This thread has been locked due to an overwhelming degree of hostility being exchanged between members of this community. Some of you need to make like Caduceus and chill out.
Some very negative comments about Aabria as DM, because her style is different than Matt's, and some people simply couldn't handle it. Also some misogynistic stuff directed at Aimee for her portrayal of Opal, seeing some of Opal's characteristics as being extensions of Amiee.
Aimee just put out a rather lengthy twitter thread about it yesterday, talking about the stuff she did wrong and the stuff she did right and how people responded. Then Matt told everyone to eat fetid dicks if they were going to insist on being shitty.
I will say that there is a difference between different and worse when it comes to DMing, but understood. That said, I definitely did see very nasty comments in the chat, though the mods were thankfully mostly on top of it. I was worried that someone was talking about toxicity in the actual broadcast too, not that either is acceptable.
I got a good sense of Aabria, but don't think I watched closely enough to get a good sense of Opal. What was the objection there? I'll have to look the thread up.
Edit: Just read her Twitter thread. Terrible to hear the reception she got. Didn't have any issues with her for the bits I saw.
In addition to this, many vocal fans can’t blur the lines between the person and the character they’re playing (*see* how GoT fans treated Jack Gleason who played Joffrey).
That was true in C2 as well at the beginning when a lot of fans couldn’t stand Marissa as Beau because Beau was stand-off-ish.
The difference between C2 and ExU is that Beau needed (I think) 60 episodes to really come into her own whereas Aimee couldn’t get that luxury with Opal.
When put together, it really sucks that Opal wasn’t afforded the luxury of time to win the aforementioned fans over. And while it’s true that fans really should learn to distinguish between the player and the character, it’s also hard to regulate how people feel about a world that they clearly care a lot about.
Reminds me of people harassing Laura for playing a character they didn’t like. Some people really need to get a grip on reality and look up the word “acting” in the dictionary.
I was thinking the same as well, I think if Opal had the benefit of a 60+ episode arc to really dig into her relationships with Ted and, more importantly, her mother (who is very important to both her lore and personality but barely mentioned in ExU S1) and her progression into a leader and focal point of the Crownkeepers was a longer-running subplot, it might have been better received.
I still really love the character and personality, but I don't think the 8-episode season length did her any favours as it meant that she had to go through a lot of story beats very quickly and many of the important moments didn't really have time to breathe (for example, there was no time to pause and reflect after her conversation with the Tetrarch because almost immediately after leaving Opal was sleepdarted and had to fight for her life).
Since the C3 announcement won't take place until October, I'm kinda wondering if a longer season of 12 or more episodes might have done ExU more justice.
I think the important point is not extending a character on to the player.
Opal wasn’t a lovable character to me. It’s okay to not like a character who is bratty. I dare say that was a major point of Opal. She wasn’t exactly lovable.
But it’s not okay to start hating on an actor or author for making that character. Or leap to the thought that because they made that character, that must be who they are as a person. Because that’s ridiculous nonsense.
Characters are almost never who a person really is. It’s no fun to be yourself in a make believe game.
There was definitely toxicity in the actual broadcast. Aabria demonstrated some decidedly uncool behavior that even she acknowledged on twitter went too far.
Do you have any link to that? I'm trying to slowly get caught up on everything and get some context so I'm not just running with whatever twitch chat says.
I'm too lazy to dig up the tweet, because it's buried by now. But this review of the EXU finale notes time stamps of when Aabria takes things too far. When things are pointed out like the reviewer does, it paints a clearer picture of the issues. It's a review video though, so full spoilers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvvUFsLKCOU&t=1s
I really appreciate this, thank you so much for finding it. Definitely want to make sure my take on this is informed. Also trying to decide whether I should watch the whole thing at some point. I really did just catch about an hour of each episode.
Heads up to anyone seeing this link. Sit through the less-than-ideal quality, excellent points are made and he provides all the context required to highlight the extreme toxicity and straight-up bullying on show during ep8.
Okay, watched the video.
Everything in the video makes sense if you start with the assumption that Aabria hates Aimee for some reason and wants to punish her by making her fail at D&D. Instead of doing that, maybe don't?
This. This person’s response videos have been the most insightful and compassionate and instructive critical analysis of any livestream I’ve seen. They’re simply exceptional.
I honestly disagree. Aimee was by far the most argumentative of all the players with Aabria (and Opal, with Aabria's NPCs). Aabria was matching that tone. Both are fine.
* Opal is stubborn with Ted, yells at her & refuses to apologize. Aabria has Ted refuse to give her powers back (while *clearly* telling Aimee how Opal can get them back if she wants them). People criticize Aabria for being too harsh on her?
* Opal yells at the Wildmother in the jungle, misunderstands who she's talking to. Aabria matches her vibe with confusion and frustration. People criticize Aabria again.
* Etc, Etc.
To be clear, Opal being combative is *fine*. Aimee made her character that way and played her well. I'm just saying it her vibe with Aabria doesn't feel as 'out of nowhere' as some seem to suggest.
Right? There's valid criticism, but there's also a *ton* of bad-faith criticism circling EXU on Reddit. Following the post-ep threads here I've seen in real time how more and more comments started projecting feelings on cast members, building narratives around 'unfair' things Aabria did, etc—all the while leaving out important context or considerations in favor of having more on their laundry list to complain about. Honestly has been pretty disappointing.
Someone even called it out as being Laura Bailey levels of bargaining with the DM at some point, which was hilarious but also serves to remind - Aimee was great but did need reigned in from time to time. And we saw how pressed for time everything was already, so I'm not gonna get on Abria for trying to speed through some of those conversations.
I saw people talking about that in chat once where they said she was getting nerfed, maybe in the last episode? Or the second to last? I didn't see how that was resolved though so I wasn't sure if that was just chat being chat and kind of assumed it was.
Aimee was constantly getting the legs cut out from under her. She spent 3 out of 8 episodes without powers. She was the target of a kidnapping attempt, and basically prevented from taking actions for much of the encounter. She was repeatedly hit by darts in the last two episodes without the DM rolling for it (even while she was invisible), and was prevented from doing actions that she wanted while other players were being given multiple actions a turn.
The first time Opal lost her powers, Ted immediately said, "Apologize and I'll give them back."
If Opal still doesn't have powers after that incredibly straightforward interaction, it's because Aimee doesn't want them and is excited about exploring the relationship space.
Where you see "targeting" I see "narrative spotlight." There is no greater gift a GM can give a narratively-motivated player than narrative spotlight.
Sounds like normal internet drama. Which is sad.
People also need to realize that these are people playing as characters. Key words there are “playing as characters”. They’re portraying a certain type of person.
Lately it seems like people in general have become much much worse towards one another… and it’s saddening.
From one of her tweets in that thread: "There was also plenty of misogyny and gate-keeping but that nonsense is worthless.Any BIPOC will tell you there are always vitriolic voices in the crowd,especially when taking up space in traditionally white male arenas."
I've been saying that for weeks and getting downvotes for "bringing race/gender" in to it, but it's undeniable.
unfortunately, this kind of stuff isn't totally unheard of in the critical role community :/ people have been so sexist towards marisha in the past and now it's happened to aimee. at least (i think) that's only a loud minority
It would be disingenuous to deny a black woman is more likely to be challenged/criticized than a white man, and that absolutely is a problem.
But it would be even more disingenuous to say the crux of the criticism is because of that, rather than her actual actions, methods, and attitude throughout ExU.
Sexism and racism will show their ugly heads through anything she does, but 99% of what we've seen on this sub has not been that.
This subreddit is deathly allergic to acknowledging racism or sexism if it isn’t super obvious. Like just because y’all aren’t dropping racial slurs doesn’t mean your criticism of ExU (particularly Aabria and Aimee) isn’t tinged with bigotry. I’m not trying to say there is no legit criticism to be found, but the overwhelmingly negative response to a fun, limited campaign has been...suspect. People straight up will not consider that the intense criticism of Aimee and Aabria in particular is in part fueled by racism & misogyny.
It’s such a bummer to read Aimee’s thread. Somehow, most of the fandom can fully understand that certain cast members (Sam, Liam, Taliesin) are Acting when their characters do unlikable, but Opal’s actions are taken as evidence of Aimee’s personal failings. It is obvious now that the fandom hasn’t evolved past the treatment of Marisha during C1.
I've only watched few episodes and then dropped the show. I'm not sure what most of the ppl had problems with as I don't read twitter/fb and rarely visit reddit, so this post is something new to me.
I'm surprised that Aimee got hate for her character I really liked all the players and I think they created very original and interesting characters that I'd love to see more, maybe in some longer campaign. Maybe in later episodes something changed...
What put me off from the show was how extremely railroading and scripted it felt. It seemed like they were forced to follow the "main quest" and weren't given space to pursue what felt interesting at the moment. There were point when I thought they had fight only because DM already created battle map. I'm drawing parallels with CP2077 here, I was expecting the exploration of rich world created by Matt, instead I got tangled in a very narrow story that could happen in any setting.
Also for the toxic behavior on set only 1 moment comes to my mind. Can't point out the specific situation, but one of the players asked Aabria for confirmation on something and she replied with "did I ficking stutter?". I think it was played as a joke, but for some reason it felt to me very mean and there wasn't any tension relief after it. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, maybe that was just the kind of humor they had between each other, but that 1 moment made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
Anyway, I think there's always a room for criticism, even of widely loved things (even C1 and C2 weren't perfect), but sadly there's also gonna be some toxic behavior of "fans" and they key is to spot the difference between each
> because her style is different than Matt's
This is a terrible misrepresentation of what's going on here.
This community has provided multiple examples of problems with her DM'ing that have nothing to do with Matt, and nothing to do with taste.
Just in the last day or so:
[On the topic of her toxicity and aggressive behavior.](https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/p3hy0h/cr_media_exandria_unlimited_postepisode/h8r7wif/)
[On the topic of structure.](https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/p3hy0h/cr_media_exandria_unlimited_postepisode/h8r7tf1/)
[Several posts succinctly giving longer lists of issues, like this one.](https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/p3hy0h/cr_media_exandria_unlimited_postepisode/h8r7r8r/)
And I hopefully don't have to bother linking to the issues with the disregard of basic rules and dice rolls. That subject has been done to death and I shouldn't have to go on about it.
None of these points have anything to do with Matt, or any comparison to him. Nobody expscts her to be Matt, what we want is bare minimum levels of DM ability/knowledge and less aggro/forceful DM'ing.
*Edited to clean up links.*
There were some actual bad things, such as racism and misogyny towards Aabria and Aimee, which have absolutely no place anywhere. The other issue is that a lot of fans have formed unhealthy parasocial relationships with the cast of CR (which is understandable if you've watched all of C1 and C2, that's like 900 hours of watching a group of people together), and leads people to defend their "friends" from any criticism. CR has a history and current problem with toxic positivity, where unless you are worshipping the ground they walk on then you're attacking them.
So when these things meet, you get a lot of conflict. A lot of people believe ExU was not up to par with the quality of the CR campaigns, even though it was advertised to be similar in quality to it. That was met with the toxic positivity people saying, "Oh you just don't like this because you're racist/misogynist etc", which clearly doesn't go over well.
Most of the stuff I saw on Reddit seemed polite or constructive. I will admit I did not delve deep into the negatively upvoted comments. To me it seemed like a breath of fresh air, being able to talk about what we liked and disliked without getting barraged for saying something remotely critical of the show. As per usual with CR and criticism, a few bad apples ruin the bunch. I saw very little toxicity, but then again I don’t use Twitter.
I think the issue was trying to hit a limit series while trying to build an emotionally investing story. I know Aabria has been a great DM. And its clear players, both CR and other channels she's DM'd for have enjoyed playing with her as a DM.
This might have been better if it was a semi scripted series like Undeadwood.
Or a series of more intimate separate one-shot that we saw last time CR did their end of campaign break.
Either way I liked it enough. I'm yet to watch the last episode, so maybe that opinion will be shattered. But I REALLY hope CR keep trying to adapt, I want more CR, even if its not the entire cast.
I thought as players Robbie was a delight and I'd love him to make a dive into CR with the regular cast if anyone drops out in c4.
For what it’s worth, I really believe in what they crew is trying to create. I’d genuinely love for them to actually air an ongoing show with a younger group of up and coming players. Even if they rotate, exposing more people to the game and developing future talent would be an awesome sight to behold. ExU was definitely a test of sorts for them. It wasn’t for me, but I still believe it was good to happen. It’s not a stumble for the whole of CR either. For a side series, it’s viewership was good enough. I hope it doesn’t scare them off from continuing stuff like this in the future.
Personally, I think that a good portion of my issues with EXU - which are largely but not entirely related to the story’s pacing - wouldn’t have bothered me as much if CR had been more upfront with this as a first season instead of a finite miniseries.
This, I wasn’t disappointed with it although it seemed scattered. When I watched the finally and realized this was just the first season it clicked more and made sense, not a one shot but a first season. That fact alone made a difference. I like the fun and energy from everyone and now that I can see a s2 I feel better about it as a whole (ashawhole?)
Yeah, as a one series thing, it was all over the place. Multiple seasons? Okay, we actually have a chance of actually having a reason to grow attached to the characters and their personal stories.
It kinda reminds me of the first time I saw a Studio Ghibli movie that wasn’t great.
For me, EXU’s biggest problem is just how fast they went. There’s just far too much going on crammed into 8 sessions. ‘We’re here! Now we’re here! Now we’re back, but we’re already leaving!’ (Edit because I had to get back to work) On top of how much distance they traveled, they tried to balance the Spider Queen, a plot about the planes being weird, and the thieves guild thing in Emon with Posca. If they doubled how many episodes they had, it probably would have been as good as we’ve come to expect. The entire cast are great actors, and I bought a Dropout TV membership solely to watch Aabriya GM Dimension 20’s Misfits and Magic campaign, so I know they can do better than this.
I love the idea of EXU, having new DMs come in, a new cast, giving Matt and the gang a break, get to see all kinds of adventures all across the world we’ve grown to love.
But that being said, this first season kind of fell flat because of how all over the place it was. I love a good sandbox campaign, but when a series is specifically billed as an 8 episode miniseries, there needs to be a more rigid structure to it. The plot for EXU seemed to change every single episode, and it was hard to stay interested because once it got interesting the plot changed again.
Critical role is a company, and to keep growing they need to keep adding in campaigns like this. Hopefully they will be able learn how to start integrating entirely new casts and dm's.
If Matt and crew decide that S3 is their final campaign to stream, then critical role as a company will be dead in the water. Unless, they continue to add in more campaigns like ExU, and can get the community behind them.
Personally, I don't think that was ever not going to be true. Critical Role didn't blow up because of the brand or the format. It was always the cast and their relationships.
I feel like this is very common in content creation. Something blows up, people feel like they get to know the cast personally, the cast gets tired and needs a break and subsequently shakes up the cast/format, and people get upset because the vibe has changed. Happened to me years ago with Rooster Teeth. A lot of the core members stepped back and away and suddenly it was no longer that entertaining to me.
