop on their tour this year celebrating the show's 10th Anniversary. We talked about their D&D origin stories and the unlikely success of bringing the game to people that have never played it before.
'My grandmother introduced me to fantasy at a young age,' said Matthew Mercer, Chief Creative Officer of Critical Role. 'It was in the mountains of Georgia, in a cabin. You would never know she was obsessed with Tolkien, obsessed with Piers Anthony. She got me reading deep fantasy very young. My parents facilitated that and I am very grateful. My mom was a very involved garage sale purchaser, every weekend, two or three hours which I hated. But she found some very cool books. She got me a Monster Manual because it had all this awesome creature art. It was the only book I had at the time. I loved looking at the art of all these creatures, reading their lore with all these stats which I didn't understand but I thought it was really cool. When I was in high school, I was part of the 'Popular Arts Club' which was the public facing term for a nerdy comic book/video game club. The guys who were the heads of the club were track kids; fit, secret nerds. I helped do some design work for the club and they asked if I wanted to play in their Dungeons and Dragons game. What? I ran home, made a character and joined their game. I came in with this backstory to my character, showed up and they were just these slapstick players. Which is fine, but I had built this idea in my head of a collaborative story and an imaginative world. But no, we're maying dick jokes and talking about barbarians. I ended up leaving that game after a few sessions, asked two of my friends if they wanted to play and then learned to DM on the fly because nobody else would.'
'Growing up in Kentucky, I knew of Dungeons & Dragons,' said Marisha Ray, Creative Director of Critical Role. 'But no one to play with, never even crossed my mind. I was into Magic The Gathering a little bit into high school. That was when I knew what Wizards of the Coast was. I came to Los Angeles, met [Matt]
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'The first time I saw a D&D book was in Dallas, Texas at my local hobby shop,' said Travis Willingham, CEO of Critical Role. 'I was looking at comic books, trying to sneak into the adult section to read some Heavy Metal. I got stuck at a beautiful looking book that had a knight and an axe and there was a dragon, It said Dungeons and Dragons. I thought it looked amazing, I opened it up, saw a bunch of words and I said 'Not for me!''
While Willingham might have bounced off the game in his local bookshop, he came back to play at Matt Mercer's table. Critters, the hardcore fanbase of the show, know that the crew originally used the Pathfinder rules set. It started out, as many massive games do, as a one shot put together to show why these games connect with so many people.
'I actually didn't play that first day,' said Ray. 'because it was supposed to be a one shot they were running for Liam and Laura and what not. I'll just be there to assist. Talesin [Jaffe] and I were supposed to be the ringers, the helpers. I was there to go over people's shoulders to point at the character sheet to show people what number he was talking about. When it became clear it was going to be an ongoing game, I ended up jumping in after that.'
'It wasn't until…2012? 2013?...where we got together for our very first game,' said Billingham. 'a Pathfinder at Matt and Marisha's apartment. I showed up a little bit late after shooting something that day. Liam [O'Brien]
was very serious because Laura [Bailey] was very serious, both doing heavy RP with British accents. Sam just looked panicked. I looked over at Marisha and she was like 'here are your dice…' I didn't know what was happening and Matt was in full [performance]. He had disappeared. There was this arch lich wizard, underlit. I think there was wind? There were candles at the table? Maybe it was just my imagination. I knew I was in for a show. The thing that sunk it for me was as we kept playing, everyone was getting more comfortable joining Liam and Laura where they were at. I made a choice and Matt said 'come with me'. We got up from the table and went into a side room. He said 'you see a guy in a red cloak over at the table. You can tell he's keeping something from you. What do you want to do? I was like 'can I do anything?' and he said 'you can certainly try.' I said 'I want to run over, grab him by the neck and pick him up' and Matt started acting scared like I was choking him out. He's responding to what I say? The rest was done. The hook was in.'
The last time Critical Role had a live show in Chicago it was just before the massive shutdown of the pandemic in March of 2019. The Co-Founders took a litte time to reflect on what their expectations were at the beginning. It started as a way to show the joys of tabletop games and is now a new media sensation embarking on a world tour over the summer.
'When we got the opportunity from Felicia Day and Geek & Sundry,' said Ray, 'it was more along the lines of showing a dozen people, just one person, how cool tabletop RPGs can be then we can consider that a success. It was very much the lowest stakes, the lowest bar possible, because we didn't expect anything from it in those initial days.'
'There are a lot of people out there that are dice curious I guess you could say,' said Mercer. 'It's hard to describe in a social space of non-gamers. Having something to send somebody, like a link, and tell them to watch five minutes of this. That was the impetus to provide that sort of content, to be a shorthand of what this experience could be. We never anticipated anything like the impact that it has. It's still, ten years later, perpetually surreal.'
'I had a conversation with my wife at our house,' said Willingham, 'I don't know if I want to do this. I don't want people to think this is what I do. All these misconceptions and everything. Once we got into it and we found the people that it touches, the things that opened up for us as players and, it sounds so cheesy, but the way that Critical Role enriched our lives. We could have never predicted it. That's the beauty.'
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