# So Let's Talk About Critical Role and Theater Kids, Then tags: #articles #references/twitter ![[So Let's Talk About Critical Role and Theater Kids, Then (cover).png]] *Theater masks icon © Fonticons, Inc. / Font Awesome (CC BY 4.0); fleur-de-lis icon © Delapouite / game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0)*  > What did more damage to TTRPG's? Critical Role or Big Bang Theory? 🎲  > Critical Role. Without question. > > Their theater kid fingerprints are all over the destruction done to the genre, especially with the growth of copy cats clearly trying to be like them isn't of trying to have fun.  > Never watched Critical Role, and I never will. > A pox on all their houses. I think we need to talk about **[Critical Role](https://criticalrole.com/)**. I don't *want* to, but I think we have to because — and you should read this in the same tone that people say, *"You people need Jesus"* — you people need to get the fuck over **Critical Role**. I have known [Ocha](https://x.com/Ochadoji999) for literal decades at this point, and I am perfectly aware that he doesn't know what he's talking about in this instance. He is doing a bit of bandwagon jumping, and unwisely. Sure, it's going to get the seal claps from the audience that he generally caters to, but it's not actual legitimate thinking. Which is sad, because actual legitimate thinking in this regard would be incredibly useful, interesting, and revelatory if the usual suspects actually engaged in it. Have I actually touched on **Critical Role** on Grim Tokens before? I'm sure I have.[^1] Perhaps not surprisingly, **Critical Role** aren't on my list of people who are highly regarded in terms of their play, their styling, their production values, or the games they produce. In fact, I am critical of **Critical Role** in ways that many of their harshest critics can only aspire to. ## Exit, Pursued by a Neckbeard All that said, let's go to the topic that is in play right here, the destruction of the RPG space. We need to go to that as a specific, because laying it at the foot of **Critical Role** or "theater kids" is a bullshit cop out. It always has been, and it always will be, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, that there is no destruction of the genre, whether it be of fantasy RPGs or of actual play recorded and presented online. Fantasy RPGs are doing just fine. There are plenty of great ones out there for whatever your play style is, whether it is extremely fiction forward or super crunchy old school throwback. You've got your choice of games. There are 10,000 supplements all day every day. To suggest gaming has been destroyed is the most arrogant kind of masturbatory bullshit.[^2] TRPGs are just fine, and it amounts to presenting yourself as a victim to suggest otherwise. If you want to position yourself as a victim, you can go ahead, but don't drag me into it. My hobby's doing all right. Now when people say, "The hobby has been killed," really what they mean is **D&D** has been killed, specifically **[[Dungeons and Dragons]]** as produced by Wizards of the Coast, and that's true. **Dungeons and Dragons** is not the same game as it was in B/X or BECMI or **AD&D** or 3 or 3.5 or 4E (it can only wish it was equal to the pinnacle that is 4E). **Dungeons and Dragons** has been ruined by a number of things, including some movements within the TRPG hobby, but to lay it at the feet of **Critical Role** or Big Bang Theory or "theater kids" is self-deluding, self-destructive behavior of the highest order. Why? Because it's the grognard neckbeards, who are responsible for the death of **Dungeons and Dragons**. It is at their feet its corpse is laid. They are responsible for stabbing it in the spine, for pissing on its grave, and for refusing to stop digging it up and parading the corpse around in front of people who really have moved on with their lives and would rather forget that it's been enshrouded. The neckbeards decided that. They really couldn't accept any evolution, development, or change in their beloved **Dungeons and Dragons**. So much so that relatively minor changes resulted in tearing of their sackcloth and screaming at the sky. You can say that it's the woke responsible for it as much as you want, but the truth is the fans of **Dungeons and Dragons** and the genre of old-school fantasy gaming *themselves* are responsible for the death of what was once **D&D**. Long live everything else. Long live **[[ShadowDark]]** and **[Wight Box](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/473031/wight-box-original-medieval-fantasy-adventure-campaigns)** and the other thousand **D&D**-adjacent games that are out there in the marketplace and that you can buy right now, all of which are better designed, better presented, better laid out, and just all around better games than **Dungeons and Dragons** ever was. I hate to break it to you, but that's just the truth. Half of the people that worship at the altar of OSR are holding up their Holy Bones as relics of ancient **Dungeons and Dragons**, and have made better games than Gary Gygax ever put a pen to. Yet they will tell you three times before the sun has risen that **Dungeons and Dragons** is the Ur-game, the one true grail that can never be approached. The other half of the OSR recognize that it's a marketing gimmick and a sales label, and proceed under the assumption that they actually have something worthwhile to sell you. I respect that half. I