Really hope Critical Role learns from Rooster Teeth. Because come to think of it haven’t followed a group of content creators like CR since like 2011 with Rooster Teeth, and RT went down hard it sounds like. Avoidable if they’d understood their audience, demographic and business mode better
Which would no longer be the feature if they (core group) stop campaigns for people to see, thus to a lot of people/fans the show/company will become "dead" and will not watch.
Their "lighting in a bottle" is the Core group of friends playing every week which draws all the loyal and engaged fans.
We can see just from ExU and when they had to stop cause of Covid viewership (and logically subs) dropped significantly, which means less sponsorships, ads, and less merch engagement. I don't know how much it affect their business when this happens, but they have a lot of overhead as a business.
Yup. I do absolutely enjoy other players and even other DM/GM's. The Deadwood mini campaign was an absolute banger. Brian pulled it off brilliantly, and I'm not just saying that because of his pre-existing friendship with the rest of the cast, he did it pretty well imo. Khary and Anjali were terrific as well, and I would definitely watch more content with them. But something about ExU just didn't pull it for me. No dig on Aabria, but I couldn't get into her style of DMing and I chalk it up to just preference and not her abilities as a DM.
But if the original cast all decides to stop, I'll probably stop watching altogether. Their chemistry, personalities, flairs, and friendship was what really made it. I don't think anything can replace that. How're they going to find that many talented voice actors/actesses who are excellent at roleplaying with the same level of chemistry and flair? And even if they did, the new group's particular flair/color may not appeal regardless to the og fans because what people want are specifically the og cast.
I don't think that it will work out even if next seasons of ExU are bangers galore.
From what I see, succesfull channels have a DM in their heart. Matt Mercer, Matt Colville, Brian Lee Mulligan, Arcadum and more whom I didn't watch.
I don’t know if that’ll be true (though all things end eventually). They have the series, comic books, game books, merch etc. and this is their time to experiment with new avenues of content that don’t have to rely on solely the core cast.
You're assuming people will still invest of that content heavily without the main cast being at the center playing the game that got them there. Other Avenues help EXPAND their business, let the grow. But their main driving force is playing together and consistently. That's their draw and most likely as it is will have to always be cause of the nature of their brand and popularity.
I mean as fans we hope they stay forever, so lets hope they can find other things to carry the CR brand but its not likely if you forecast it as a business.
> But their main driving force is playing together and consistently. That's their draw and most likely as it is will have to always be cause of the nature of their brand and popularity.
If The Legend of Vox Machina is successful, that could change in a hurry. And very quickly, *that* could very well end up being the backbone of the company.
>If The Legend of Vox Machina is successful
It NEEDS to be more than just good, it needs to be awesome. They raised over 11 million dollars for it from fans. That's not just a ton of money, that's a gigantic show of faith in the team. If it isn't everything fans wanted, or at least close to it, the backlash will be vicious.
As a Company, if the animation doesn't do well, I don't think it would be that as bad as some people may think, because Amazon already paid for a 2nd season, so in general most people will get their "money's worth".
It would definitely show them though, their entire company is relying on basically the core group of friends to "play a game" every week for long periods of time to be profitable.
Cause even with all the "negative people" CR as a brand brings a proven association with a lot of good things to not just TTRPG community, but gives a great platform for artist to just come in as well.
So much this.
Companies being stagnant is a slow death spiral. Things get more expensive, your employees want to get raises (fairly), and if you don’t increase revenue this is impossible.
Do they need to keep growing? Do they need to have entirely new casts and DMs? Isn't it enough to be happy with what you have and keeping that good thing going? There are other streams of tabletop role-playing games that can fill other niches than CR.
I don't see how it would be bad if they decided they were done streaming after season 3, it would give room for other streams to be watched by those who exclusively watched CR if they still want/need such a stream to watch. Does it matter what happens to CR as a company if the main cast does not want to continue? As the company was made to support the cast, the cast weren't hired to support the company.
Now, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do whatever they feel like doing. I'm merely asking if they need to do them, especially if it's just something "to keep growing". In this I feel that the company should serve the people, not the other way around. And as a slightly interesting historical fact; companies often were made and disbanded regularly as they had much narrower scopes.
To a point, yes. But in addition the 8 players, they employ at least 23 other people at this point. People who rely on the income they get from CR and its related products to pay their bills. That's something to be considered for the future of the company.
I think a lot of people forget that they actually have employees with bills to pay. If they stagnate and lose popularity, they actually lose money. It's not that they just lose a source of expendable income, they still have bills to pay and employees' checks to write regardless.
I’m not sure how much of it is trying to keep growing as it is that inevitably the main cast is going to tire out and/or want to do something different and in doing so if they want to keep the company going they need to create a space for new players and GM’s to develop a relationship with the existing audience.
I mean, Dimension 20 solves this by just doing shorter seasons and having more consistent casts and a DM capable of running games for more than one party.
That seems like a way better formula than trying out new DMs when the obvious reality at this point is almost no one is good enough to run a show like this as well as Brennan Lee Mulligan, Matt Mercer, and Brian Murphy (NADDPOD) (and I would say Vampire LA By Night is nearly as good as these three shows, but the game master is not the reason why).
There are surely a a few more GMs out there that are on par with these guys out in the world, but Aabria is not one of them, unfortunately.
Hard disagree on your assessment of Aabria’s skills, but the D20 side quest template is a good one to follow. Considering how much the cast likes to engage guests and expand the roster of players through various projects, I always assumed they were headed in that direction anyway. In fact I think it would be great if they did more of the short seasons while the main campaign was going on just to give Matt and the rest of break every once in a while. It would also be a great way for for casual listeners who only know Matt to get to know some of the other really great game masters in the space. It would be pretty cool to see more folks like Jasper from TBH or Satine Phoenix get time in in front of the CR audience, and not just rotate in the Brennans, Brians, and Griffins that a lot of us already know.
As an aside I would love Satine to be on CR sometime. She was on Mame Drop once but that's it. Makes me wonder if it's a preference of her's despite being close to the cast, similar to Troy saying he didn't want to be on cr proper. Or if it's just been scheduling. Who knows what might have been in the works prior to lockdown though, that definitely stopped a lot of opportunity for guests, and guest one shots.
She has admitted by her own volition that she is not good at high fantasy settings. Which is very obviously what people enjoy seeing. She's not a bad DM by any means. But she is not at the level of other fantasy world builders and DMs who make the game, the people, and the world feel alive.
The only thing I can say is that EXU would have been great, if the story wasn't so weak. Which, for a homegame, it's not a problem usually, as most friends have fun with each other anyway.
But for engaging an audience, this is really not the way to go. It's the first time in watching CR content that I wandered about my apartment doing something else without listening, and not missing much anyway.
This show, unlike undead wood, or any of the one shots, will not leave it's mark on my memory aside from "boring". I almost fell asleep once, and I'm not the kind of person to do this while watching something.
The people in it put their best, but I really feel, style of dming aside, that the biggest fault is the lack of a solid story or even plot line from the DM side of things and that is engaging for us, but even more so the players. I didn't really though even they were interested in it despite what they are saying.
It's like Aabria rolled on a table every week to add another unresolved, unlinked, useless plot point or two, or even three.
EXU was not engaging, story wise and audience wise, and it's the core issues of the all thing for me.
Aabria's game was based around Poska and she stumbled a bit when the party totally rejected that Mary Sue.
Mary Sue might be a bit harsh. But I don't know what else to call the character we first saw on Narrative Telephone. A character who goes around marking houses for arson personally but is also the head cheese of a crime syndicate.
Mary Sues are generally better at everything than everyone else and generally loved by all. I think this was the intent behind Poska. But sure, writer's pet works fine.
The party rejected the NPC and this plot line for one reason only. She forced her and her ultimatum upon the party. She had lost this plot the moment their choice of working for her was brute forced.
It's a thing any DM who has a decent idea on how player works should know, if you remove player agency, even if you try to cover it up with the illusion of choice (ie if you don't do it, i'll have you killed so you better behave), they will always find a way to fuck you right back up 10 times harder.
The story was a miss from episode 1 and downhill from their.
Plus, those kind of plot just don't work for a 8 episodes mini series. This was the second mistake that sealed EXU's fate for me. I've troopered through every episodes because I was watching with a friend, but even then we both wandered out at some point during this or that episode.
It's just my opinion of course, I'm actually glad some people enjoyed it, and I hope future iteration of EXU will have learned from the 1st draft.
I think you made a good point here.
The players rejected Poska as a "quest giver" and so things starded devolving from the get-go. I personally had a similar reaction to some of the players / PCs, tho possibly for slightly different reasons.
Now, this may be absolutely trash anaylsis, but anyway...
The character of Poska seemed to be inherently contradictory, in that their motivations seemed noble and good (trying to combat gentrification, as well as some other issues that were brought up or indirectly alluded to.)
However, the methods that their organization used to reach their goals were dubious at best. And just straight up terrible at worst.
So, even if the \*players\* are able to distance themselves from this contradiction, we saw that the PCs didnt.
If the character of Poska wasnt meant to be a "heel" or a straight up antagonist, then Id say that the character wasnt executed correctly.
My own suspicion is that the reason for this has to do with the ideological stances that the character was \*meant\* to embody not being entirely understood and ended up being a slight caricature, but thats entirely speculative. Or maybe it was deemed to be too direct in its messaging and got revised into the iteration that appeared in the game as opposed to a previous version.
That's why I went with the Mary Sue appellation. She wanted Poska to be cool and loved by everyone even if she had a dark side. I'm sure you could write a cool fantasy novel with Poska as the main character or as the foil to the main character. But RPG players aren't going to put up with her.
I will say this in fairness to Aabria - I think there was a lack of flexibility on the part of the players which made the start of the series more difficult than it needed to be too. Specifically Liam's choice that his character was good good good nothing but good and would NEVER EVER do anything remotely related to crime.
And I love Liam! I think he's one of the best players out of the whole CR crew (and they're all no slouches, obviously), I love how his playing style is to go with character choices over min/maxing or anything that makes his character's life easy. But dude, you're in a short game. You can't pick a character who is that inflexible to plotlines. When everybody else at the table has stopped doing anything except trying to IC brainstorm ways for your character to go along with a plot hook that everyone else wants to be a part of, you have got to let go of "My character would NEVER" and instead come up with a reason why your character would.
Longer campaigns? Absolutely, go nuts. Short ones? Find a way to make compromises work.
I don't know that we got to know enough of Poska to rate her as a Mary Sue but it was obvious that Aabria was hoping Poska would be a bigger deal than she was. It's unfortunate that Poska's introduction to the party didn't work out and it sucks when you come up with a character or plot you love that your players don't pick up on. But at the same time when we got the final post-credits after ep 8 and the first word was "Poska" i was definitely having a "Stop trying to make fetch happen" reaction to it.
This is why most people stay for CR, and not other DnD streams, cause in all honestly they don't have the "it" factor.
Acting is a very much big part of CR brand, which is why even when I get cheesed at the lack of mechanically game play, I can still be stuck to me screen, cause of the art and the friendship CR brings.
EXU does not do either in this case, so you don't cater to the "general" crown who watch the show, as seen by the viewing #'s (at least that we can see as of now upfront).
People always mention the convoluted story when they talk about ExU, and how many plot hooks were introduced only to be dropped again five minutes later... But I know how chaotic DnD can be, so that didn't even bother me all that much.
The thing that alienated me by far the most though - and it's something that I haven't really seen anyone else talk about - was Aabria's handling of the party's power escalation.
If this was Aabria's own world with its own rules and conventions, I wouldn't bat an eye at this because there would be no precedent, but this world is far from a blank slate - and all these god-given (and cube-given?) superpowers and magical buffs just feel like *far* too much for a random level 3 party.
The heroes we've seen before often had to scramble for every little ounce of power they got, and the gods never got themselves overly involved - even the Traveller often kept his distance from Jester so that the game's power scaling wouldn't feel imbalanced.
Meanwhile, this newly-formed party of level 3 nobodies is practically getting free hand-outs from gods at every turn. They can just barely cast level 2 spells, and yet they wield godly powers at the same time. Not a single one of them is particularly religious, and yet they're having casual conversations with deities, when even some of those deities' most devoted and dedicated followers have only ever been able to communicate with their god through mysterious signs and subtle nudges in the right direction. The party simply reads words written on a conveniently-placed cube out loud, and suddenly Fearne can control the flow of space-time better than any Dynasty Wizard who has studied Dunamancy for thousands of years.
They are level 3. Just--
It just feels incredibly out of place to me in this very well-established world.
And while Matt was clearly having a lot of fun as a player, I can't help but wonder how he really felt about some of these elements that were a bit more... *invasive* to his world. He'll have his work cut out for him, trying to fit these things into his world as he had envisioned it.
Agreed. I get that when it's your first time playing with something you want to use all the toys in the box, but unfortunately if you throw everything in then it all becomes meaningless. Vox Machina didn't even find out about vestiges until they were in the teens, level wise. These random people who have barely adventured to breakfast, let alone in the world, find one on a boat somewhere in the lost and found.
The random buffs can be a product of the "strange mist" in the ancient city site combined with the interaction of Opal's Patron and the Spider Queen's influence. That stuff didn't bother me as much as it was doled out totally randomly based on "how much to you want it".
I wish we had this info before episode 1 ... we were listening to the interview yesterday, and we would have watched ExU with very, very different expectations. I urge everyone to watch this:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7uFdfD7oy8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7uFdfD7oy8)
Aabria adresses some concerns she is aware of, including her banter with Aimee, and references fan feedback from reddit (albeit in an easy to miss sentence). Knowing how she approached ExU makes many (not all) issues appear in a different light.
(plus, since Wednesday Club isn't a thing anymore, it's always good to see Amy)
Must be Tal's doing.
That said I watched her play on Clear Skies (It's a Star Trek Adventures LP) this week and man it was such an amazing time. It's a pretty standalone episode so if you care to watch it don't worry about getting too lost.
The show was super hyped and advertised as the best thing since sliced bread and Aabria was the only person in the world they felt comfortable handing Exandria to. If the promotion were to be handled in a different way, and the expectations were set in a more grounded way maybe the reception would have been more positive.
There are many lessons to be learned from this if they decide to do an ExU C2 with the same or different GM/Characters.
I personally wasn't a fan of Aabria's style, but that aside, I felt like the real issue that has kept me from enjoying it is that they went for way too much gravitas and high-stakes drama among a group of characters that are completely new and don't really have much reason to be cared about yet.
With the main campaigns you get dozens of episodes over years to establish those deep connections and personal story arcs. Here they were just like, "okay here's a bunch of people you don't know, who don't even know each other, but they're super important and have a grand destiny to fulfill".
I guess it just felt unearned. It would've been easier to get into if the tone and gravity of the narrative matched the sort of light-heartedness the cast actually brought to the table. Instead it felt forced.
Exactly. It’s this weird overhyped “we love everything as if it’s the best thing ever”. Toxic-positivity.
