After a decade rolling the dice, Dungeons and Dragons' biggest stars look back on their family business
written by James Grebey
photo by Gracie Hammond
Grog Strongjaw, a hulking barbarian warrior who once helped save the realm by splitting a terrible dragon’s skull in twain with a mighty cleave of his axe, did not expect to find himself dancing, doing the worm for the amusement of a fiendish emcee. As he writhed his body on the stage in front of a sold-out arena crowd, it’s fair to say that Travis Willingham didn’t expect this either. He and the rest of the cast of Critical Role were the ones who were actually dancing, slamming shots of tequila and hot sauce, and doing a ring-toss aimed at some particularly phallic helmets. (Later, the cast will see fanart online of their characters in “the Traveler dick helmets” — the sign of a successful show.)
It’s a far cry from what they normally do, the thing that made them famous enough to sell out arenas. Typically, they’re rolling dice around a table while playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons, weaving an elaborate fantasy story and streaming it weekly for hundreds of thousands of fans, known as “Critters.” Yet despite the outlandish action on the stage, it doesn’t feel all that different from usual, which is part of Critical Role‘s magic. Even as they’re the standard bearers of a whole new genre of entertainment, heads of an expanding multimedia empire, and creators of a fantasy lore whose complexity might outdo The Lord of the Rings (and whose total runtime, north of 1,500 hours, certainly does), Critical Role is ultimately a group of friends playing a fun game together. They’ve pulled it off for 10 years, turning that very friendship into a groundbreaking entertainment company. It’s what comes next that’s everybody’s question.
It’s a mid-April Thursday in the fantastic realm known as “Chicago,” hours before Critical Role’s live show at the Wintrust Arena, when Sam Riegel, the class clown of an already frequently silly bunch, compares the group to the mafia. “We’re a family that does business together and kills people,” he quips.
A professional voice actor by trade, like the rest of the cast, Riegel hasn’t done any killing himself, but he and his pals have slain plenty of evil-doers in a fantasy roleplaying game that quickly became one of the biggest businesses in this slice of the entertainment industry. In addition to a flagship streaming series, they have spin-off streaming shows, graphic novels, a behind-the-scenes subscription service, tabletop games of their own, and an animated adaptation streaming on Amazon Prime Video with a second show in the works. The show, The Legend of Vox Machina, was the most in-demand animated streaming series, according to Parrot Analytics, and Critical Role credits it with expanding their audience. There’s buzz about an upcoming video game, too.
In late 2012, two years before they live-streamed anything, Matt Mercer, a voice actor and lifelong tabletop gamer whose unflappable, collected demeanor as Dungeon Master — DM — belies the narrative chaos he can unleash at any moment, gathered the Fellowship. In his small Los Angeles apartment, he ran a game of D&D for some of his friends and fellow voice actors, including Riegel, Willingham, Liam O’Brien, Laura Bailey, Marisha Ray, and Taliesin Jaffe. It soon morphed into an ongoing campaign, with actress Ashley Johnson, known for voicing Ellie from the video game series The Last of Us, joining for the second session. It was here that they had their first adventures in Exandria, a fantasy setting of Mercer’s creation.
In 2015, Critical Role first shared their adventure with the world, broadcasting the game on Geek & Sundry, a once-prominent Twitch and YouTube channels created by actress and geeky icon Felicia Day. Three years after that, Critical Role went independent. By 2021, it reportedly made the most money of any channel on Twitch, bringing in over $9.6 million from August 2019 to September 2021.
In 2025, Critical Role is one of the brightest lights in an increasingly popular medium: actual play. Using a game like D&D as the rules to provide an engine for an adventure, players and their DM improvise and act out a story together. Audiences watch along as they become fans of both the fictional heroes and the people playing them. There is, of course, a little bit of a parasocial relationship aspect to this. (“A little?” says Willingham.) Actual play series have become big business with millions of fans. Another group, Dimension 20, recently rolled their dice before 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden. What was once a niche is becoming mainstream — or at least broadly understood.
