You ever see a thread that looks like hitting a bee's nest with a bat? Well I've got my bat and epi-pen at the ready so here we go!

One of the most common pieces of advice I see on these forums is "Don't try to be like CR." or "CR is just ACTING DnD, not playing REAL DnD". And I've never really understood what they're on about?

My table is a group of friends outside of DnD and we've been playing every week for about 5 years (ish) now. We all discovered CR shortly after we started and were IMEDIATELY inspired by how they played. We have 2 ongoing campaigns with 2 different DM's and EVERYONE takes inspiration from CR at least in SOME aspect. We all watched it and simultaneously thought "That's what we want to play". 

Then later I discovered DnDbeyond's forums and had a HOST of people essentially shouting "DON'T DO THAT! THEY'LL RUIN DND FOR YOU! THEY'RE PROFESSIONAL ACTORS AND YOU'RE NOT!!!" So is THAT the reason? I shouldn't take inspiration and influence from CR because they're professionals and our table isn't? We're all adults, we KNOW we're not actors and none of us have never thought we were. To me that feels like saying "Don't Read LoTR before planning a campaign! Tolkien is a writer and you aren't so you'll have unrealistic expectations!"

Our games DO feel like CR. Obviously we don't have an audience (besides ourselves) and we're not professional actors, but that doesn't stop us from taking queues from them?

Can someone explain to me what people are suggesting against?

Honestly, there is saying from where I come from that is: "If advices were good, people would charge them".

If it works for you and your group, it works for you and your group and you don't have to change anything.

That said, I feel like the main reason people say that using CR as a benchmark is a bad idea, is mostly when this create unattainable expectations on what a game of D&D should look like. Especially when you are joining a new group, this can be very harmful, as it can set the group to failure if they don't play that specific way.

When someone is putting pressure on others to be as good a DM as Matt Mercer or as good as a player as Sam Riegel, that will destroy a game asap.

Not only that, but they play a very specific kind of game, some people like completely different types of game (e.g. Some people hate RP and love dungeon crawl).

If you found a group that is happy to play that style of game and that don't harm the fun by trying to perform at the same level of the guys from CR (Both of in terms of acting and storytelling), there is no reason to not be inspired by them.

I've never noticed anyone being told to not be like CR, just that D&D doesn't have to be like that.

If there's a scale between pure descriptive role-playing and acting role-playing, and CR represents the epitome of the latter (short of costumes or even using real weapons, I guess), then the best argument for not doing it like 100% like CR is if you don't want to or feel uncomfortable doing it. If you want to go even further and get a professional custom made outfit, then go you, I suppose. That's not for me, though. The only wrong way to do it is by making yourself uncomfortable or not going far enough to enjoy yourself. That could be 100% descriptive, or it could be 10,000% CR. Doesn't  matter - do what makes the game fun for you.

On the aforementioned scale, I think my games are probably about 60%. I find CR a little OTT and too reliant on the social skills of the player. It can make players uncomfortable if it's too extroverted. So, I'll do voices, I'll have conversations, body language will be mimicked, but actions will be minimal, a bar tender handing out drinks will described rather than acted, attacks will be accompanied by muted actions but not actually acted out and so forth. While I try to make it immersive, I try to keep things toned down so as to not make introverts uncomfortable or feel pressured into doing things they are not ready to do. If people just want to describe their actions and conversations, then they aren't feeling pressured to act it out either.

While the 60% is a benchmark that is highly dependent on the table, a table of Shakespeare and actors will want to push past CR while a bunch of really shy and traumatised orphans may struggle with purely descriptive, I think the sentiment is universally good. Do what makes it fun for everyone at the table, perhaps a level that slightly pushes the comfort zone of the shiest person (as in, so they come out of their shell, not that it makes them uncomfortable).

There isn't a universally right or wrong level. What's right for a YouTube show trying to get views and sponsors isn't what's going to be right for everyone. Especially for new DMs - it's more important to get the foundations down than having a professional finish. That can come later. O mean, I've taken some cues from them, how to make things more immersive, but I don't set myself their standards either - I play my game, and just try to tweak things to make it better. Sometimes CR can provide that inspiration. Just don't expect the smooth professional games off of me (yet), becuase that's just the dressing.