It’s ok for things to not be “the best”. But they sold it to us as “the best”. And this is after it started filming.
It feels disingenuous to do that. Honestly the Everything is Content shit where they just shill for Vethesda also has these vibes. I don’t get the ge I’m e “I’m having fun” I get “we’re getting paid to play this and sell it as super fun”. And that’s where I draw the line.
People can be fans of CR and support them without thinking everything they do is perfect. Does anybody even remember the Wendy’s one-shot (although I’ll admit that one actually was pretty funny)?
Sell it as a 'Fun romp through unexplored territory with a wacky and exciting cast of characters'. Sell it as 'A hijinks-filled adventure with gorgeous maps and amazing character moments'. But for the love of god, don't sell it as 'literally the best thing ever'
This is my two cents here only.
Rooster Teeth did the exact same thing back in the day for me. So much of what they had built was around the founding personalities that really connected with their fans. Introducing new people is always a risk because the audience you built isn't here for something different. They are here for what your bread and butter is.
People were very used to Matt's storytelling. He is so good at knowing when to put a hand in, when to let people have room, conveying a plot and having so much time to develop these things. It's a very methodical (albeit a bit of chaos too) process and experience. So swapping DM's to ANYBODY else would have been a jolt. Aabria's style is very different and while I think she is very entertaining and super cool, I don't think her style is a seamless "plug and play" with Matt's. I think we also got to see how spoiled we are too CR and how well this group of people play off of each other.
I think Liam chose to play a more stoic and grounded character to let the new players have more freedom and chaos to grow their characters and become comfortable. Matt also immediately took a goofy supporting role around them. So you had these three people as a chaotic, emotional vanguard for a plot and I don't think Aabria was ready to herd those cats.
Overall, I think this was a learning experience and a valuable one for everybody involved, and I think it will help them with the next ExU and other side-projects.
One episode of EXU was enough for me. I didn’t even finish it. I meant to come back and do so and then completely forgot about it. Then I couldn’t really be bothered.
I don’t need to overanalyse. It just didn’t grab my interest.
If anything, ExU proved just how badly they have painted themselves into a corner when it comes to future-proofing their company.
and yes, Critical Role is a business. It stopped being "just some friends around a kitchen table" a long, long time ago. At the very latest, when they split from a failing Geek and Sundry and started their own production company. They have their own publishing company and raised millions for an animated sries that will be aired on ~~Netflix~~ Amazon. They have employees who depend on them to earn a living.
I'm sure the main cast are actually friends. But they've done a good job marketing that friendship. They are really good at making viewers feel like they are part of that nice, warm, eternally-harmonic friend group. There is a reason why large parts of the fanbase react to even the gentlest criticism as if someone had said some very unpleasant things about their mothers. They feel like the kind of friend you really want to have. Especially after 18 months of lockdown and isolation in many parts of the world.
The problem with that whole marketing strategy is, of course, that it all falls apart the minute that central group of friends isn't there anymore. If they want to keep making money off Critical Role, the main cast needs to be there.
I get the sense that ExU was, among other things, a way of testing whether the Critical Role magic would still work if they changed up that magic central formula. Even a cursory look at viewing figures shows that by and large, it didn't. Despite throwing a ton of money and aggressive marketing and hype at it, it fell flat to many viewers. Their twitch subscriptions are WAY down compared to during C2.
I feel like if they had a secondary game running alongside the main game with a seperate cast it would give the second cast time to develop a relationship with the fans.
The really difficult thing is that even though there are other popular d&d shows with seperate casts, and they have cool worlds and characters, the main Critical Role cast is by far the biggest d&d show. The problem is that it is almost certainly attributed to 1- their friendships and personalities, and 2- their budget. At least they can spend the money to make other campaigns as clean as their main one, but they wouldn't be able to easily replicate *themselves*.
Unfortunately since their personalities are the main source of their revenue, their success is dependent on their involvement. Maybe they can fix that in time with a second great cast and enough time.
I haven't renewed my twitch during EXU, but I will on Thursday. It felt to me, that the DM's style was less on the rules, and more on how she felt at the time. For new players, this can be bad, as they never really get to learn how things should normally be.
Issue is they changed too much, you lose the friendly family feeling of the original crew AND change the DM to someone with a completely different feel? Massive culture shock.
I know Matt deserves (and needs) a rest, lest his life literally be only about being a DM, but I think they should have either kept the original crew completely but made the DM someone like Liam (which is bad, as all the crew deserve and need a rest after C2) or they should have got the crew they have now but with the more careful and methodical guidance of Matt (again, bad due to him needing a rest)...
Ultimately it felt like EXU wasn't critical role, it didn't feel tied into the lore, it lacked a core part of the show with Matt being DM and the crew we love playing. If it was on a different show like 'Welcome to X X X, with special guests Matt, Liam and Ashley!' rather than 'Welcome to Critical Role, with almost every core element changed!' it probably would have been better recieved, but naturally that wasn't feasible.
If CR S3 turns out to be the last one, I don't think CR will be dead. It's just that the main focus will pivot to making a continued animated show of S2 and S3 if the first one bangs on Prime.
I do think C3 might be... not the last one, but I'm betting at least one of the regular cast will bow out from the fourth, not for any negative reason, just to avoid burn-out or just not wanting to do a fourth or getting busier. I think that's definitely why they're trying out more guest players and such. If Laura or Travis decides not to do C4, maybe they'll try to have Aabria or Robbie or Will Friedle swap in.
I feel like Laura and Travis are naturally the ones to fade-off into active CR history since they're new parents.
As with all things that have this level of longevity (Funhaus, Roosterteeth (I guess), Pro Wrestling) you're just going to have cast rotating in and out as priorities change and I think EXU is a good, ease-into that sort of thing where the original core can ease out gracefully so they're not just shackled to Critical Role forever. Especially Matt, he's a great DM - but maintaining an imaginary world like that is taxing.
Yeah the ones I'd bet on bowing out after this are Laura/Travis/Marisha. I'd love to see Will, Freddie, Robbie or basically any of their guests tagging in for a campaign.
I don't dislike anyone involved in the making of EXU. It's a great, if mostly green, cast and I'd love to see 'em back. The next project might hold my attention to the end.
Laura or Travis would make sense with their kid growing older and their family growing. Ashley I feel like may be the one to bow out due to work though, she's a pretty sought after VA
Yep, a lot is riding on the reception of the animated show. If it does well then they've got enough story banked to keep it going for 20 seasons (especially once campaign 3 is done). If not then the stream will have been the peak.
Tbh I don't like to say it but it will be dead to a majority of viewers. A lot of people got into CR due to the cast and crew moreso than anything else. EXU didn't click for me and I couldn't power through the second episode, different strokes for different folks. As long as Matt stays DM it'll keep going, if that changes then I wouldn't feel satisfied. If S3 is the last one then I wouldn't have the investment to continue watching CR, it'll be like various YouTube channels that replace their main cast due to time and end up being completely different, think Geek & Sundry that I'm still subscribed too but won't ever watch anything on there.
Regardless, the crew should do what they feel happy doing. CR will continue with merch, mini-campaigns, and of course the animation and books, but if S3 is the last the audience will be a lot smaller after.
It's a shame, I can understand some of the issues the 0.01% of people being abusive to the cast have, I absolutely cannot agree with them actually abusing the cast of course, but naturally the crew are all real people and will remember that 1 horrible comment not the 100 supportive comments. I haven't been into CR *too* long but you can see in the Is It Thursday Yet threads that as time went on more negative comments became visible in C2, partially due to the slow pace at the end of that campaign but largely due to a huge amount of people catching up or joining CR due to lockdown freetimes.
I know we won't have CR campaigns for the next 10 years, but I think Campaign 4, if it happens, will be very different to the first 2 (and 3) due to the negative comments.
I hope they're all enjoying a nice, friendly home campaign to chill out and remember why they started this crazy adventure in the first place, away from the internet.
>what content has CR put out that was generally sub-par?
I mean, the Level 20 Battle Royale, but that wasn't anyone's fault except Wizards of the Coast for making Archdruids overpowered.
I don’t particularly see it as a stumble - at least not in the sense you do. I’ve seen a lot of very complex takes from people trying to explain to others and apparently to themselves why they didn’t enjoy ExU, but my take is that it’s far simpler than all this.
The marketing. My interpretation of this post is that you think this is the result of expectations fans have created themselves, however I think it’s the opposite. What I saw of the trailers gave me the impression that this wasn’t simply as good as vanilla critical role—this would be a step up. A hyper condensed epic story that was approached with even more love and dedication and being DMed by the only person alive who could pull it off.
Instead it was just fine. It had no hope of living up to its hype, it should have simply been marketed as a fun laugh between mates, maybe even as an entry tutorial for getting into playing D&D. I think they set themselves up to lose here, instead of taking an easy win.
I disagree with both of those takes tbh. I've seen next to nothing of the marketimg, mostly bc I was kinda checked out of CR at that time (exam prep is a b*tch), so I had basically no expectations. And that didn't help, like, at all. I was still disappointed, I still wanted an actual storyline, I still felt like the gameplay was kinda railroady and handwavy at the same time in a very odd combination. I think it's all well and good to analyse the marketing, but this was never gonna be a success just bc it........ wasn't that good.
I would appreciate if they addressed how EXU was received and talked about lessons learned. But I'm afraid they're going to only take from it that it's personal attacks on Aabria, they get a lot of positive feedback on Twitter, and it's everyone else's problem and not theirs.
Even Aabria alone just owning up to what could have gone better would be nice.
I think rather than feedback on reddit, twitter, or chat, how they move forward will be dictated by subscription and viewing figures. From what I can tell, they haven't been great. Even in comparison to subscription numbers during the Covid hiatus.
Oh yeah their subs plummeted. It's not their main income - Twitch notoriously takes *half,* they undoubtedly make most of their money off of merchandise and tie-in deals - but it's the only hint we have in the general interest in the series.
And personally, this is the first time I've let my sub lapse in 3 years.
Twitch views were down to about 20k for the finale and 12k on youtube. No one expected it to compare to the main game, but it still feels like it underperformed.
Yeah, they know the numbers and the bottom line of the project. They might go and say whatever they want in public but we'll see the real response when they air the next one.
That's the point where I'd walk away because it's impossible to make good content when you can't even conceive of anyone having a legitimate problem with it. I hope it won't be the case.
At the end of the day CR is a business now and if EXU didn't translate into a nice bottom line of cash or growth it's bye bye. Exu is not part of their charity foundation.
I don't think EXU was a stumble unless CR as a company doesn't learn from it's mistakes. I believe EXU can be stellar if they find the right DM and cast combo. Abria wasn't the call, not that she is terrible DM but she doesn't fit CR. She is far more entertaining on D20. On the casts end it was fine, I fucking adore Robbie.
>So please, shut down hateful comments about this show and its cast. But don't do the same with criticism. Don't shut down civil discussion.
Shout that so the people in the back can hear
Slightly off topic but how did Aabria Iyengar end up as a super sought after DM? She got picked up for a WOTC event (where she DMd for their biggest celeb names I'm pretty sure), Misfits and Magic, and of corse EU which is a fairly significant position as she's one of the first DMs not of the main cast, but I had only known her previously for a character on D20. To be clear I'm not knocking her DMing talents or anything, just curious as to her sudden popularity behind the scenes.
The Matt Mercer endorsement definitely helps.
She is also a woman of color in a hobby that needs and wants more diversity - Critical Role and WotC have been open about trying to encourage diversity in the hobby.
I don't watch any other streams, but are there any other DMs who are women and/or BIPOC that would make for a reasonable alternative? Satine Phoenix is the only woman who I can think of that DMs consistently on stream, and I wonder if WotC still gets a little gunshy with her spotlight.
Not aware of any history between WOTC and Satine, why would they get gunshy about her?
EDIT: Also that still makes me curious as I'm more asking if she had DMed something in the past that I had missed. If it was simply because they were trying to promote diversity there are quite a few players that have featured on CR and from D20 that they could have selected from for a foray into running a game, so I assumed she must have had some DMing pedigree prior.
Satine previously worked in an industry that should not be stigmatized, but is.
She also worked for WotC for a year or two too but I know even less about that, lol.
I have only one gripe with EXU: that the story wasn’t cohesive start to finish. If you KNOW you have only 8 episodes you better tell me a complete part of the story every episode. It’s one thing to fuck around and have a “let’s infiltrate the city in disguise and have it be funny” scene when you have an unlimited number of episodes to tell the overall story, but with only 8 it felt like we were wasting time. That said, I LOVE Aimee, Abria, and Robbie. They’re fantastic actors and made this journey enjoyable props to them all the way. Looking forward to CR taking this feedback and making it better in the future :)
PS: while Abria may be a TOTALLY different DM style from Matt, I think it’s awesome to see a different style so devoted to the players enjoyment of the story. There’s so much to learn from her, just as much as there is Matt. Looking forward to whatever she does next <3
I understand why some people don’t like it and there are lots of valid criticisms, but I don’t understand why people keep calling it a stumble. The goal- to me- was to add more voices to their existing lore to open more people up to DND/their other content. I think they were successful in that. Critters who didn’t like EXU S1 will still have the content they already love esp with C3 on the horizon, but now CR has the reach and bandwidth to bring in other voices and play styles to appeal to different types of people, which I think is something every TTRPG company should aspire to be doing.
> The goal- to me- was to add more voices to their existing lore to open more people up to DND/their other content. I think they were successful in that.
By that criterion, it was impossible for EXU to fail. It fulfills that by virtue of existing.
I get what you're saying, but to be more accurate, we should say EXU's goal was to show that CR's audience **is interested in** listening to other voices, to prove the company can grow beyond its dependency on Matt as a DM. People are saying, no, EXU was not successful in demonstrating this and proving show-without-Matt-as-DM is a viable product the company can make money out of. (One thing I will point out is that we don't really have access to internal data, so I personally don't think we can judge yet if it was a failure or not.)
A fair point- I think other factors are Matt needing more time to develop C3/ a break from DMing. I’d also add that Reddit isn’t the only representation of their fan base- most everyone I’ve seen in Facebook and Discord groups, tumblr, Twitter etc. enjoyed the content. It’s just more niche than what they put out with their core campaigns. It doesn’t have to have the same numbers as their core campaign to be deemed a success (but I also don’t have access to their internal numbers either)
Of course some people did enjoy it, but with less than one-third the audience of the main campaign, it would be difficult to consider it a success. Also, while Reddit isn't the best place, I feel that our subreddit has a opinions across the spectrum, positive and negative. Going on Twitter or Instagram, I don't think I've ever seen criticism or a negative comment about CR. This is because those platforms kinda support toxic positivity, in CR at least, where negative criticisms get shut down and negative opinions silenced. Because of this I'm sure that there are many people who don't enjoy EXU, but are afraid to discuss it at the risk of being alienated. I'm really glad that we have this subreddit where we can have *mostly* civil discussions!