“We’ve all had conversations with our parents trying to explain, ‘What is a ‘Critical Role?‘” says O’Brien, the thoughtful player behind characters like troubled wizard Caleb Widogast and moody rogue Vax’ildan. “But way more people that I encounter in the world now understand who we are. I meet people who are like, ‘Oh yeah. That’s that show where people play a game at a table and tell a story?’”
Jaffe, who sports a colorful mohawk and who, according to the rest of the cast, may or may not be an actual practitioner of the dark magical arts, says he’s heard them referred to as “one of those bands you’ve never heard of that can fill a stadium” — and they do just that.
Live shows are increasingly a big part of Critical Role; they’ve done more than a dozen over the past several years, and the Chicago adventure is first of a five-stop 10th anniversary tour that will take them from Australia to Radio City Music Hall. Typically these shows are just higher-energy versions of the games they normally record in a studio, sometimes entries of the ongoing storylines (known as campaigns), other times one-off adventures. Chicago is different. Robbie Daymond, a frequent Critical Role guest, makes a surprise appearance on the stage, playing the sadistic host of a fantasy reality show. Cackling with glee, in a top hat with golden demon horns poking through it, Daymond’s Malvolio has the characters compete against one another in physical challenges — like trying to pop balloons by slamming their butts down on them while a teammate holds them in place, ready for the squashing. This is not something that’s found in any copy of the D&D Player’s Handbook.
While the second act of the Chicago show does have the players banding together to fight Malvolio in a more classic (if still a little loosey-goosey) D&D way — butts in chairs and dice in hand — it’s still a departure from Critical Role’s normal routine. Campaign Three, which followed a ragtag bunch of heroes known as Bells Hells, concluded earlier this year. Although a highly anticipated fourth has yet to start (or be announced), they’re still in their Burbank studio recording spin-offs and other adventures.
“The live shows are all about surfing on a tsunami of energy from thousands of people,” O’Brien says.
A couple of weeks after their Chicago adventure, the cast is back at their studio, located on the other side of Los Angeles’ Mount Hollywood. It’s unassuming from the outside — the front still has the name of the now-defunct lighting company whose space Critical Role partially moved into in 2018 before fully taking over a couple of years later. Inside, geeky knickknacks cover the desks of the roughly 70 employees, including not one but two people whose job it is to know all the lore Critical Role has developed over its three main campaigns, five spin-off shows, and more than two dozen one-shots. There’s a room full of models and miniatures, including many-eyed tentacled horrors, fiery dragons in intimidating poses, and hordes of skeletal warriors. The vast majority are Mercer’s bespoke constructions, and every one represents an epic battle or memorable locale from Critical Role‘s history.
Walk past an epic mural of their fantasy exploits and eventually you’ll come to their main recording stage, a custom-made triangular table where the cast sits to play and record games of the main Critical Role campaign, though nobody has rolled a dice on its polished surface in a while. Instead, they’re a room over, at a more flexible table that they can re-decorate and reshape for one-shots or limited series. Today, they’re recording Age of Umbra, a limited series outside the main continuity of the main Critical Role lore. A grimdark fantasy adventure compared to the brighter tone of the main campaign, it’s a departure in another way, too. They’re not playing D&D but Daggerheart, a tabletop gaming system of their own design, created under their label Darrington Press.
Even this smaller studio, with spooky backdrops and featuring dramatic uplighting, is elaborate. The main table, surrounded by a background vaguely meant to look like a tavern, boasts projected screens that can add rain or smoke effects behind the players. From his DMing station at the head of the table, Mercer has a whole board of audio and lighting effects, including buttons for things like “city streets,” “arcane spaces,” “creepy,” and “big creepy.” Press one and the vibe of the table switches to battle mode, the lighting changing as one of the many original music tracks Critical Role has commissioned over the years begins to play. It’s impressive, but all of these bells and whistles are subtle. Though the possibility exists to add even more effects — like a dragon actually swooping behind them, should Mercer mention a dragon — that’s not what Critical Role wants to be.
“You can slowly turn D&D back into a video game. There’s a reason why we do it this way,” says Maxwell James, associate creative director and one of the many talented behind-the-scenes faces. “Not everybody can do this in their home, but the core of what you’re watching on the show, you can do too. You can do this.”
