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Hi yes, I think that’s accurate! I’ve added you as well!

And yeah, the CritRole back library can be... intimidating. But protip: you can actually go ahead and ignore the first hundred or so episodes for now. See, Critical Role is made up of two campaigns. Campaign 1 follows the adventures of the Vox Machina group. It sprang from a home game that they played for a while before they started recording, so we jump in kinda in media res when they start streaming the sessions. Because they’re at the beginning of their live play journey, there’s some rough parts from a production standpoint, and they also started with some character choices that play somewhat better around a table in person than they do for an audience. It’s not bad, and it’s definitely worth going back to watch once you’re hooked, but I wouldn’t recommend starting at the very beginning.

I myself started (and would recommend any new viewer start) with Campaign 2. It’s the one they’re currently playing, and it’s set about 23 years after the events of Vox Machina, on a different continent of the same planet, and following an entirely new group of characters: the Mighty Nein. There are currently 44 episodes, which is a bit more manageable. New episodes stream every Thursday, and an audio recording is released in podcast form a week after. If you can’t watch the livestream (or if, like me, you fall asleep at the end because time zones are nonsense), you can find video on demand versions of the episodes up on the Critical Role YouTube, with current episodes going up the Monday following each stream.

I got hooked by listening to the podcast. The whole cast, particularly the DM, Matt Mercer, is very good at doing great evocative visual descriptions of what’s going on, and because they’re all voice actors, they all DO THE VOICES which is great. There’s never any confusion about who’s talking, and it’s really easy to keep the characters straight. The episodes are about 3-4 hours long usually, which was one of the reasons I picked it up initially (plus just enough recommendations from sources I trust that were saying it was good - but not so many that I felt pressured to listen, which sucks). 4 hours seems long, and it is if you’re trying to sit there and concentrate on only that, but it’s actually the perfect length if I want something to listen to while I do something else like crafting or housework or driving or so forth. Shorter episodes of podcasts are nice, but I have to constantly switch to something new when they’re done; I can put one episode of CR on and I know I’m good for a good while. When I caught up with the podcast to where they were with the live episodes at the time, I started watching the stream live each week.

The main thing that you gain when you watch the video is you get to see the faces everyone makes, which are honestly priceless. I’d say 95% of the story gets specifically told or described verbally, and that last 5% lives in the facial expressions and gestures that happen quickly and spur of the moment as a reaction to other events, without being described. Watching live every Thursday is an interesting experience, too. I stopped paying for cable a long time ago and do Netflix and Hulu instead, and even when I had cable, I was recording most shows to watch at my own convenience, so it had been a long time since I’d watched anything live. It’s interesting to have a specific time that I watch a thing, and to factor that into my plan for the week. It’s also a really cool shared experience to watch the thing live with a group of people who also really love the thing and are super excited to see what happens. It’s like the internet turns into one big watch party. One thing that I really enjoyed about tumblr-based Crit Role fandom is going into the #cr spoilers tag every Thursday and yelling about shocking events, and watching people yell with me. It’s like screaming into the void, but also the void is full of other people screaming, and we’re all screaming about the backstory bomb that just dropped. It’s pretty great!

So anyway, yes, I highly recommend Critical Role, and if you decide to watch it PLEASE let me know because I would love to hear what you think as you go along! I got one of my friends hooked and she’s been working her way through the C2 backlog to catch up, and her reactions as she gets to the good bits are amazing and give me life.