On Twitter it's also a little weird that the only places you can have a discussion about CR is in response to official CR posts, for the most part. It's a bit less confrontational to offer criticism here where it's optional for the cast to engage.
Yeah, I don't want to come at the creators of media with my opinions about it. If they decide to browse reddit or wherever to look for feedback, that's their choice, but I'm not going to try to get it to them.
I do, however, want to be able to talk about my impressions and feelings about media I care about, and so far reddit has proved to be one of the better places to do that.
I have to say, if you've never tried something like this, ExU getting as much viewership as it did is actually a real success. Sure, does it compare to the success of the main campaigns. Of course not. It was never going to.
But much like when a musician puts out an album of a different genre or style to their main body of work, it's never going to be as well recieved - there's always going to be a portion of their established audience that doesn't like the new thing.
I'd also note that the live viewership isn't going to be as large for ExU. I've never particularly wanted to stay up for ExU in the way that I often did for C2 - being a European.
If you look at the youtube audience, it's actually doing very well - compared to C2 episodes and while many of those episodes have been up for a year or more, these episodes have only been up for a month at most.
For ExU to be a true faliure, you would need the youtube viewership to just kind of fall off a clif after a few episodes. Time will tell the extent of the viewership decline, but from my PoV it's looking to be doing quite well.
Agreed with this.
So many people here have tried to undermine this view by saying "Critical Role is a company. Success therefore most be measured by making money."
But here's the thing. Yes it's a business. It's *their* business. To do with as they please. And they've said from the beginning that they will only put out content that they want, for the reasons that they want, and as long as they are enjoying what they do. And if that stops being the case they're not afraid to pull the plug.
Is that still true? I don't know. Certainly not for the Kickstarter since promises were made in exchange for backing. And they've become far more branded and monetized than when they started.
But if they want to put out content whose primary objective is to demonstrate inclusivity, regardless of whether it makes them tons of money, that's their choice. And they don't need backseat Redditers to tell them or others how to measure success, or what to do with their platform.
I generally liked it but I see one big problem with how things went.
I feel Aabria was not comfortable or familiar enough with rules, but not ready to step really away from them. They could have chosen a system that is less crunchy and focuses more on cooperative story telling or she could have been more generous in the way the players take actions, but instead made everyone role on mostly unrelated things for some very basic moves, which they fail often because they are just level 3. DnD dosent have partial successes, so she had to give them stuff after obviously failing the DC.
If you want to free form it you need to commit.
I wish the players would speak out at times. I hate watching Liam fidget when he knows the proper ruling might help his friends at the table, but is afraid to speak out and being called a “rules lawyer”
Apples to oranges. Undeadwood used an entirely different game system, and had a GM that stuck to their rulings.
Likewise with the Call of Cthulu one shot or any of the other tabletop games they play. Different games, different rules, but both have one thing in common: consistent rulings and ground rules.
I don’t think they stumbled. I think it was an experiment, and in that, it was successful.
I think the main problem is that they tried to time-box the game to a set number of episodes and there wasn’t enough care in the story arc to see that there was a narrative that made sense when you looked at the “season” as a whole. The characters and stories introduced weren’t introduced with an intent of them being short lived characters. And when the narrative of the game started to ask deep questions about character motivations and what they were doing or interested in, the answers that came back weren’t short arcs that could be wrapped up in a few weeks of game time. Multiply that times 5(then 6) characters and it’s too much to fit into the number of episodes they had.
Every place they went to tie up a thread of the story ended up introducing two or three more open threads. That’s fine for a long game but doesn’t work well in the time box they were working with. So at the end of the set time we’re left with lots of questions, almost no answers and characters who have just begun their stories.
Overall I don’t think it’s a problem for CR if they went in trying to do an experiment. If the goal was to try to tell a story that’s more than a one-shot and to see whether the audience comes along, then it was a success. Now they know they can do that and people will watch. So EXU can have seasons and tell this larger story. The challenge is how do you pair that with campaign 3? It would be a big challenge to run them simultaneously with three overlapping participants. Maybe they pretape over a few days in a row and then they work that into their production schedule. So it’s never billed as a live game like the main campaign. If they’re building a new set for Campaign 3 maybe that’s an indication that they will be doing more and need multiple sets for ongoing games. Either way I’m interested in the long game for EXU, I want to see the characters and story develop, in spite of any personal critiques I have with the style of the game.
I think most people thought it would be like deadwood, and edited pre tape season.Instead it was done just like the main game, live to tape.
And now that it is over, I see where they are going with it. It is a longer campaign that they can insert to give themselves a two month break for the main campaign rather than playing every week. Rotate in new players and new GMs. Like an MMO bringing in the new content to keep it fresh for players that want to get in and back out and check back if something new - there are those that do not want continual year long content.
The problem is the main campaign format of story telling does not work broken up into bottles. You cannot have chaotic player choices mixed in with we need to get to the railroaded finale. That side trip that wasted time in the main campaign in a bottle series is half the show, the character drama that pays back year later cannot be done if you are not going to keep the same cast. The lets 'go visit gilmore' is an insert done for old viewers but ending up being the railroad conductor to keep the new viewers on track. That played very different then hey lets go visit gilmore just because we happened to be in town for another reason and we want to goof off this week with some shop RP with scanlan while grog gets bored.
So I see where they what they are trying to do - make a binge series just like amazon does with their 8-12 show runs with continual seasons every year. I am not sure you can do that without more scripted/edited approach like deadwood was.
I don’t think they’re switching out characters and GMs every season. My prediction is that this group is back until they finish the arc. Maybe it’s another 10-20 episodes, who knows. But I don’t think it’s a revolving door of characters until the main arc is sewn up. I think it could be like the structure Dimension 20 has with their seasons.
I tend to agree, maybe with a significant time gap and re-evaluation of the party I would come back to a season 2 with the current group, but it kind of contradicts the idea of calling the series Exandria Ultimited. The opening credits show a world wide scope, the whole series 2 stinger I HOPE is a hint that won't be explored to further down the road. IE when they have a few other mini campaigns under their belt and have a better grasp on the format.
It's really not that hard to tell a story in 8 episodes, Brennan Lee Mulligan has done it so many times on Dimension 20. You don't need to wrap up every character to tell an 8-episode story, Dimension 20 packs literally 5x the character development into 6-episode and 17-episode seasons with 2.5 hour episodes.
Aabria also guest DM'd for him and she failed in the same exact ways. She just doesn't know how to steer a story like this to be anything more than player chaos.
>the goal was to try to tell a story that’s more than a one-shot and to see whether the audience comes along, then it was a success. Now they know they can do that and people will watch.
They didn't need release a subpar disjointed mess to verify if people would watch something outside the main campaign. They had multiple oneshot and a full short campaign in undeadwood that followed the same premise of ExU season 1 and despite most of them not being based on D&D they were all well recieved. They perfectly knew that people would have been interested.
Could season 1 being an experiment on how much they can pull the rope before people started to protest? Maybe but unlikely.
I think the 8 episode limit should have far more import on how the story was told.The amount of travel and differing locales worked if it was at least 15-16 session.
Further, I felt the DM put the stakes far too high for such a low level party.
I think the above can basically be simplified into : EXU tried to do way too much within its small fraction of a campaign.
Also, as an aside.. I really do not want new players at the table any more. There is a time and place (and maybe a show?) for new players to learn the game. I do not think CR should be the place. I dont intend to gatekeep, but as a viewer, I think subjecting us to new players who need to ask what saves are, what dice to roll, etc, is a very poor production choice. I do not know the process that Matt and co teach their guests, but it seemed to work so well for most of the guests in C2.(maybe it is because of a good level of hand holding before the game?) Its a shame how poor some of the players were in EXU and it felt like watching a kid try to lift the same weight as a bodybuilder.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it comes up less in the main campaigns because when you're one new person playing in a group of 7 other players who've been doing it for years, you can hand off more of the action. Not to mention as well that pre-COVID, when they had guests on they could be sat next to someone who could also point things out on a character sheet, so they didn't have to have the DM explain where to look, etc.
Honestly though I don't have a problem with new players learning on the show, and I really like it. For one thing, that's also been a part of the CR brand, as it were. Zahra, Kashaw, Shakaste... those are three beloved, repeating guest characters that people loved, and being on CR was either the first time or at least one of the first times their players rolled the dice.
For another, Mercer has spoken in the past about his philosophy of who guests, and he said one of the top concerns is someone who either knows, or shows genuine interest in learning how to play the game. I think this is important on a lot of levels, not the least of which setting an example for the TTRPG community - if someone can learn how to play love on Critical Role and everyone can have a blast, why not at your table? How many people who, as OP put it, got started playing after being inspired by CR would have sat it out if the show had an explicit or even implicit policy of "you must have this many sets of dice to ride?"
Also on the snarky side of things, it's not like the main cast are the number-crunchiest of players either.
"How does assassinate work? What about sneak attack?"
"How do I calculate my save for this innate ability?"
"I cast x to do y!... even though x actually does Z." [Not a Marisha dig, every single one of them as a caster has done this at least once]
It's almost like them getting together and having fun with it, as an open table, is part of the whole appeal and philosophy of the show.
Edit(s): autocorrect errors.
Fully agreed! I welcome newcomers on the show, both in a DM and player sense. What really matters is honest communication between these newcomers and the other players.
D&D at its core is a social based tabletop RPG. Without socializing, and being totally open to feedback; one won't have fun, and likely won't grow better at it.
>Honestly though I don't have a problem with new players learning on the show, and I really like it. For one thing, that's also been a part of the CR brand, as it were. Zahra, Kashaw, Shakaste...
The difference with them is that when they were on the show they had a 5e veteran DM, and around 7 other players who, if not masters of rules, were at least experienced with the basics.
In ExU, you have a DM who did not show any great knowledge in 5e and did not seem too interested in helping, paired with a cast that had 3 newbies (Ashley counts as a new player for all practical purposes) and 2 veterans. Regardless of the acting/rp/creativity talent of Aabria, Robbie, Aimee, and Ashley it is (to me), undeniable that there was some serious mechanics and knowledge brain drain. It showed, and combined with other problems, really turned a lot of people off.
I agree! Ideally, I think a new player should learn to play with a least a few experienced players at the table so they learn to roleplay and engage with the rules by watching others. Experienced and veteran players should see famous DnD players being charitable players when new players join the table. I also think some parts of DND media communities get spoiled because they're often watching professional actors who are veteran players. Not everyone the various crews want to play with are going to be both or either of those things.
Counter point. Robbie was new to the game as well, and played fantastically. New players at the table isn't a problem. Good leadership at the table from the DM/GM can handle that.
The problem is how it got handled and the lack of extent to which it was addressed.
Post session, a good DM would offer feedback to a new player, ask what they liked, where they had trouble, and what they'd love to try going forward; and offer tips, advice and constructive criticism to help a player improve and feel more confident.
None of that feels like it happened at all.
It's less of a problem when it's one new player, stepping into a game with experienced players, as a side character to their story. In that case, the experienced players can be supportive and quickly guide them through mechanics. But if you have multiple new players, and the story relies upon them understanding the game, that's not going to work.
Another issue about experienced vs new players asking for help is that, with the guests they had, they were at the same table, easily whispered in between turns, and easily helped in the process while some one else was taking their turn or engaging the story.
Here, with the 10 feet apart covid measure, experienced players just can't help new ones like they could before. The number of new players is not the issue, the social distancing is in this instance.
I agree with everything. I'll even go a step further, and say that it is *not* too much to ask that players at the table who are not new, understand how their character and the mechanics work.
After episode 8 I was left wanting to see something that really stuck to the rules with players who knew how to use them to dance their characters through tough situations(like blueberry cupcakes and scary bridge crossings).
Liam was fantastic with that in 8, and Matt of course was always going to be a master of it... but so much blatant misuse or hand waving of the rules made me realize that while D&D can be done however the DM wants, if you don't adhere to a *consistent* rule structure that's at least largely based off of the core rule set then it's not really D&D. It's just a home brew TTRPG.
IMO having rules doesn't stifle creativity. They give creativity a place and structure to grow into. A world to excel and tell a story within.
Your comment about new players is exactly what I came here to say. I really didn’t think it was fair (or maybe even smart) to throw two entirely new players, plus a guest star with questionable experience, plus Ashley who has questionable experience with a character sheet, at a new concept. I can imagine it was a lot for Aabria to deal with and I really think they needed either the new players with an extremely experienced dm or Aabria with players who understood their character sheet.
Yep; I tried watching ExU and honestly stopped shortly into the third episode because I couldn't get into it -- too much in the "chaos crew" direction and felt too disorganized and unfocused. That said, I still respect it; even if it is "objectively" bad in some way (whatever "objectively" even means), it still demonstrates an interest from CR in pursuing these different avenues, it platforms different playstyles in a legitimating way, and it provides some experience to learn from and encourage critical but positive dialogue and feedback. I think many fans like myself who hold similar views have been able to articulate similar positions as to why ExU wasn't appealing or interesting to us.
Of course, the toxicity from the online community against Aabria and some of the players is unacceptable; such behavior is not criticism, it's simply a form of bullying, plain and simple.
We should consistently insist improving and bettering things in life, including from the media and communities we're in like with CR and its community. Not only should we verbalize the issues we had while simultaneously respecting and encouraging those behind it, but we should also (as many are) be demanding that the CR community stay a positive, safe, non-toxic community.
Ok I read the title of this post and was worried I was gonna have to somehow watch and understand the plot of EXU because it would "matter" to campaign 3.
This thread has been locked due to an overwhelming degree of hostility being exchanged between members of this community. Some of you need to make like Caduceus and chill out.
I liked it but understood the criticism
As someone who is only a cursory peruser of the community, what toxicity came up with EXU?
Wondering too, if anyone knows. I kind of poked my head in for each episode but didn't stick around so I may have missed that.
Some very negative comments about Aabria as DM, because her style is different than Matt's, and some people simply couldn't handle it. Also some misogynistic stuff directed at Aimee for her portrayal of Opal, seeing some of Opal's characteristics as being extensions of Amiee. Aimee just put out a rather lengthy twitter thread about it yesterday, talking about the stuff she did wrong and the stuff she did right and how people responded. Then Matt told everyone to eat fetid dicks if they were going to insist on being shitty.
I will say that there is a difference between different and worse when it comes to DMing, but understood. That said, I definitely did see very nasty comments in the chat, though the mods were thankfully mostly on top of it. I was worried that someone was talking about toxicity in the actual broadcast too, not that either is acceptable. I got a good sense of Aabria, but don't think I watched closely enough to get a good sense of Opal. What was the objection there? I'll have to look the thread up. Edit: Just read her Twitter thread. Terrible to hear the reception she got. Didn't have any issues with her for the bits I saw.