That tension between Critical Role being a legitimate production performed by professionals and feeling like any group of friends playing a fun game is real. It’s even caused something known as the “Matt Mercer Effect,” where DMs lament that they’re not running a game as complex or engaging as the one run by a high-profile professional who has been doing this on camera for a decade. Mercer has tried to push back against these comparisons, stressing that what’s important is that the people at the table are having fun. “The show at its core is about us and how much we care about each other, and people can see that,” O’Brien says.
Mercer looks at his friends. “Doing this for 10 years, we could have easily transitioned using it as a means of making money. But it’s still us wanting to play games and surprise each other, to make it for each other,” Mercer says. “I’m not excited to play it for the story or the audience. I want you guys to have fun.”
Of course, it is work. It may not feel that way when they’re sitting down playing, but the cast is unanimous and quick to stress that this is indeed their jobs — and since going independent, their careers. At a Q&A for VIP fans before the Chicago show, Ray, the spunky redhead who is Critical Role’s creative director in addition to playing an undead warlock and tomboy monk, is asked what the cast had learned from doing the show. “Taxes,” she deadpans. They’re no longer just on the hook for saving Exandria from an evil conclave of dragons; they need to make sure their employees have health insurance as they plan a future for themselves in the fraught entertainment industry.
“There’s nobody that’s come before us to show the path. We made it with a machete,” says Bailey, perhaps the most naturally joyful member of the cast. Luckily, thanks to careful growth, the path is clear for the moment. Willingham, Critical Role’s CEO who can come off as a football-playing jock but is as geeky as the rest of his fellow players, says the company is “very, very stable.”
There are a lot of levels to Critical Role’s hierarchy. As the DM, Mercer is essentially in charge of the fantasy universe, as he created the setting and it’s his whims that primarily shape what happens next in the story. Meanwhile in every campaign there usually tends to be one character who emerges as the leader of the party. In the real world, Willingham’s the CEO, but there’s no sense that he’s the “boss” over any of his friends. On top of friendship dynamics, there are relationship dynamics; Willingham and Bailey are married, as are Mercer and Ray. Given all this, Critical Role seems to run remarkably without incident.
“The foundation of our friendship and as co-workers is problem-solving. All we know how to do together is collaborate,” says Johnson, who went from a child actor on Growing Pains to a fallen angel barbarian on Critical Role. “Even if we’re fighting, it’s like “Yeah, well also this’ or ‘Yes, and!'”
Since one of the unique aspects to actual-play like Critical Role is how audiences become attached to the actors as much (if not more) than their characters, the cast also has an inherently lopsided relationship with their fans, who watch them have fun with each other every week. They’ve all gotten a lot better at dealing with people online wanting input on their real-life friendship over the course of a decade in the spotlight, something Mercer says wasn’t always the case.
“Because this is something that is so special to us and so personal, at the beginning it was very difficult to hear anything,” Mercer says, though now he points to the relationships the Critter community has made with each other, as Critical Role has helped gaming groups, friendships, and even families get together. “That’s more important than any concerns of parasociality.”
High-stakes fictional drama on the table notwithstanding, there really doesn’t seem to be a hidden side to Critical Role. They really are as friendly off camera as they are in public and they work as well together as their fantasy heroes do — often better, in fact. To find any real drama you have to go back to the earliest days of Critical Role when another voice actor, who was part of that first home game, left the show after the 27th episode. The cast declines to talk about it, and the fan community has largely forbidden any online discussion of the exit. It’s fair to say, though, what few incidents like this exist have helped inform what Critical Role and the relationships that make it up aspire to be.
“We all realized, once the ball got rolling on this, how rare this opportunity is and how much focus and respect and care it really deserves,” O’Brien says. “That’s informed every month and year.”
The next year of Critical Role looks to be a big one. Willingham says 2025 will mark “the biggest changes” since the show began. (“The moon will turn to blood,” he jokes, prompting Jaffey to note that such an ominous event already happened in the show’s fiction.)