do *not* respect the half that parades around and tells me that the hobby is dead while trying to shill me their new gaming book, all the while blaming the murder of said hobby on a TV show, a stream, or theater kids. Frankly, if your hobby *could* be murdered by a TV show or a bunch of dumbasses on a stream or a bunch of hated theater kids, it deserves to die. Something so weak should not walk this earth. If it burned to death and then was plunged into an ocean until the ashes were dispersed into the seven seas, that might be a good start. If it could be killed by **Critical Role**, Big Bang Theory, or theater kids. No, instead it was the neckbeards, and they could only do it because they were the ones keeping it alive via artificial respiration half the time. The rest of the time they were punching each other in the solar plexus to get that oomph, and incidentally strangling the babe in the crib. ## All the World's a Stage And what of the "theater kids"?[^3] Well, some of you are either too young or too dumb to know when "theater kids" came into use as the pejorative of choice of the grognards to complain about the new wave of people coming into the hobby. I am neither too young nor too dumb. I was there. I saw it happen. It was in the mid-90s, with the innovation brought to the table by **[[Vampire - the Masquerade|Vampire: The Masquerade]]**, and not just the technological innovation, but the actual marketing, the choice of demographic, the ways in which the game was put in front of the people who were the most likely to have the time, the money, and the creative drive to play a big tabletop role-playing game. The theater kids started getting called out *as* theater kids because in the mid-90s, White Wolf marketed hard at the youth and college crowd, which resulted in something very interesting. **Vampire: The Masquerade** took off like a bat out of hell, pun fully intended.[^4] The game sold ridiculous numbers. When I say ridiculous numbers, I want you to keep in mind that by the mid-90s, **Dungeons and Dragons** was truly on the decline. That's been documented even by the big **D&D** boosters of the era. It wasn't dead, by any means, but the hobby as represented by the game was not doing too well. **Vampire: The Masquerade** charged into the middle of things and proceeded to stomp an absolute mudhole in **Dungeons and Dragons** to the point where it literally outsold it day in and day out for a ridiculous amount of time. What did **VtM** bring with it? It wasn't the first to innovate here, but it certainly was the first to popularize it: *"theater language"* that directly referred to troupes, scenes, and storytellers, so it became trendy for the neckbeards to bitch about the "drama geeks," or as Gary Gygax told Allen Varney in his June 1998 [Dragon Magazine #248 interview](https://archive.org/details/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonMagazine248.pdf), *"amateur thespianism."* That was pretty hoity-toity language, but [rec.games.frp.dnd](https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.frp.dnd)[^5] latched on to it like a leech on your unprotected scrotum. Honestly, pretty fucking rich coming from the guy who literally wrote in 1978 in the **[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook](https://archive.org/details/tsr02100addplayershandbook)** that *"each of you will become an artful thespian as time goes by, and you will acquire gold, magic items, and great renown as you become Falstaff the Invincible!"* Somehow, thespianism[^6] was fine when he was advocating for it, but when someone else did it better, Gygax knuckled under and called it out like a bitch. In fairness, back in [Dragon Magazine #102](https://archive.org/details/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonMagazine102.pdf), October of 1985, he did say, *"Games are not plays, although role-playing games should have some of the theatre included in their play."* He went on to write **[Dangerous Journeys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Journeys)**. That act alone should probably disqualify him from being one of the luminaries of the hobby. By 2007 the term "theater kids" was pretty well established. So much so that White Wolf actually used the exact phrase in **[World of Darkness: Innocents](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/55727/World-of-Darkness-Innocents)** from 2008, where you could find the **Drama Club** merit with *"theater kids, music students, dancers, writers"* as the core description for characters specializing in the Expression skill. While you could say a lot of things about White Wolf of the early 2000s — and I definitely did since I was literally there — there was a certain sense of ironic self-awareness you just had to enjoy right up until **"Hey, Net Punks!"