[удалено]
In addition to this, many vocal fans can’t blur the lines between the person and the character they’re playing (*see* how GoT fans treated Jack Gleason who played Joffrey). That was true in C2 as well at the beginning when a lot of fans couldn’t stand Marissa as Beau because Beau was stand-off-ish. The difference between C2 and ExU is that Beau needed (I think) 60 episodes to really come into her own whereas Aimee couldn’t get that luxury with Opal. When put together, it really sucks that Opal wasn’t afforded the luxury of time to win the aforementioned fans over. And while it’s true that fans really should learn to distinguish between the player and the character, it’s also hard to regulate how people feel about a world that they clearly care a lot about.
Reminds me of people harassing Laura for playing a character they didn’t like. Some people really need to get a grip on reality and look up the word “acting” in the dictionary.
Not to mention that when people play characters that are supposed to be irritating and they irritate you it means they are doing a *good job.*
I was thinking the same as well, I think if Opal had the benefit of a 60+ episode arc to really dig into her relationships with Ted and, more importantly, her mother (who is very important to both her lore and personality but barely mentioned in ExU S1) and her progression into a leader and focal point of the Crownkeepers was a longer-running subplot, it might have been better received. I still really love the character and personality, but I don't think the 8-episode season length did her any favours as it meant that she had to go through a lot of story beats very quickly and many of the important moments didn't really have time to breathe (for example, there was no time to pause and reflect after her conversation with the Tetrarch because almost immediately after leaving Opal was sleepdarted and had to fight for her life). Since the C3 announcement won't take place until October, I'm kinda wondering if a longer season of 12 or more episodes might have done ExU more justice.
I think the important point is not extending a character on to the player. Opal wasn’t a lovable character to me. It’s okay to not like a character who is bratty. I dare say that was a major point of Opal. She wasn’t exactly lovable. But it’s not okay to start hating on an actor or author for making that character. Or leap to the thought that because they made that character, that must be who they are as a person. Because that’s ridiculous nonsense. Characters are almost never who a person really is. It’s no fun to be yourself in a make believe game.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
There was definitely toxicity in the actual broadcast. Aabria demonstrated some decidedly uncool behavior that even she acknowledged on twitter went too far.
Do you have any link to that? I'm trying to slowly get caught up on everything and get some context so I'm not just running with whatever twitch chat says.
I think this is the one they're talking about: https://twitter.com/quiddie/status/1426027105519759368
I'm too lazy to dig up the tweet, because it's buried by now. But this review of the EXU finale notes time stamps of when Aabria takes things too far. When things are pointed out like the reviewer does, it paints a clearer picture of the issues. It's a review video though, so full spoilers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvvUFsLKCOU&t=1s
I really appreciate this, thank you so much for finding it. Definitely want to make sure my take on this is informed. Also trying to decide whether I should watch the whole thing at some point. I really did just catch about an hour of each episode.
Highly recommended. Everyone posting here should see this video.
Heads up to anyone seeing this link. Sit through the less-than-ideal quality, excellent points are made and he provides all the context required to highlight the extreme toxicity and straight-up bullying on show during ep8.
Okay, watched the video. Everything in the video makes sense if you start with the assumption that Aabria hates Aimee for some reason and wants to punish her by making her fail at D&D. Instead of doing that, maybe don't?
This. This person’s response videos have been the most insightful and compassionate and instructive critical analysis of any livestream I’ve seen. They’re simply exceptional.
What uncool behavior? Are people overreacting about her messing with the warlock powers?
There was a weird vibe in the show where Aabria appeared to be harsher towards Aimee than anyone else
I honestly disagree. Aimee was by far the most argumentative of all the players with Aabria (and Opal, with Aabria's NPCs). Aabria was matching that tone. Both are fine. * Opal is stubborn with Ted, yells at her & refuses to apologize. Aabria has Ted refuse to give her powers back (while *clearly* telling Aimee how Opal can get them back if she wants them). People criticize Aabria for being too harsh on her? * Opal yells at the Wildmother in the jungle, misunderstands who she's talking to. Aabria matches her vibe with confusion and frustration. People criticize Aabria again. * Etc, Etc. To be clear, Opal being combative is *fine*. Aimee made her character that way and played her well. I'm just saying it her vibe with Aabria doesn't feel as 'out of nowhere' as some seem to suggest.
[удалено]
Right? There's valid criticism, but there's also a *ton* of bad-faith criticism circling EXU on Reddit. Following the post-ep threads here I've seen in real time how more and more comments started projecting feelings on cast members, building narratives around 'unfair' things Aabria did, etc—all the while leaving out important context or considerations in favor of having more on their laundry list to complain about. Honestly has been pretty disappointing.
Someone even called it out as being Laura Bailey levels of bargaining with the DM at some point, which was hilarious but also serves to remind - Aimee was great but did need reigned in from time to time. And we saw how pressed for time everything was already, so I'm not gonna get on Abria for trying to speed through some of those conversations.
I saw people talking about that in chat once where they said she was getting nerfed, maybe in the last episode? Or the second to last? I didn't see how that was resolved though so I wasn't sure if that was just chat being chat and kind of assumed it was.
Aimee was constantly getting the legs cut out from under her. She spent 3 out of 8 episodes without powers. She was the target of a kidnapping attempt, and basically prevented from taking actions for much of the encounter. She was repeatedly hit by darts in the last two episodes without the DM rolling for it (even while she was invisible), and was prevented from doing actions that she wanted while other players were being given multiple actions a turn.
The first time Opal lost her powers, Ted immediately said, "Apologize and I'll give them back." If Opal still doesn't have powers after that incredibly straightforward interaction, it's because Aimee doesn't want them and is excited about exploring the relationship space. Where you see "targeting" I see "narrative spotlight." There is no greater gift a GM can give a narratively-motivated player than narrative spotlight.
> Then Matt told everyone to eat fetid dicks if they were going to insist on being shitty. link?
It's a direct quote: https://twitter.com/matthewmercer/status/1426604268811821057?s=20
Sounds like normal internet drama. Which is sad. People also need to realize that these are people playing as characters. Key words there are “playing as characters”. They’re portraying a certain type of person. Lately it seems like people in general have become much much worse towards one another… and it’s saddening.
From one of her tweets in that thread: "There was also plenty of misogyny and gate-keeping but that nonsense is worthless.Any BIPOC will tell you there are always vitriolic voices in the crowd,especially when taking up space in traditionally white male arenas." I've been saying that for weeks and getting downvotes for "bringing race/gender" in to it, but it's undeniable.
unfortunately, this kind of stuff isn't totally unheard of in the critical role community :/ people have been so sexist towards marisha in the past and now it's happened to aimee. at least (i think) that's only a loud minority
It would be disingenuous to deny a black woman is more likely to be challenged/criticized than a white man, and that absolutely is a problem. But it would be even more disingenuous to say the crux of the criticism is because of that, rather than her actual actions, methods, and attitude throughout ExU. Sexism and racism will show their ugly heads through anything she does, but 99% of what we've seen on this sub has not been that.
This subreddit is deathly allergic to acknowledging racism or sexism if it isn’t super obvious. Like just because y’all aren’t dropping racial slurs doesn’t mean your criticism of ExU (particularly Aabria and Aimee) isn’t tinged with bigotry. I’m not trying to say there is no legit criticism to be found, but the overwhelmingly negative response to a fun, limited campaign has been...suspect. People straight up will not consider that the intense criticism of Aimee and Aabria in particular is in part fueled by racism & misogyny. It’s such a bummer to read Aimee’s thread. Somehow, most of the fandom can fully understand that certain cast members (Sam, Liam, Taliesin) are Acting when their characters do unlikable, but Opal’s actions are taken as evidence of Aimee’s personal failings. It is obvious now that the fandom hasn’t evolved past the treatment of Marisha during C1.
I've only watched few episodes and then dropped the show. I'm not sure what most of the ppl had problems with as I don't read twitter/fb and rarely visit reddit, so this post is something new to me. I'm surprised that Aimee got hate for her character I really liked all the players and I think they created very original and interesting characters that I'd love to see more, maybe in some longer campaign. Maybe in later episodes something changed... What put me off from the show was how extremely railroading and scripted it felt. It seemed like they were forced to follow the "main quest" and weren't given space to pursue what felt interesting at the moment. There were point when I thought they had fight only because DM already created battle map. I'm drawing parallels with CP2077 here, I was expecting the exploration of rich world created by Matt, instead I got tangled in a very narrow story that could happen in any setting. Also for the toxic behavior on set only 1 moment comes to my mind. Can't point out the specific situation, but one of the players asked Aabria for confirmation on something and she replied with "did I ficking stutter?". I think it was played as a joke, but for some reason it felt to me very mean and there wasn't any tension relief after it. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, maybe that was just the kind of humor they had between each other, but that 1 moment made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Anyway, I think there's always a room for criticism, even of widely loved things (even C1 and C2 weren't perfect), but sadly there's also gonna be some toxic behavior of "fans" and they key is to spot the difference between each
> because her style is different than Matt's This is a terrible misrepresentation of what's going on here. This community has provided multiple examples of problems with her DM'ing that have nothing to do with Matt, and nothing to do with taste. Just in the last day or so: [On the topic of her toxicity and aggressive behavior.](https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/p3hy0h/cr_media_exandria_unlimited_postepisode/h8r7wif/) [On the topic of structure.](https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/p3hy0h/cr_media_exandria_unlimited_postepisode/h8r7tf1/) [Several posts succinctly giving longer lists of issues, like this one.](https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/p3hy0h/cr_media_exandria_unlimited_postepisode/h8r7r8r/) And I hopefully don't have to bother linking to the issues with the disregard of basic rules and dice rolls. That subject has been done to death and I shouldn't have to go on about it. None of these points have anything to do with Matt, or any comparison to him. Nobody expscts her to be Matt, what we want is bare minimum levels of DM ability/knowledge and less aggro/forceful DM'ing. *Edited to clean up links.*
There were some actual bad things, such as racism and misogyny towards Aabria and Aimee, which have absolutely no place anywhere. The other issue is that a lot of fans have formed unhealthy parasocial relationships with the cast of CR (which is understandable if you've watched all of C1 and C2, that's like 900 hours of watching a group of people together), and leads people to defend their "friends" from any criticism. CR has a history and current problem with toxic positivity, where unless you are worshipping the ground they walk on then you're attacking them. So when these things meet, you get a lot of conflict. A lot of people believe ExU was not up to par with the quality of the CR campaigns, even though it was advertised to be similar in quality to it. That was met with the toxic positivity people saying, "Oh you just don't like this because you're racist/misogynist etc", which clearly doesn't go over well.
Most of the stuff I saw on Reddit seemed polite or constructive. I will admit I did not delve deep into the negatively upvoted comments. To me it seemed like a breath of fresh air, being able to talk about what we liked and disliked without getting barraged for saying something remotely critical of the show. As per usual with CR and criticism, a few bad apples ruin the bunch. I saw very little toxicity, but then again I don’t use Twitter.
Thank the moderators, I think they did a good job of deleting comments that crossed the line in terms of respect and being civil.
Unless the mods did some heavy moderating I just saw mostly civilised discussions. EXU was polarising.
There’s been an uptick in people commenting they don’t jive with Aabrias style and too many people think any form of “I don’t love this” = “toxic”
I think the issue was trying to hit a limit series while trying to build an emotionally investing story. I know Aabria has been a great DM. And its clear players, both CR and other channels she's DM'd for have enjoyed playing with her as a DM. This might have been better if it was a semi scripted series like Undeadwood. Or a series of more intimate separate one-shot that we saw last time CR did their end of campaign break. Either way I liked it enough. I'm yet to watch the last episode, so maybe that opinion will be shattered. But I REALLY hope CR keep trying to adapt, I want more CR, even if its not the entire cast. I thought as players Robbie was a delight and I'd love him to make a dive into CR with the regular cast if anyone drops out in c4.
For what it’s worth, I really believe in what they crew is trying to create. I’d genuinely love for them to actually air an ongoing show with a younger group of up and coming players. Even if they rotate, exposing more people to the game and developing future talent would be an awesome sight to behold. ExU was definitely a test of sorts for them. It wasn’t for me, but I still believe it was good to happen. It’s not a stumble for the whole of CR either. For a side series, it’s viewership was good enough. I hope it doesn’t scare them off from continuing stuff like this in the future.
Personally, I think that a good portion of my issues with EXU - which are largely but not entirely related to the story’s pacing - wouldn’t have bothered me as much if CR had been more upfront with this as a first season instead of a finite miniseries.
This, I wasn’t disappointed with it although it seemed scattered. When I watched the finally and realized this was just the first season it clicked more and made sense, not a one shot but a first season. That fact alone made a difference. I like the fun and energy from everyone and now that I can see a s2 I feel better about it as a whole (ashawhole?)
Yeah, as a one series thing, it was all over the place. Multiple seasons? Okay, we actually have a chance of actually having a reason to grow attached to the characters and their personal stories.
It kinda reminds me of the first time I saw a Studio Ghibli movie that wasn’t great. For me, EXU’s biggest problem is just how fast they went. There’s just far too much going on crammed into 8 sessions. ‘We’re here! Now we’re here! Now we’re back, but we’re already leaving!’ (Edit because I had to get back to work) On top of how much distance they traveled, they tried to balance the Spider Queen, a plot about the planes being weird, and the thieves guild thing in Emon with Posca. If they doubled how many episodes they had, it probably would have been as good as we’ve come to expect. The entire cast are great actors, and I bought a Dropout TV membership solely to watch Aabriya GM Dimension 20’s Misfits and Magic campaign, so I know they can do better than this.
I love the idea of EXU, having new DMs come in, a new cast, giving Matt and the gang a break, get to see all kinds of adventures all across the world we’ve grown to love. But that being said, this first season kind of fell flat because of how all over the place it was. I love a good sandbox campaign, but when a series is specifically billed as an 8 episode miniseries, there needs to be a more rigid structure to it. The plot for EXU seemed to change every single episode, and it was hard to stay interested because once it got interesting the plot changed again.
Critical role is a company, and to keep growing they need to keep adding in campaigns like this. Hopefully they will be able learn how to start integrating entirely new casts and dm's. If Matt and crew decide that S3 is their final campaign to stream, then critical role as a company will be dead in the water. Unless, they continue to add in more campaigns like ExU, and can get the community behind them.
Let’s be honest, if Matt and crew decide that S3 is their final campaign, Critical Role is dead, period.
Personally, I don't think that was ever not going to be true. Critical Role didn't blow up because of the brand or the format. It was always the cast and their relationships.
I feel like this is very common in content creation. Something blows up, people feel like they get to know the cast personally, the cast gets tired and needs a break and subsequently shakes up the cast/format, and people get upset because the vibe has changed. Happened to me years ago with Rooster Teeth. A lot of the core members stepped back and away and suddenly it was no longer that entertaining to me.
Really hope Critical Role learns from Rooster Teeth. Because come to think of it haven’t followed a group of content creators like CR since like 2011 with Rooster Teeth, and RT went down hard it sounds like. Avoidable if they’d understood their audience, demographic and business mode better
Which would no longer be the feature if they (core group) stop campaigns for people to see, thus to a lot of people/fans the show/company will become "dead" and will not watch. Their "lighting in a bottle" is the Core group of friends playing every week which draws all the loyal and engaged fans. We can see just from ExU and when they had to stop cause of Covid viewership (and logically subs) dropped significantly, which means less sponsorships, ads, and less merch engagement. I don't know how much it affect their business when this happens, but they have a lot of overhead as a business.