The cast won’t release any concrete information about the fourth campaign, though they promise they will before the year is up. There is a lot of speculation — and concern — about what they’ll do next. Perhaps most crucially, will all eight of them be at the table? After several years of bringing other players and creators in for limited series or spin-offs and demonstrating an interest in switching up the cast, it’s a possibility, one that the founders admit is an inevitability, it’s just a question of when. So, is Critical Role the brand they’ve created, or is it this specific group of friends who fans have come to know and love?
When Campaign Three started in 2021, Willingham did not make an appearance. Instead, Daymond, who had starred in a limited series spin-off earlier in the year, sat at the table. Willingham didn’t debut his character until a few episodes later. This perceived substitution was not announced ahead of time. “I remember watching the Twitch chat scroll when Travis didn’t show up and it was me. That’s a scary feeling,” Daymond recalls. “It just goes to the point — you’re never going to replace them.”
Fans might have been apprehensive when Daymond arrived in the Campaign Three premiere, but they were screaming in surprised delight when he appeared on stage at the Chicago live show. He fits right in, and that’s by design.
“It’s been a process of introducing friends and new faces into the community. ‘Look, we love them. If you like us, we know you’ll learn to love them too,’” Mercer says. “It’s less about us going away and more about bringing more friends into the fold. We would never just be like ‘Alright, great, thanks for coming. Here’s all the new faces,’ and vanish. We are never going away.”
“We are going to be like the Rolling Stones and have, like, a dozen farewell shows,” adds Ray, with Mercer suggesting he might eventually move into a “Professor X” mentor role rather than always being the DM. “I want to do this the rest of my life, to some degree,” he says. “This is the thing I’m most proud of.”
There are other questions ahead of Campaign Four, too, including whether or not it will be in the same setting as the first three or a rebooted canon. They’re aware of how important the start of a new campaign is as an onboarding point for new fans, especially those who may have learned about them from the animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, and now want to see what the deal is without the stress of an intimidating backlog of three or four-hour long episodes. (“We’ve got more hours of content than The Simpsons and Law & Order,” Willingham says.) The lore of Exandria has gotten really dense. Mercer says he’s aware of the barrier this might present, and aims to consider it for the new campaign without “ruining what exists, which I think is a mistake that some creative spaces have done.”
There’s also the question of whether the show, which they describe as “a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons,” will still be them playing D&D. They’ve dabbled in other games for spin-off shows, and now they’re selling their own fantasy role-playing game, Daggerheart. Using different rules and gameplay mechanics that are supposedly more narrative-friendly and accessible, Daggerheart is one of many tabletop games coming for D&D‘s throne as the go-to system for fantasy adventures. Though they’ve said Daggerheart is a “major part” of their business going forward, the cast is noncommittal about what it means for Campaign Four. Mercer stresses how important the 50-year-old grandaddy of tabletop gaming has been to them and their success while also admitting that Age of Umbra is something of a trial balloon, since it runs on Daggerheart. (“I would be lying if I said there wasn’t this cloud in the back of my mind going, ‘Don’t fuck it up, Matt!'”)
The 10th anniversary is a yearlong celebration of the past and an extremely important marker for the future. Everyone is excited to play what comes next, and they confidently assume their fans will be excited once they learn the specifics, too. As long as these friends are having fun, success tends to follow. You can see it from the sidelines when they’re recording Age of Umbra. Once the cameras start rolling, there’s only a subtle change when they’re “on.” A hair more theatrical, sure, but only slightly. They’re the same old friends who were goofing around beforehand.
It’s the same in Chicago, as they’re waiting to get miked up. Johnson recounts a tale of childhood destruction, an incident when she accidentally set her mom’s kitchen on fire while trying to make Mother’s Day breakfast. Willingham follows up with one of his own, the time he accidentally drove a car into his mom’s just-renovated bathroom. Amazingly, these two stories are new to the rest of the cast. Friends after all these years and there’s still more to learn.
At this moment, waiting to perform before a legion of fans, they’re not the heroes of the realm or business owners. They’re just friends joking and razzing one another.
“We’re just fucking with each other,” Mercer says. “Everyone has butterflies in their stomach, but this is how we knock it out, just fucking with each other.”
Battle Map!