The biggest thing I can think of as a reason to not be influenced by Critical Roll(CR) is new people to the hobby using CR as a reference for what the default of the game should be. Let me explain;

The cast of CR is made up of trained actors and storytellers. They have been working with the character and storytelling mediums for years. They, all of them, have a masterful understanding of the levels of communication and cooperation necessary to be able to create a story, in addition to the experience necessary to be able to do all of this seamlessly for an audience. They have more experience than what a probable new person to the hobby has. Using CR as a source for inspiration is not the issue. It is more so when someone tries to duplicate the game without understanding what makes that game so special and what parts of CR would work for in their situation that is the problem. Using CR as a reference for what the default of Dnd should be is like saying that a NASCAR driver is what the default driver should be like. In addition to that, just because you have watched the Cars Movie doesn't mean that you could participate in a NASCAR race. Sure, watching Cars might get you interested in professional racing but it takes a lot more work to be able to participate in the race. CR is to DND as NASCAR is to Driving.

That being said, I rather enjoy CR. I know I have been inspired by the show on more than one occasion. I am the DM in my group and I know that my players are not at the same level as the cast of CR, but they/we are having fun and that is all that matters. (I actually have one player who tries really hard to emulate CR without understanding what makes participating in a multiperson narrative different from watching one and writing a story with a singular protagonist, but that is a different discussion.)

I haven't heard anyone say not to be inspired by them.  However, I would say you should probably not try to copy them and don't be disappointed when your game doesn't end up like theirs. 

Play your game however makes your table happy. It's not so much that 'you should not take inspiration from Critical Role' but more 'don't try to force your game to be CR.' 

Its better to say that you should draw aspects from their games.

One great thing Matt does is "tell me what you want to do and I will tell you what to roll".  This is how it should be at every table regardless of style of play as this is how the rules dictate things should go. 

You can also say that you should try to be descriptive as a DM and try to do your best to paint a picture of the room/area the players are in.  If you are not great at this then use a map to help out or use pre-gen modules if needed but you should be giving out enough detail that they can reasonably interact with the world. 

On the other side you can set realistic expectations about your style:  

"I am not going to be doing accents for NPCs as I am terrible at them"

"I see from the session 0 stuff you guys aren't really looking for a RP heavy experience.  I will not push the social dynamics much but I do still expect you to tell me how you interact with the NPCs.  'I roll for persuasion' will not suffice as I need SOME description of how you intend to do that as it may impact if you get DIS/ADV on the roll. We do not have to roleplay the entire conversation but I do need some idea of how the conversation goes"

Mostly people take things on a whole instead of actually breaking them down and maybe having parts they use and parts they don't.  It does take some thought and experimentation. 

Ok so what I'm gathering is that the "Don't try and emulate CR" advice is mainly for new people joining new tables so that they don't have strong preconceived/unrealistic expectations of what DnD at their new table should be like.

This would actually explain quite nicely why my group has never understood this advice because we ALL are eachother's ONLY group and we ALL had the expectation of trying (more like striving) to be MORE like CR from the beginning.

Thanks all! This clarified quite a lot for me! I'm very impressed by how nicely this was handled lol

I have also seen a lot of comments along the lines of "What they're playing is NOT DnD! its theater" (usually by old grouchy classic players). This makes me question, "What do your games look like?" Cause what CR is doing looks A LOT like what my table does? Now obviously we have a bit more BS and are sidetracked from conversation and jokes a lot more, but that's only because we don't have an audience. Other than that, CR looks like the same game we're playing, just with a bit more focus (due to it being their job).

I have a feeling this is cause "Different tables play differently" and I can respect that! I wouldn't mind trying to play in a purely mechanical dungeon crawl a few times! sometimes you have that combat itch you just wanna scratch. But "different tables play differently" works both ways

The other replies spoke to the 'don't be like CR' issues - essentially, the average DM is not going to be Matt Mercer with his two decades plus of experience, ten thousand voices, and deep well of acting training, and the average table story is not going to be as grandiose as CR.  Plus the show has a billion sponsors and access to tools most tables couldn't dream of, unless you happen to have tens of thousands of dollars of professionally painted minis and DwarvenForge terrain just laying around?