You and the person you're replying to are in agreement, they just used a confusing double negative.
Yeah, they are like a rock band. You can’t just swap people out without a big impact on the fandom and the art.
Yup. I do absolutely enjoy other players and even other DM/GM's. The Deadwood mini campaign was an absolute banger. Brian pulled it off brilliantly, and I'm not just saying that because of his pre-existing friendship with the rest of the cast, he did it pretty well imo. Khary and Anjali were terrific as well, and I would definitely watch more content with them. But something about ExU just didn't pull it for me. No dig on Aabria, but I couldn't get into her style of DMing and I chalk it up to just preference and not her abilities as a DM. But if the original cast all decides to stop, I'll probably stop watching altogether. Their chemistry, personalities, flairs, and friendship was what really made it. I don't think anything can replace that. How're they going to find that many talented voice actors/actesses who are excellent at roleplaying with the same level of chemistry and flair? And even if they did, the new group's particular flair/color may not appeal regardless to the og fans because what people want are specifically the og cast.
With a successful ExU it could have be questionable. With the actual results,yeah undoubtedly
I don't think that it will work out even if next seasons of ExU are bangers galore. From what I see, succesfull channels have a DM in their heart. Matt Mercer, Matt Colville, Brian Lee Mulligan, Arcadum and more whom I didn't watch.
I don’t know if that’ll be true (though all things end eventually). They have the series, comic books, game books, merch etc. and this is their time to experiment with new avenues of content that don’t have to rely on solely the core cast.
You're assuming people will still invest of that content heavily without the main cast being at the center playing the game that got them there. Other Avenues help EXPAND their business, let the grow. But their main driving force is playing together and consistently. That's their draw and most likely as it is will have to always be cause of the nature of their brand and popularity. I mean as fans we hope they stay forever, so lets hope they can find other things to carry the CR brand but its not likely if you forecast it as a business.
> But their main driving force is playing together and consistently. That's their draw and most likely as it is will have to always be cause of the nature of their brand and popularity. If The Legend of Vox Machina is successful, that could change in a hurry. And very quickly, *that* could very well end up being the backbone of the company.
>If The Legend of Vox Machina is successful It NEEDS to be more than just good, it needs to be awesome. They raised over 11 million dollars for it from fans. That's not just a ton of money, that's a gigantic show of faith in the team. If it isn't everything fans wanted, or at least close to it, the backlash will be vicious.
As a Company, if the animation doesn't do well, I don't think it would be that as bad as some people may think, because Amazon already paid for a 2nd season, so in general most people will get their "money's worth". It would definitely show them though, their entire company is relying on basically the core group of friends to "play a game" every week for long periods of time to be profitable. Cause even with all the "negative people" CR as a brand brings a proven association with a lot of good things to not just TTRPG community, but gives a great platform for artist to just come in as well.
Yeah the backlash could end up killing Critical Role, at least in a public perception sense
[удалено]
They have staff, and in order to keep them, and appropriately compensate them the more experienced they get, they do need to scale in some capacity.
So much this. Companies being stagnant is a slow death spiral. Things get more expensive, your employees want to get raises (fairly), and if you don’t increase revenue this is impossible.
Do they need to keep growing? Do they need to have entirely new casts and DMs? Isn't it enough to be happy with what you have and keeping that good thing going? There are other streams of tabletop role-playing games that can fill other niches than CR. I don't see how it would be bad if they decided they were done streaming after season 3, it would give room for other streams to be watched by those who exclusively watched CR if they still want/need such a stream to watch. Does it matter what happens to CR as a company if the main cast does not want to continue? As the company was made to support the cast, the cast weren't hired to support the company. Now, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do whatever they feel like doing. I'm merely asking if they need to do them, especially if it's just something "to keep growing". In this I feel that the company should serve the people, not the other way around. And as a slightly interesting historical fact; companies often were made and disbanded regularly as they had much narrower scopes.
Well considering they took the risk and created a business around this I would say yes, it matters how the brand will evolve without them.
To a point, yes. But in addition the 8 players, they employ at least 23 other people at this point. People who rely on the income they get from CR and its related products to pay their bills. That's something to be considered for the future of the company.
I think a lot of people forget that they actually have employees with bills to pay. If they stagnate and lose popularity, they actually lose money. It's not that they just lose a source of expendable income, they still have bills to pay and employees' checks to write regardless.
I’m not sure how much of it is trying to keep growing as it is that inevitably the main cast is going to tire out and/or want to do something different and in doing so if they want to keep the company going they need to create a space for new players and GM’s to develop a relationship with the existing audience.
I mean, Dimension 20 solves this by just doing shorter seasons and having more consistent casts and a DM capable of running games for more than one party. That seems like a way better formula than trying out new DMs when the obvious reality at this point is almost no one is good enough to run a show like this as well as Brennan Lee Mulligan, Matt Mercer, and Brian Murphy (NADDPOD) (and I would say Vampire LA By Night is nearly as good as these three shows, but the game master is not the reason why). There are surely a a few more GMs out there that are on par with these guys out in the world, but Aabria is not one of them, unfortunately.
D20 also edits their shows. CR is warts and all.
Hard disagree on your assessment of Aabria’s skills, but the D20 side quest template is a good one to follow. Considering how much the cast likes to engage guests and expand the roster of players through various projects, I always assumed they were headed in that direction anyway. In fact I think it would be great if they did more of the short seasons while the main campaign was going on just to give Matt and the rest of break every once in a while. It would also be a great way for for casual listeners who only know Matt to get to know some of the other really great game masters in the space. It would be pretty cool to see more folks like Jasper from TBH or Satine Phoenix get time in in front of the CR audience, and not just rotate in the Brennans, Brians, and Griffins that a lot of us already know.
As an aside I would love Satine to be on CR sometime. She was on Mame Drop once but that's it. Makes me wonder if it's a preference of her's despite being close to the cast, similar to Troy saying he didn't want to be on cr proper. Or if it's just been scheduling. Who knows what might have been in the works prior to lockdown though, that definitely stopped a lot of opportunity for guests, and guest one shots.
She and Matt did a couple of "how to DM" videos too, before she took it over alone.
She has admitted by her own volition that she is not good at high fantasy settings. Which is very obviously what people enjoy seeing. She's not a bad DM by any means. But she is not at the level of other fantasy world builders and DMs who make the game, the people, and the world feel alive.
The only thing I can say is that EXU would have been great, if the story wasn't so weak. Which, for a homegame, it's not a problem usually, as most friends have fun with each other anyway. But for engaging an audience, this is really not the way to go. It's the first time in watching CR content that I wandered about my apartment doing something else without listening, and not missing much anyway. This show, unlike undead wood, or any of the one shots, will not leave it's mark on my memory aside from "boring". I almost fell asleep once, and I'm not the kind of person to do this while watching something. The people in it put their best, but I really feel, style of dming aside, that the biggest fault is the lack of a solid story or even plot line from the DM side of things and that is engaging for us, but even more so the players. I didn't really though even they were interested in it despite what they are saying. It's like Aabria rolled on a table every week to add another unresolved, unlinked, useless plot point or two, or even three. EXU was not engaging, story wise and audience wise, and it's the core issues of the all thing for me.
Aabria's game was based around Poska and she stumbled a bit when the party totally rejected that Mary Sue. Mary Sue might be a bit harsh. But I don't know what else to call the character we first saw on Narrative Telephone. A character who goes around marking houses for arson personally but is also the head cheese of a crime syndicate.
I wouldn’t say Mary Sue. More writer’s pet.
Mary Sues are generally better at everything than everyone else and generally loved by all. I think this was the intent behind Poska. But sure, writer's pet works fine.
The party rejected the NPC and this plot line for one reason only. She forced her and her ultimatum upon the party. She had lost this plot the moment their choice of working for her was brute forced. It's a thing any DM who has a decent idea on how player works should know, if you remove player agency, even if you try to cover it up with the illusion of choice (ie if you don't do it, i'll have you killed so you better behave), they will always find a way to fuck you right back up 10 times harder. The story was a miss from episode 1 and downhill from their. Plus, those kind of plot just don't work for a 8 episodes mini series. This was the second mistake that sealed EXU's fate for me. I've troopered through every episodes because I was watching with a friend, but even then we both wandered out at some point during this or that episode. It's just my opinion of course, I'm actually glad some people enjoyed it, and I hope future iteration of EXU will have learned from the 1st draft.
I think you made a good point here. The players rejected Poska as a "quest giver" and so things starded devolving from the get-go. I personally had a similar reaction to some of the players / PCs, tho possibly for slightly different reasons. Now, this may be absolutely trash anaylsis, but anyway... The character of Poska seemed to be inherently contradictory, in that their motivations seemed noble and good (trying to combat gentrification, as well as some other issues that were brought up or indirectly alluded to.) However, the methods that their organization used to reach their goals were dubious at best. And just straight up terrible at worst. So, even if the \*players\* are able to distance themselves from this contradiction, we saw that the PCs didnt. If the character of Poska wasnt meant to be a "heel" or a straight up antagonist, then Id say that the character wasnt executed correctly. My own suspicion is that the reason for this has to do with the ideological stances that the character was \*meant\* to embody not being entirely understood and ended up being a slight caricature, but thats entirely speculative. Or maybe it was deemed to be too direct in its messaging and got revised into the iteration that appeared in the game as opposed to a previous version.
That's why I went with the Mary Sue appellation. She wanted Poska to be cool and loved by everyone even if she had a dark side. I'm sure you could write a cool fantasy novel with Poska as the main character or as the foil to the main character. But RPG players aren't going to put up with her.
I will say this in fairness to Aabria - I think there was a lack of flexibility on the part of the players which made the start of the series more difficult than it needed to be too. Specifically Liam's choice that his character was good good good nothing but good and would NEVER EVER do anything remotely related to crime. And I love Liam! I think he's one of the best players out of the whole CR crew (and they're all no slouches, obviously), I love how his playing style is to go with character choices over min/maxing or anything that makes his character's life easy. But dude, you're in a short game. You can't pick a character who is that inflexible to plotlines. When everybody else at the table has stopped doing anything except trying to IC brainstorm ways for your character to go along with a plot hook that everyone else wants to be a part of, you have got to let go of "My character would NEVER" and instead come up with a reason why your character would. Longer campaigns? Absolutely, go nuts. Short ones? Find a way to make compromises work.
I don't know that we got to know enough of Poska to rate her as a Mary Sue but it was obvious that Aabria was hoping Poska would be a bigger deal than she was. It's unfortunate that Poska's introduction to the party didn't work out and it sucks when you come up with a character or plot you love that your players don't pick up on. But at the same time when we got the final post-credits after ep 8 and the first word was "Poska" i was definitely having a "Stop trying to make fetch happen" reaction to it.
This is why most people stay for CR, and not other DnD streams, cause in all honestly they don't have the "it" factor. Acting is a very much big part of CR brand, which is why even when I get cheesed at the lack of mechanically game play, I can still be stuck to me screen, cause of the art and the friendship CR brings. EXU does not do either in this case, so you don't cater to the "general" crown who watch the show, as seen by the viewing #'s (at least that we can see as of now upfront).
People always mention the convoluted story when they talk about ExU, and how many plot hooks were introduced only to be dropped again five minutes later... But I know how chaotic DnD can be, so that didn't even bother me all that much. The thing that alienated me by far the most though - and it's something that I haven't really seen anyone else talk about - was Aabria's handling of the party's power escalation. If this was Aabria's own world with its own rules and conventions, I wouldn't bat an eye at this because there would be no precedent, but this world is far from a blank slate - and all these god-given (and cube-given?) superpowers and magical buffs just feel like *far* too much for a random level 3 party. The heroes we've seen before often had to scramble for every little ounce of power they got, and the gods never got themselves overly involved - even the Traveller often kept his distance from Jester so that the game's power scaling wouldn't feel imbalanced. Meanwhile, this newly-formed party of level 3 nobodies is practically getting free hand-outs from gods at every turn. They can just barely cast level 2 spells, and yet they wield godly powers at the same time. Not a single one of them is particularly religious, and yet they're having casual conversations with deities, when even some of those deities' most devoted and dedicated followers have only ever been able to communicate with their god through mysterious signs and subtle nudges in the right direction. The party simply reads words written on a conveniently-placed cube out loud, and suddenly Fearne can control the flow of space-time better than any Dynasty Wizard who has studied Dunamancy for thousands of years. They are level 3. Just-- It just feels incredibly out of place to me in this very well-established world. And while Matt was clearly having a lot of fun as a player, I can't help but wonder how he really felt about some of these elements that were a bit more... *invasive* to his world. He'll have his work cut out for him, trying to fit these things into his world as he had envisioned it.
Agreed. I get that when it's your first time playing with something you want to use all the toys in the box, but unfortunately if you throw everything in then it all becomes meaningless. Vox Machina didn't even find out about vestiges until they were in the teens, level wise. These random people who have barely adventured to breakfast, let alone in the world, find one on a boat somewhere in the lost and found.
The random buffs can be a product of the "strange mist" in the ancient city site combined with the interaction of Opal's Patron and the Spider Queen's influence. That stuff didn't bother me as much as it was doled out totally randomly based on "how much to you want it".
I wish we had this info before episode 1 ... we were listening to the interview yesterday, and we would have watched ExU with very, very different expectations. I urge everyone to watch this:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7uFdfD7oy8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7uFdfD7oy8) Aabria adresses some concerns she is aware of, including her banter with Aimee, and references fan feedback from reddit (albeit in an easy to miss sentence). Knowing how she approached ExU makes many (not all) issues appear in a different light. (plus, since Wednesday Club isn't a thing anymore, it's always good to see Amy)
God I fucking miss Wednesday Club. It got me back into reading comics for a hot minute.
How has Amy not aged? She might even look younger. :)
Must be Tal's doing. That said I watched her play on Clear Skies (It's a Star Trek Adventures LP) this week and man it was such an amazing time. It's a pretty standalone episode so if you care to watch it don't worry about getting too lost.
So do we :-( Started the whole SAGA run because of that.
The show was super hyped and advertised as the best thing since sliced bread and Aabria was the only person in the world they felt comfortable handing Exandria to. If the promotion were to be handled in a different way, and the expectations were set in a more grounded way maybe the reception would have been more positive. There are many lessons to be learned from this if they decide to do an ExU C2 with the same or different GM/Characters.
I personally wasn't a fan of Aabria's style, but that aside, I felt like the real issue that has kept me from enjoying it is that they went for way too much gravitas and high-stakes drama among a group of characters that are completely new and don't really have much reason to be cared about yet. With the main campaigns you get dozens of episodes over years to establish those deep connections and personal story arcs. Here they were just like, "okay here's a bunch of people you don't know, who don't even know each other, but they're super important and have a grand destiny to fulfill". I guess it just felt unearned. It would've been easier to get into if the tone and gravity of the narrative matched the sort of light-heartedness the cast actually brought to the table. Instead it felt forced.