**[^7] ## The Widening Gyre What happened in 2007 to get the rhetoric spiking again? The death of **D&D** 3.5e and the announcement of 4e that August. The same existential terror that had swept the hobby back when **Dungeons and Dragons** got absolutely bodied by hot goth girls and guys in capes. This absolutely shattered the *ever-fucking minds* of the grognard fraternity, betrayed by their own even though they had long been betrayed by themselves, the people who weren't actually buying 3.5 because it was a bloated, ungainly whale of a game, and it really needed a serious reset and frankly the mechanical refurbishment that 4e brought. But they didn't want it, and they didn't want those filthy theater kids who had actually gone on to play successful games and make money in the hobby industry, such as it is. That was insult on top of injury. I actually have a nice table that one of my faithful hounds put together for me. |**Era**|**Dominant Community Term**|**Primary System Associations**|**Core Tension**| |---|---|---|---| |**1975–1989**|**Thespians / Role-Players**|_AD&D 1e_, _Call of Cthulhu_, _AD&D 2e_|First-person persona immersion vs. third-person pawn/wargame play| |**1990–2005**|**Amateur Thespians / Drama Geeks**|_Vampire: The Masquerade_, _Mind's Eye Theatre_|"Roleplay, not rollplay" and parlor LARP vs. crunchy simulation and dungeon crawls| |**2006–2014**|**Improv / Theater Kids**|_World of Darkness_, indie story games, _D&D 4e/PF1e_|Collaborative improv and character backstory vs. tactical grid combat and early OSR lethality| |**2015–Present**|**Theater Kids (OC / Neo-Trad)**|_D&D 5e_, _Daggerheart_, **Critical Role**|Performative actual-play aesthetics and pre-written character arcs vs. emergent, high-lethality sandbox play| Finally, 2015 rolled around, which is an important turning point. I'm not sure I actually agree with the 2015 to present nomenclature, which lumps **Daggerheart**, **Critical Role**, and **D&D** 5e with **Blades in the Dark**, **Universalis**, and **Trophy Dark**. I think you have to be a serious retard to be incapable of distinguishing things that have almost nothing to do with one another. But hey, we aren't talking about people with adequately powerful cognitive facilities. We're talking about people who think theater kids killed their hobby. The bit about this particular table that gets right up my ass, along with so many other things, is that it flips from collaborative improvisation and character backstory to performative actual play aesthetics and pre-written character arcs. Somehow we went from accusing theater kids of being improv heavy (which is actually true) to being all about following a pre-written script, which is far more applicable to classic **D&D** scenario and module design. These motherfuckers couldn't even be consistent in their own derogatory terms. I demand a better class of opposition. ## The Dog That Didn't Bark Which brings us around to **Critical Role** again. I want to repeat: *I am not a **Critical Role** booster.* I think the first season was kind of interesting and showed some promise, and then everything after that was a group of people strangling off their own creativity to chase the dragon of higher numbers and corporate endorsements, not to mention the most performative behaviors, both on screen and off, that they could manage, thinking that all of the falseness could easily replace authenticity. It clearly never did, and there's an easy practical observation to make to prove it. **Critical Role** introduced **[Daggerheart](https://www.daggerheart.com)**, the next big fantasy system that was supposed to stomp a mudhole in **D&D** and walk it off all the way to the bank. It was going to be the thing that **Critical Role** rode into the future, securing their place as pioneers and visionaries. They sank a ridiculous amount of money in promotion and art purchases and more merchandising and even more marketing. What happened to it? Well, normal people have never heard of it. It has a small, dedicated community and no real market growth. Something that could kill a hobby or a genre would be able to sell a game. Not only did it fail to sell one game, it failed to sell two: **Candela Obscura**. **Candela Obscura** was also supposed to be the next big thing to take horror gaming past the [[World of Darkness]] and past **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** into the future, and they were going to ride that right up until it died under them like a malnourished horse. **Critical Role** didn't kill your hobby. It *couldn't* kill your hobby because it couldn't even keep its *own games* alive. They made a calculated decision to stop using **Daggerheart** and go to **D&D** 5e for their theatrical presentation, because nobody knew or wanted to buy **Daggerheart**, and **Critical Role** themselves didn't have enough faith or belief in their own promoted game to continue using it. Theater kids didn't kill your hobby. They couldn't kill your hobby. They were off having a good time playing their own games, games that have some measure of success and that have influenced almost every game that has been published in the last 20 years, whether you know it or not. This includes OSR games, I would like you to know. Elements like high-speed, low-drag mechanics that don't require addition and subtraction but leverage die pools. Yeah, those showed up over on the indie side of the house first. Stuff like **ShadowDark**'s real-time torches, yeah, that was experimental stuff that came out of the late 90s, early 2000s, where there was a lot of experimentation with reified physicality when it comes to gameplay.