As for why it's considered fashionable in this place to bag on CR?  Critical Role and Mercer in specific are kinda the face of "New D&D".  A lot (and I mean a lot, like a lot) of people don't at all like the Critical Role focus on PC backstory, inter-party character dynamics, romance, and the like.  They miss when D&D was more exclusively about the Grand Adventure everybody is having together, where your PC's backstory and connections don't really matter because the game is about what's in front of you, not what came before the game started.  Whether it be dungeon crawl, hex crawl, or other variations of story-lite gameplay, they don't appreciate Critical Role pulling so much focus off the "game" part of Role Playing Game and thrusting it on what they consider to be entirely unnecessary improv acting and a deep over-emphasis on special-snowflake bespoke PCs a DM isn't allowed to threaten. And because these folks are almost universally older players from pre-CR, their word carries a lot of clout.  It becomes the trendy, fashionably-edgy thing in places like this to claim to hate Critical Role and to be 'better/above' CR styles of play.

A lot of DMs also feel unduly pressured to try and do the Mercer thing of weaving everybody's backstory together into a seamless mesh of multi-threaded plot, and frankly that is really ******* difficult to do.  It's hard enough keeping one plot more-or-less on track with a party of fractious knucklehead PCs all grabbing at the steering wheel, let alone half a dozen different co-plots.  They retaliate against this pressure by saying "your backstory doesn't ******* matter, you're not Liam O'Brien or Sam Riegel and I'm not Matt Mercer - we're playing one story at this table, not fourteen, and it's the story of what we're doing, not what you did when you were a baby."

So a combination of feeling marginalized within their own hobby they clung to specifically to avoid being marginalized and backlash against the Matt Mercer Effect, primarily.  Or at least that would be my take.

I'd have to agree that what they're doing is closer to improv than to actually following the rules of DnD.  I wouldn't say that that is a bad thing, just that it isn't exactly DnD.  Honestly, DnD is pretty terrible at handling anything but tactical combat, so unless your group particularly enjoys tactical combat, moving away from what the rules cover is probably for the best.

Quote from LeBattery >>

One of the most common pieces of advice I see on these forums is "Don't try to be like CR." or "CR is just ACTING DnD, not playing REAL DnD". And I've never really understood what they're on about?

 I have not actually seen people say this, but I'd guess the people saying it were a vocal minority. Overall opinion of CR seems very positive from what I've seen here.

Now contextually you can caution tables about certain aspects. What I have seen is people saying you don't need to play as performatively as they do, and that's certainly true. Some people will never do voices and their games will not suffer for that. But overall you should treat CR like anything else - ruthlessly steal any bit of it that will make your game better.

I don’t think it “don’t try and emulate them” it’s more “don’t expect to emulate them.” At least not at first.

If their playstyle is fun for you, then by all means you should try. They’re very, very good at it and can be pretty entertaining.

But if you go in thinking that you’re going to be able to keep up an accent and not break character for 5 hours, and that everyone else you play with will do the same, and that yourDM is going to have a rich character arc planned for every shopkeeper you meet, you’re really setting yourself up for disappointment.

This gets extra important for new players who don’t have much other exposure to the game, and may go in thinking CR is a typical D&D experience. They might end up frustrated and just stay away from the hobby.

I'd say that there's plenty of great dnd stuff you can learn from Critical Role, and there's a lot to take inspiration from there. The only danger you run into lies in feeling pressured to have a game like theirs. People not into the same kind of game might not speak up about what they do like because they might feel pressured to like that kind of game, or might not even know there's other types of gameplay and therefore might just conclude that dnd is not for them. 

So yes, critical role good, overall good for the hobby, only really bad when it starts imposing expectations onto your games that are either hard for non professional voice actors to meet, or that run contrary to the kind of game you like. 

Quote from Lunali >>

I'd have to agree that what they're doing is closer to improv than to actually following the rules of DnD. 

Going to have to disagree. There's the occasional "I'll allow it" moment, but most interactions seem to be handled in accordance to the rules of 5E. Not everything requires a dice roll, even by the RAW. 

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

The other replies spoke to the 'don't be like CR' issues - essentially, the average DM is not going to be Matt Mercer with his two decades plus of experience, ten thousand voices, and deep well of acting training, and the average table story is not going to be as grandiose as CR.  Plus the show has a billion sponsors and access to tools most tables couldn't dream of, unless you happen to have tens of thousands of dollars of professionally painted minis and DwarvenForge terrain just laying around?