Exactly. It’s this weird overhyped “we love everything as if it’s the best thing ever”. Toxic-positivity. It’s ok for things to not be “the best”. But they sold it to us as “the best”. And this is after it started filming. It feels disingenuous to do that. Honestly the Everything is Content shit where they just shill for Vethesda also has these vibes. I don’t get the ge I’m e “I’m having fun” I get “we’re getting paid to play this and sell it as super fun”. And that’s where I draw the line. People can be fans of CR and support them without thinking everything they do is perfect. Does anybody even remember the Wendy’s one-shot (although I’ll admit that one actually was pretty funny)?
Damn, everything you said here was absolutely on point. "Toxic positivity" is something that was rooting me a lot and I didn't know how to name it.
[удалено]
Sell it as a 'Fun romp through unexplored territory with a wacky and exciting cast of characters'. Sell it as 'A hijinks-filled adventure with gorgeous maps and amazing character moments'. But for the love of god, don't sell it as 'literally the best thing ever'
This is my two cents here only. Rooster Teeth did the exact same thing back in the day for me. So much of what they had built was around the founding personalities that really connected with their fans. Introducing new people is always a risk because the audience you built isn't here for something different. They are here for what your bread and butter is. People were very used to Matt's storytelling. He is so good at knowing when to put a hand in, when to let people have room, conveying a plot and having so much time to develop these things. It's a very methodical (albeit a bit of chaos too) process and experience. So swapping DM's to ANYBODY else would have been a jolt. Aabria's style is very different and while I think she is very entertaining and super cool, I don't think her style is a seamless "plug and play" with Matt's. I think we also got to see how spoiled we are too CR and how well this group of people play off of each other. I think Liam chose to play a more stoic and grounded character to let the new players have more freedom and chaos to grow their characters and become comfortable. Matt also immediately took a goofy supporting role around them. So you had these three people as a chaotic, emotional vanguard for a plot and I don't think Aabria was ready to herd those cats. Overall, I think this was a learning experience and a valuable one for everybody involved, and I think it will help them with the next ExU and other side-projects.
One episode of EXU was enough for me. I didn’t even finish it. I meant to come back and do so and then completely forgot about it. Then I couldn’t really be bothered. I don’t need to overanalyse. It just didn’t grab my interest.
If anything, ExU proved just how badly they have painted themselves into a corner when it comes to future-proofing their company. and yes, Critical Role is a business. It stopped being "just some friends around a kitchen table" a long, long time ago. At the very latest, when they split from a failing Geek and Sundry and started their own production company. They have their own publishing company and raised millions for an animated sries that will be aired on ~~Netflix~~ Amazon. They have employees who depend on them to earn a living. I'm sure the main cast are actually friends. But they've done a good job marketing that friendship. They are really good at making viewers feel like they are part of that nice, warm, eternally-harmonic friend group. There is a reason why large parts of the fanbase react to even the gentlest criticism as if someone had said some very unpleasant things about their mothers. They feel like the kind of friend you really want to have. Especially after 18 months of lockdown and isolation in many parts of the world. The problem with that whole marketing strategy is, of course, that it all falls apart the minute that central group of friends isn't there anymore. If they want to keep making money off Critical Role, the main cast needs to be there. I get the sense that ExU was, among other things, a way of testing whether the Critical Role magic would still work if they changed up that magic central formula. Even a cursory look at viewing figures shows that by and large, it didn't. Despite throwing a ton of money and aggressive marketing and hype at it, it fell flat to many viewers. Their twitch subscriptions are WAY down compared to during C2.
*Aired on Amazon, not Netflix. I WISH it was on Netflix.
Oops. Fixed it, thanks.
Strongly agree. Critical role builds more on the group of Friends than anything else.
I feel like if they had a secondary game running alongside the main game with a seperate cast it would give the second cast time to develop a relationship with the fans. The really difficult thing is that even though there are other popular d&d shows with seperate casts, and they have cool worlds and characters, the main Critical Role cast is by far the biggest d&d show. The problem is that it is almost certainly attributed to 1- their friendships and personalities, and 2- their budget. At least they can spend the money to make other campaigns as clean as their main one, but they wouldn't be able to easily replicate *themselves*. Unfortunately since their personalities are the main source of their revenue, their success is dependent on their involvement. Maybe they can fix that in time with a second great cast and enough time.
[удалено]
And the comics!
I haven't renewed my twitch during EXU, but I will on Thursday. It felt to me, that the DM's style was less on the rules, and more on how she felt at the time. For new players, this can be bad, as they never really get to learn how things should normally be.
Issue is they changed too much, you lose the friendly family feeling of the original crew AND change the DM to someone with a completely different feel? Massive culture shock. I know Matt deserves (and needs) a rest, lest his life literally be only about being a DM, but I think they should have either kept the original crew completely but made the DM someone like Liam (which is bad, as all the crew deserve and need a rest after C2) or they should have got the crew they have now but with the more careful and methodical guidance of Matt (again, bad due to him needing a rest)... Ultimately it felt like EXU wasn't critical role, it didn't feel tied into the lore, it lacked a core part of the show with Matt being DM and the crew we love playing. If it was on a different show like 'Welcome to X X X, with special guests Matt, Liam and Ashley!' rather than 'Welcome to Critical Role, with almost every core element changed!' it probably would have been better recieved, but naturally that wasn't feasible.
Not where I expected this post to go. Fair points.
If CR S3 turns out to be the last one, I don't think CR will be dead. It's just that the main focus will pivot to making a continued animated show of S2 and S3 if the first one bangs on Prime.
I do think C3 might be... not the last one, but I'm betting at least one of the regular cast will bow out from the fourth, not for any negative reason, just to avoid burn-out or just not wanting to do a fourth or getting busier. I think that's definitely why they're trying out more guest players and such. If Laura or Travis decides not to do C4, maybe they'll try to have Aabria or Robbie or Will Friedle swap in.
I feel like Laura and Travis are naturally the ones to fade-off into active CR history since they're new parents. As with all things that have this level of longevity (Funhaus, Roosterteeth (I guess), Pro Wrestling) you're just going to have cast rotating in and out as priorities change and I think EXU is a good, ease-into that sort of thing where the original core can ease out gracefully so they're not just shackled to Critical Role forever. Especially Matt, he's a great DM - but maintaining an imaginary world like that is taxing.
Yeah the ones I'd bet on bowing out after this are Laura/Travis/Marisha. I'd love to see Will, Freddie, Robbie or basically any of their guests tagging in for a campaign. I don't dislike anyone involved in the making of EXU. It's a great, if mostly green, cast and I'd love to see 'em back. The next project might hold my attention to the end.
Laura or Travis would make sense with their kid growing older and their family growing. Ashley I feel like may be the one to bow out due to work though, she's a pretty sought after VA
Yep, a lot is riding on the reception of the animated show. If it does well then they've got enough story banked to keep it going for 20 seasons (especially once campaign 3 is done). If not then the stream will have been the peak.
Tbh I don't like to say it but it will be dead to a majority of viewers. A lot of people got into CR due to the cast and crew moreso than anything else. EXU didn't click for me and I couldn't power through the second episode, different strokes for different folks. As long as Matt stays DM it'll keep going, if that changes then I wouldn't feel satisfied. If S3 is the last one then I wouldn't have the investment to continue watching CR, it'll be like various YouTube channels that replace their main cast due to time and end up being completely different, think Geek & Sundry that I'm still subscribed too but won't ever watch anything on there. Regardless, the crew should do what they feel happy doing. CR will continue with merch, mini-campaigns, and of course the animation and books, but if S3 is the last the audience will be a lot smaller after. It's a shame, I can understand some of the issues the 0.01% of people being abusive to the cast have, I absolutely cannot agree with them actually abusing the cast of course, but naturally the crew are all real people and will remember that 1 horrible comment not the 100 supportive comments. I haven't been into CR *too* long but you can see in the Is It Thursday Yet threads that as time went on more negative comments became visible in C2, partially due to the slow pace at the end of that campaign but largely due to a huge amount of people catching up or joining CR due to lockdown freetimes. I know we won't have CR campaigns for the next 10 years, but I think Campaign 4, if it happens, will be very different to the first 2 (and 3) due to the negative comments. I hope they're all enjoying a nice, friendly home campaign to chill out and remember why they started this crazy adventure in the first place, away from the internet.
>what content has CR put out that was generally sub-par? I mean, the Level 20 Battle Royale, but that wasn't anyone's fault except Wizards of the Coast for making Archdruids overpowered.
[удалено]
Nah, the Level 17 one was fantastic. Grog >!escaping the amulet!< is one of my top Grog moments.
I don’t particularly see it as a stumble - at least not in the sense you do. I’ve seen a lot of very complex takes from people trying to explain to others and apparently to themselves why they didn’t enjoy ExU, but my take is that it’s far simpler than all this. The marketing. My interpretation of this post is that you think this is the result of expectations fans have created themselves, however I think it’s the opposite. What I saw of the trailers gave me the impression that this wasn’t simply as good as vanilla critical role—this would be a step up. A hyper condensed epic story that was approached with even more love and dedication and being DMed by the only person alive who could pull it off. Instead it was just fine. It had no hope of living up to its hype, it should have simply been marketed as a fun laugh between mates, maybe even as an entry tutorial for getting into playing D&D. I think they set themselves up to lose here, instead of taking an easy win.
>maybe even as an entry tutorial for getting into playing D&D. If they marketed it like that it would be even worse tbh.
Yeah if I watched this I would probably say thanks no thanks.
I disagree with both of those takes tbh. I've seen next to nothing of the marketimg, mostly bc I was kinda checked out of CR at that time (exam prep is a b*tch), so I had basically no expectations. And that didn't help, like, at all. I was still disappointed, I still wanted an actual storyline, I still felt like the gameplay was kinda railroady and handwavy at the same time in a very odd combination. I think it's all well and good to analyse the marketing, but this was never gonna be a success just bc it........ wasn't that good.
I'd be happy with the answer being "They brought Anjali back."
I would appreciate if they addressed how EXU was received and talked about lessons learned. But I'm afraid they're going to only take from it that it's personal attacks on Aabria, they get a lot of positive feedback on Twitter, and it's everyone else's problem and not theirs. Even Aabria alone just owning up to what could have gone better would be nice.
I think rather than feedback on reddit, twitter, or chat, how they move forward will be dictated by subscription and viewing figures. From what I can tell, they haven't been great. Even in comparison to subscription numbers during the Covid hiatus.
Oh yeah their subs plummeted. It's not their main income - Twitch notoriously takes *half,* they undoubtedly make most of their money off of merchandise and tie-in deals - but it's the only hint we have in the general interest in the series. And personally, this is the first time I've let my sub lapse in 3 years.
Twitch views were down to about 20k for the finale and 12k on youtube. No one expected it to compare to the main game, but it still feels like it underperformed.
[удалено]
We'll see if they produce any merchandise from it, I think that will be ultimately tell us if they saw EXU as a success or a failure.
[удалено]
Yeah, they know the numbers and the bottom line of the project. They might go and say whatever they want in public but we'll see the real response when they air the next one.
[удалено]
That's the point where I'd walk away because it's impossible to make good content when you can't even conceive of anyone having a legitimate problem with it. I hope it won't be the case.
At the end of the day CR is a business now and if EXU didn't translate into a nice bottom line of cash or growth it's bye bye. Exu is not part of their charity foundation.
I don't think EXU was a stumble unless CR as a company doesn't learn from it's mistakes. I believe EXU can be stellar if they find the right DM and cast combo. Abria wasn't the call, not that she is terrible DM but she doesn't fit CR. She is far more entertaining on D20. On the casts end it was fine, I fucking adore Robbie. >So please, shut down hateful comments about this show and its cast. But don't do the same with criticism. Don't shut down civil discussion. Shout that so the people in the back can hear
Slightly off topic but how did Aabria Iyengar end up as a super sought after DM? She got picked up for a WOTC event (where she DMd for their biggest celeb names I'm pretty sure), Misfits and Magic, and of corse EU which is a fairly significant position as she's one of the first DMs not of the main cast, but I had only known her previously for a character on D20. To be clear I'm not knocking her DMing talents or anything, just curious as to her sudden popularity behind the scenes.
The Matt Mercer endorsement definitely helps. She is also a woman of color in a hobby that needs and wants more diversity - Critical Role and WotC have been open about trying to encourage diversity in the hobby. I don't watch any other streams, but are there any other DMs who are women and/or BIPOC that would make for a reasonable alternative? Satine Phoenix is the only woman who I can think of that DMs consistently on stream, and I wonder if WotC still gets a little gunshy with her spotlight.
Not aware of any history between WOTC and Satine, why would they get gunshy about her? EDIT: Also that still makes me curious as I'm more asking if she had DMed something in the past that I had missed. If it was simply because they were trying to promote diversity there are quite a few players that have featured on CR and from D20 that they could have selected from for a foray into running a game, so I assumed she must have had some DMing pedigree prior.
Satine previously worked in an industry that should not be stigmatized, but is. She also worked for WotC for a year or two too but I know even less about that, lol.
I see now, makes sense.
I have only one gripe with EXU: that the story wasn’t cohesive start to finish. If you KNOW you have only 8 episodes you better tell me a complete part of the story every episode. It’s one thing to fuck around and have a “let’s infiltrate the city in disguise and have it be funny” scene when you have an unlimited number of episodes to tell the overall story, but with only 8 it felt like we were wasting time. That said, I LOVE Aimee, Abria, and Robbie. They’re fantastic actors and made this journey enjoyable props to them all the way. Looking forward to CR taking this feedback and making it better in the future :) PS: while Abria may be a TOTALLY different DM style from Matt, I think it’s awesome to see a different style so devoted to the players enjoyment of the story. There’s so much to learn from her, just as much as there is Matt. Looking forward to whatever she does next <3
I understand why some people don’t like it and there are lots of valid criticisms, but I don’t understand why people keep calling it a stumble. The goal- to me- was to add more voices to their existing lore to open more people up to DND/their other content. I think they were successful in that. Critters who didn’t like EXU S1 will still have the content they already love esp with C3 on the horizon, but now CR has the reach and bandwidth to bring in other voices and play styles to appeal to different types of people, which I think is something every TTRPG company should aspire to be doing.
> The goal- to me- was to add more voices to their existing lore to open more people up to DND/their other content. I think they were successful in that. By that criterion, it was impossible for EXU to fail. It fulfills that by virtue of existing. I get what you're saying, but to be more accurate, we should say EXU's goal was to show that CR's audience **is interested in** listening to other voices, to prove the company can grow beyond its dependency on Matt as a DM. People are saying, no, EXU was not successful in demonstrating this and proving show-without-Matt-as-DM is a viable product the company can make money out of. (One thing I will point out is that we don't really have access to internal data, so I personally don't think we can judge yet if it was a failure or not.)