[^8] Actually, this is a good opportunity to break out another table. |**System**|**Year**|**Physical Object / Constraint**|**In-Game Fiction Reified**| |---|---|---|---| |**Dread**|2005|Jenga tower|Mounting survival-horror tension and mortal peril| |**Don't Walk in Winter Wood**|2006|Single candle & pitcher of ice water|Encroaching darkness and creeping hypothermia| |**ViewScream**|2012|Separate rooms & live webcams|Sealed spaceship compartments and video comms| |**Ten Candles**|2015|10 tea lights, burned index cards, voice recorder|Fading light, expended traits, and final transmissions| |**The Tearable RPG**|2016|Torn paper character sheet|Physical/mental attrition and permanent loss of skills| |**Bluebeard's Bride**|2017|Wearable wedding ring|Dominant persona controlling the Bride's body| |**Sign**|2017|Enforced silence & hand gestures|Emergence of a fledgling sign language| |**Star Crossed**|2019|Jenga tower|Emotional restraint vs. forbidden romantic attraction| |**The Wretched**|2020|Jenga tower & audio microphone|Failing ship integrity and solo survivor distress logs| |**Alice is Missing**|2020|90-minute timer & real smartphone texts/voicemails|Real-time missing-person search across town| |**ARC: Doom**|2021|Real-time session clock|Inevitable countdown to an impending apocalypse| |**ShadowDark**|2023|60-minute real-time countdown timer|Burning dungeon torches and light-source scarcity| ## On With the Show Looking at that list, honestly, I need to get a copy of **[Sign](https://thornygames.itch.io/sign-a-game-about-being-understood)**. It's a game I have absolutely no ability to play, literally in a physical sense, but it's intriguing and I've never heard of it before. The hobby is doing great. There's a good argument to be made that we are in a golden age of tabletop RPGs and have been for over 20 years, but it is a time in which dinosaurs are finding it increasingly hard to continue to walk the earth. The ease with which anyone, anywhere, can write their own RPG, lay it out in a very professional manner, and publish it for whatever price that they want, from free to hundreds of dollars for professional offset multicolor printing—those days are here. The hobby as a whole has real diversity. It's an ecology that can't be killed off by something as piddling as **Critical Role**, or even an influx of people that you think are better than you. As much as I decry the woke excesses of modern WotC and even Chaosium at this point.[^9] I think that it's foolish to posture as a victim. It tells me that you have consciously given up power to others, and you wish to be given it by a third party in recompense. We have two words for that where I'm from: fuck that. I'm not party to that. I'm not going to go along with it, and I sure as hell aren't going to let it keep wandering on past without calling it out. The hobby is fine. Some publishers are rotting on the inside, but that's fine. We don't need big publishers to support our hobby. In fact, they just seem to get in the way. If Hasbro died tomorrow and took Wizards of the Coast with them, if Chaosium burned to the ground, if **Critical Role** fell into a black hole and MCDM[^10] was eaten by demons, the hobby would still be fine and we would have 10,000 games to play and people willing to sell them to us. The theater kids will still be around because we're still writing better games. Life is hard. [^1]: On Grim Tokens, **Critical Role** has come up a few times, always as a foil rather than a recommendation: - in the **Daggerheart initiative analysis** ([[Static vs Sequentialized vs Emergent Initiative Implementations - Or What is Daggerheart Initiative Actually Doing|Static vs Sequentialized vs Emergent Initiative]]) — as the studio behind Daggerheart, critiqued for burying its real mechanical influences; - in the **2026 RPG a Day "Mercy" piece** ([[RPGaDay 2026 - 07 - Mercy|RPGaDay 2026 - 07 - Mercy]]) — their audience treated as a soft-touch market demographic; - in the **2024 "Peerless player" post** ([[RPG A DAY 2024 - Peerless player - Acclaimed advice|RPG a Day 2024 - Peerless player]]) — shorthand for performative acting over actual play; - and in the **[[Dungeon World]] reference** — the Mighty Nein as the mainstream "found family" trope. [^2]: Yes, I know I've used bullshit twice in three or four paragraphs. That's how strongly I mean it. [^3]: Look, man, I had to. If you're going to make me do it, I'm going to do it.  [^4]: You may think this is temporally out of sequence, but we'll get to that. Don't you worry. I love linguistics. You're going to learn today. [^5]: That's a Usenet newsgroup, by the way; social media before there was social media. [^6]: Is it true that guys just want to watch thespians go at it together? [^7]: White Wolf Magazine editor Ken Cliffe's December 1994 Usenet announcement that the mag was coming online, signed "Hey, Net Punk," touched off a legendary flame war. The thread survives on Google Groups: [alt.games.whitewolf](https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.whitewolf/c/ZLVNWrOIAOM). Why yes, I was actually in that flame war. I am a veteran of the psychic wars.  [^8]: See **[Ten Candles](https://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles/)**, for example. [^9]: Chaosium put a disclaimer on a reissue of its 1983 **Cthulhu Companion** conceding that its stereotypes "were wrong then and are wrong now" — that book published in the middle of Stafford's quarter-century running the company — then turned around and unveiled a new **Great Pendragon Campaign** edition to venerate the same man. The whiplash drew a deserved call-out from many: [Wee Wheaton](https://x.com/WeeWheaton/status/2112006559991787793). [^10]: I'll bet you forgot entirely about MCDM and their **[Draw Steel](https://www.mcdmproductions.com/)**, which was the other RPG that was supposed to take over the fantasy RPG world by storm and almost entirely failed to do so.