As for why it's considered fashionable in this place to bag on CR?  Critical Role and Mercer in specific are kinda the face of "New D&D".  A lot (and I mean a lot, like a lot) of people don't at all like the Critical Role focus on PC backstory, inter-party character dynamics, romance, and the like.  They miss when D&D was more exclusively about the Grand Adventure everybody is having together, where your PC's backstory and connections don't really matter because the game is about what's in front of you, not what came before the game started.  Whether it be dungeon crawl, hex crawl, or other variations of story-lite gameplay, they don't appreciate Critical Role pulling so much focus off the "game" part of Role Playing Game and thrusting it on what they consider to be entirely unnecessary improv acting and a deep over-emphasis on special-snowflake bespoke PCs a DM isn't allowed to threaten. And because these folks are almost universally older players from pre-CR, their word carries a lot of clout.  It becomes the trendy, fashionably-edgy thing in places like this to claim to hate Critical Role and to be 'better/above' CR styles of play.

A lot of DMs also feel unduly pressured to try and do the Mercer thing of weaving everybody's backstory together into a seamless mesh of multi-threaded plot, and frankly that is really ****ing difficult to do.  It's hard enough keeping one plot more-or-less on track with a party of fractious knucklehead PCs all grabbing at the steering wheel, let alone half a dozen different co-plots.  They retaliate against this pressure by saying "your backstory doesn't ****ing matter, you're not Liam O'Brien or Sam Riegel and I'm not Matt Mercer - we're playing one story at this table, not fourteen, and it's the story of what we're doing, not what you did when you were a baby."

So a combination of feeling marginalized within their own hobby they clung to specifically to avoid being marginalized and backlash against the Matt Mercer Effect, primarily.  Or at least that would be my take.

 I getcha I getcha! 

I refer to this as the idea of Forward characters (FC), and Hind characters (HC). FC's developments are focused more on who they WILL become, whereas HC's are more focused on resolving issues of their past. 

At my table, we often have a mix of both. I know I have done both almost evenly!

As a DM, Part of the fun for me is searching for ways to make the PC's backstories all tie together to the main plot. and you are correct! it IS hard! But I guess I can see how that isn't fun for EVERY DM. In fact, I think it would be fun to run a whole campaign of "FC's". But at the end of the day, What MY table likes about DND is each character having their own substory (think party members in a Bioware game) that comes up every so often. So when we all found Critical Role shortly after we started, rather than being "indoctrinated" to their play style, we felt validated. We were like "Hey look! its like the professional version of what we've been doing, so we must be doing it right! Maybe we'll get there one day" lol

In the team's defense, they've stated that once they sit down and start playing, the cameras all just disappear into the background and they're mostly just having fun with their friends playing D&D.  Yes, it's a produced show, but all the production happens outside game time.  Game time is still game time, their sacred space where they just have fun doing their game.  That's the spirit people should really take away from Critical Role - they're a bunch of close friends having fun with their game in the way they like to do.  We could all be so lucky.

Quote from pangurjan >>

Quote from Lunali >>

I'd have to agree that what they're doing is closer to improv than to actually following the rules of DnD. 

Going to have to disagree. There's the occasional "I'll allow it" moment, but most interactions seem to be handled in accordance to the rules of 5E. Not everything requires a dice roll, even by the RAW. 

Matt is about 90% by the book...he is actually a lot more RAW focused than most real play DMs. 

Adventure Zone and Not Another DnD Podcast are MUCH more rules light and tend to sway entirely towards "Rule of Cool" at times. 

Matt, for the most part, has a good internal consistency. 

Also worth noting that the occasional "I'll allow it" moment is also in accordance with the RAW of D&D.  An in-the-moment ruling that keeps the game going and allows for a neat moment to happen is usually better than slamming on the brakes and cracking open rulebooks for ten minutes, even according to the rulebooks.  "Decide with your gut in the moment, then look it up between games" is a good rule of DMing thumb to follow.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

Also worth noting that the occasional "I'll allow it" moment is also in accordance with the RAW of D&D.  An in-the-moment ruling that keeps the game going and allows for a neat moment to happen is usually better than slamming on the brakes and cracking open rulebooks for ten minutes, even according to the rulebooks.  "Decide with your gut in the moment, then look it up between games" is a good rule of DMing thumb to follow.

 Yup that is fair too!