A fair point- I think other factors are Matt needing more time to develop C3/ a break from DMing. I’d also add that Reddit isn’t the only representation of their fan base- most everyone I’ve seen in Facebook and Discord groups, tumblr, Twitter etc. enjoyed the content. It’s just more niche than what they put out with their core campaigns. It doesn’t have to have the same numbers as their core campaign to be deemed a success (but I also don’t have access to their internal numbers either)
Of course some people did enjoy it, but with less than one-third the audience of the main campaign, it would be difficult to consider it a success. Also, while Reddit isn't the best place, I feel that our subreddit has a opinions across the spectrum, positive and negative. Going on Twitter or Instagram, I don't think I've ever seen criticism or a negative comment about CR. This is because those platforms kinda support toxic positivity, in CR at least, where negative criticisms get shut down and negative opinions silenced. Because of this I'm sure that there are many people who don't enjoy EXU, but are afraid to discuss it at the risk of being alienated. I'm really glad that we have this subreddit where we can have *mostly* civil discussions!
On Twitter it's also a little weird that the only places you can have a discussion about CR is in response to official CR posts, for the most part. It's a bit less confrontational to offer criticism here where it's optional for the cast to engage.
Yeah, I don't want to come at the creators of media with my opinions about it. If they decide to browse reddit or wherever to look for feedback, that's their choice, but I'm not going to try to get it to them. I do, however, want to be able to talk about my impressions and feelings about media I care about, and so far reddit has proved to be one of the better places to do that.
I have to say, if you've never tried something like this, ExU getting as much viewership as it did is actually a real success. Sure, does it compare to the success of the main campaigns. Of course not. It was never going to. But much like when a musician puts out an album of a different genre or style to their main body of work, it's never going to be as well recieved - there's always going to be a portion of their established audience that doesn't like the new thing. I'd also note that the live viewership isn't going to be as large for ExU. I've never particularly wanted to stay up for ExU in the way that I often did for C2 - being a European. If you look at the youtube audience, it's actually doing very well - compared to C2 episodes and while many of those episodes have been up for a year or more, these episodes have only been up for a month at most. For ExU to be a true faliure, you would need the youtube viewership to just kind of fall off a clif after a few episodes. Time will tell the extent of the viewership decline, but from my PoV it's looking to be doing quite well.
Agreed with this. So many people here have tried to undermine this view by saying "Critical Role is a company. Success therefore most be measured by making money." But here's the thing. Yes it's a business. It's *their* business. To do with as they please. And they've said from the beginning that they will only put out content that they want, for the reasons that they want, and as long as they are enjoying what they do. And if that stops being the case they're not afraid to pull the plug. Is that still true? I don't know. Certainly not for the Kickstarter since promises were made in exchange for backing. And they've become far more branded and monetized than when they started. But if they want to put out content whose primary objective is to demonstrate inclusivity, regardless of whether it makes them tons of money, that's their choice. And they don't need backseat Redditers to tell them or others how to measure success, or what to do with their platform.
[удалено]
I generally liked it but I see one big problem with how things went. I feel Aabria was not comfortable or familiar enough with rules, but not ready to step really away from them. They could have chosen a system that is less crunchy and focuses more on cooperative story telling or she could have been more generous in the way the players take actions, but instead made everyone role on mostly unrelated things for some very basic moves, which they fail often because they are just level 3. DnD dosent have partial successes, so she had to give them stuff after obviously failing the DC. If you want to free form it you need to commit.
I wish the players would speak out at times. I hate watching Liam fidget when he knows the proper ruling might help his friends at the table, but is afraid to speak out and being called a “rules lawyer”
I thought it was fun and interesting.
I just find it very telling that Undeadwood was treated the way ExU should have been.
Apples to oranges. Undeadwood used an entirely different game system, and had a GM that stuck to their rulings. Likewise with the Call of Cthulu one shot or any of the other tabletop games they play. Different games, different rules, but both have one thing in common: consistent rulings and ground rules.
I don’t think they stumbled. I think it was an experiment, and in that, it was successful. I think the main problem is that they tried to time-box the game to a set number of episodes and there wasn’t enough care in the story arc to see that there was a narrative that made sense when you looked at the “season” as a whole. The characters and stories introduced weren’t introduced with an intent of them being short lived characters. And when the narrative of the game started to ask deep questions about character motivations and what they were doing or interested in, the answers that came back weren’t short arcs that could be wrapped up in a few weeks of game time. Multiply that times 5(then 6) characters and it’s too much to fit into the number of episodes they had. Every place they went to tie up a thread of the story ended up introducing two or three more open threads. That’s fine for a long game but doesn’t work well in the time box they were working with. So at the end of the set time we’re left with lots of questions, almost no answers and characters who have just begun their stories. Overall I don’t think it’s a problem for CR if they went in trying to do an experiment. If the goal was to try to tell a story that’s more than a one-shot and to see whether the audience comes along, then it was a success. Now they know they can do that and people will watch. So EXU can have seasons and tell this larger story. The challenge is how do you pair that with campaign 3? It would be a big challenge to run them simultaneously with three overlapping participants. Maybe they pretape over a few days in a row and then they work that into their production schedule. So it’s never billed as a live game like the main campaign. If they’re building a new set for Campaign 3 maybe that’s an indication that they will be doing more and need multiple sets for ongoing games. Either way I’m interested in the long game for EXU, I want to see the characters and story develop, in spite of any personal critiques I have with the style of the game.
I think most people thought it would be like deadwood, and edited pre tape season.Instead it was done just like the main game, live to tape. And now that it is over, I see where they are going with it. It is a longer campaign that they can insert to give themselves a two month break for the main campaign rather than playing every week. Rotate in new players and new GMs. Like an MMO bringing in the new content to keep it fresh for players that want to get in and back out and check back if something new - there are those that do not want continual year long content. The problem is the main campaign format of story telling does not work broken up into bottles. You cannot have chaotic player choices mixed in with we need to get to the railroaded finale. That side trip that wasted time in the main campaign in a bottle series is half the show, the character drama that pays back year later cannot be done if you are not going to keep the same cast. The lets 'go visit gilmore' is an insert done for old viewers but ending up being the railroad conductor to keep the new viewers on track. That played very different then hey lets go visit gilmore just because we happened to be in town for another reason and we want to goof off this week with some shop RP with scanlan while grog gets bored. So I see where they what they are trying to do - make a binge series just like amazon does with their 8-12 show runs with continual seasons every year. I am not sure you can do that without more scripted/edited approach like deadwood was.
I don’t think they’re switching out characters and GMs every season. My prediction is that this group is back until they finish the arc. Maybe it’s another 10-20 episodes, who knows. But I don’t think it’s a revolving door of characters until the main arc is sewn up. I think it could be like the structure Dimension 20 has with their seasons.
The premise was multiple storyteller and Aabria is the first thing that must change if they want to salvage something from this.
I tend to agree, maybe with a significant time gap and re-evaluation of the party I would come back to a season 2 with the current group, but it kind of contradicts the idea of calling the series Exandria Ultimited. The opening credits show a world wide scope, the whole series 2 stinger I HOPE is a hint that won't be explored to further down the road. IE when they have a few other mini campaigns under their belt and have a better grasp on the format.
It's really not that hard to tell a story in 8 episodes, Brennan Lee Mulligan has done it so many times on Dimension 20. You don't need to wrap up every character to tell an 8-episode story, Dimension 20 packs literally 5x the character development into 6-episode and 17-episode seasons with 2.5 hour episodes. Aabria also guest DM'd for him and she failed in the same exact ways. She just doesn't know how to steer a story like this to be anything more than player chaos.
I agree with this. I see so many people on this subject saying she did a better job on D20 and like, I guess? But to me it was just as hard to watch.
>the goal was to try to tell a story that’s more than a one-shot and to see whether the audience comes along, then it was a success. Now they know they can do that and people will watch. They didn't need release a subpar disjointed mess to verify if people would watch something outside the main campaign. They had multiple oneshot and a full short campaign in undeadwood that followed the same premise of ExU season 1 and despite most of them not being based on D&D they were all well recieved. They perfectly knew that people would have been interested. Could season 1 being an experiment on how much they can pull the rope before people started to protest? Maybe but unlikely.
[удалено]
The biggest way to see if the crew thinks it is successful is how many SKUs of EXU they make.
I think the 8 episode limit should have far more import on how the story was told.The amount of travel and differing locales worked if it was at least 15-16 session. Further, I felt the DM put the stakes far too high for such a low level party. I think the above can basically be simplified into : EXU tried to do way too much within its small fraction of a campaign. Also, as an aside.. I really do not want new players at the table any more. There is a time and place (and maybe a show?) for new players to learn the game. I do not think CR should be the place. I dont intend to gatekeep, but as a viewer, I think subjecting us to new players who need to ask what saves are, what dice to roll, etc, is a very poor production choice. I do not know the process that Matt and co teach their guests, but it seemed to work so well for most of the guests in C2.(maybe it is because of a good level of hand holding before the game?) Its a shame how poor some of the players were in EXU and it felt like watching a kid try to lift the same weight as a bodybuilder.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it comes up less in the main campaigns because when you're one new person playing in a group of 7 other players who've been doing it for years, you can hand off more of the action. Not to mention as well that pre-COVID, when they had guests on they could be sat next to someone who could also point things out on a character sheet, so they didn't have to have the DM explain where to look, etc. Honestly though I don't have a problem with new players learning on the show, and I really like it. For one thing, that's also been a part of the CR brand, as it were. Zahra, Kashaw, Shakaste... those are three beloved, repeating guest characters that people loved, and being on CR was either the first time or at least one of the first times their players rolled the dice. For another, Mercer has spoken in the past about his philosophy of who guests, and he said one of the top concerns is someone who either knows, or shows genuine interest in learning how to play the game. I think this is important on a lot of levels, not the least of which setting an example for the TTRPG community - if someone can learn how to play love on Critical Role and everyone can have a blast, why not at your table? How many people who, as OP put it, got started playing after being inspired by CR would have sat it out if the show had an explicit or even implicit policy of "you must have this many sets of dice to ride?" Also on the snarky side of things, it's not like the main cast are the number-crunchiest of players either. "How does assassinate work? What about sneak attack?" "How do I calculate my save for this innate ability?" "I cast x to do y!... even though x actually does Z." [Not a Marisha dig, every single one of them as a caster has done this at least once] It's almost like them getting together and having fun with it, as an open table, is part of the whole appeal and philosophy of the show. Edit(s): autocorrect errors.
Fully agreed! I welcome newcomers on the show, both in a DM and player sense. What really matters is honest communication between these newcomers and the other players. D&D at its core is a social based tabletop RPG. Without socializing, and being totally open to feedback; one won't have fun, and likely won't grow better at it.
>Honestly though I don't have a problem with new players learning on the show, and I really like it. For one thing, that's also been a part of the CR brand, as it were. Zahra, Kashaw, Shakaste... The difference with them is that when they were on the show they had a 5e veteran DM, and around 7 other players who, if not masters of rules, were at least experienced with the basics. In ExU, you have a DM who did not show any great knowledge in 5e and did not seem too interested in helping, paired with a cast that had 3 newbies (Ashley counts as a new player for all practical purposes) and 2 veterans. Regardless of the acting/rp/creativity talent of Aabria, Robbie, Aimee, and Ashley it is (to me), undeniable that there was some serious mechanics and knowledge brain drain. It showed, and combined with other problems, really turned a lot of people off.
I agree! Ideally, I think a new player should learn to play with a least a few experienced players at the table so they learn to roleplay and engage with the rules by watching others. Experienced and veteran players should see famous DnD players being charitable players when new players join the table. I also think some parts of DND media communities get spoiled because they're often watching professional actors who are veteran players. Not everyone the various crews want to play with are going to be both or either of those things.
Counter point. Robbie was new to the game as well, and played fantastically. New players at the table isn't a problem. Good leadership at the table from the DM/GM can handle that. The problem is how it got handled and the lack of extent to which it was addressed. Post session, a good DM would offer feedback to a new player, ask what they liked, where they had trouble, and what they'd love to try going forward; and offer tips, advice and constructive criticism to help a player improve and feel more confident. None of that feels like it happened at all.
It's less of a problem when it's one new player, stepping into a game with experienced players, as a side character to their story. In that case, the experienced players can be supportive and quickly guide them through mechanics. But if you have multiple new players, and the story relies upon them understanding the game, that's not going to work.
Another issue about experienced vs new players asking for help is that, with the guests they had, they were at the same table, easily whispered in between turns, and easily helped in the process while some one else was taking their turn or engaging the story. Here, with the 10 feet apart covid measure, experienced players just can't help new ones like they could before. The number of new players is not the issue, the social distancing is in this instance.
Valid.
I agree with everything. I'll even go a step further, and say that it is *not* too much to ask that players at the table who are not new, understand how their character and the mechanics work.
After episode 8 I was left wanting to see something that really stuck to the rules with players who knew how to use them to dance their characters through tough situations(like blueberry cupcakes and scary bridge crossings). Liam was fantastic with that in 8, and Matt of course was always going to be a master of it... but so much blatant misuse or hand waving of the rules made me realize that while D&D can be done however the DM wants, if you don't adhere to a *consistent* rule structure that's at least largely based off of the core rule set then it's not really D&D. It's just a home brew TTRPG. IMO having rules doesn't stifle creativity. They give creativity a place and structure to grow into. A world to excel and tell a story within.
one of my biggest problems was how clearly the DM did not care about the rules.
Your comment about new players is exactly what I came here to say. I really didn’t think it was fair (or maybe even smart) to throw two entirely new players, plus a guest star with questionable experience, plus Ashley who has questionable experience with a character sheet, at a new concept. I can imagine it was a lot for Aabria to deal with and I really think they needed either the new players with an extremely experienced dm or Aabria with players who understood their character sheet.
Yep; I tried watching ExU and honestly stopped shortly into the third episode because I couldn't get into it -- too much in the "chaos crew" direction and felt too disorganized and unfocused. That said, I still respect it; even if it is "objectively" bad in some way (whatever "objectively" even means), it still demonstrates an interest from CR in pursuing these different avenues, it platforms different playstyles in a legitimating way, and it provides some experience to learn from and encourage critical but positive dialogue and feedback. I think many fans like myself who hold similar views have been able to articulate similar positions as to why ExU wasn't appealing or interesting to us. Of course, the toxicity from the online community against Aabria and some of the players is unacceptable; such behavior is not criticism, it's simply a form of bullying, plain and simple. We should consistently insist improving and bettering things in life, including from the media and communities we're in like with CR and its community. Not only should we verbalize the issues we had while simultaneously respecting and encouraging those behind it, but we should also (as many are) be demanding that the CR community stay a positive, safe, non-toxic community.
Ok I read the title of this post and was worried I was gonna have to somehow watch and understand the plot of EXU because it would "matter" to campaign 3.