"Traditional Dungeons & Dragons usually keeps a sharper focus on the mechanics of the game—dice rolls, initiative order, dungeon crawling, tactical combat, and structured adventure modules—while Matt Mercer’s style, made famous through Critical Role, leans heavily into performance, cinematic storytelling, and character-driven drama. In a classic tabletop setting, the Dungeon Master’s main job is to present challenges and adjudicate rules, often keeping the world impartial and focusing on pace and fairness; players interact with that framework through problem-solving and teamwork. Mercer’s approach turns the table into a stage, where the DM performs every NPC with distinct voices and personalities, the narrative often takes precedence over the mechanics, and the game’s rhythm bends around emotional beats rather than initiative or exploration pacing. Traditional D&D might be closer to a collaborative board game with storytelling elements, while Mercer’s version is closer to an improvised ensemble drama that happens to use D&D rules as scaffolding. Both come from the same foundation, but one prioritises the game, the other the story."
It helps to conceive of any answer received from chat as a list of statistical probabilities. With perhaps hundreds of thousands of documents at its disposal, those elements that make the cut in an answer are going to be those that are referenced most often. For example, "initiative order" is largely superfluous to the manner in which D&D is played; of all the elements I might name related to the game, I would probably go a day and a night before the word "initiative" passed my lips, if at all. Yet because it is a point of considerable contention within the zeitgeist, it appears here because it's common... and so it is with most of the answer above.
I've spoken before about the emergence of corporate boardroom jargon inserting itself into the game's perception. "Collaborate," "storytelling," "voices"... these are such words, which have next to nothing to do with gameplay, but which emerge because the tsunami of correspondence where these words are automatically attached to every discourse, regardless of any sufficient definition, guarantees that virtually any answer to a question about D&D generally will dredge these words forth. They are the SEO of D&D parlance.
Which is essentially the problem with any sort of knowledge distribution throughout the internet: concepts cannot be prioritised so easily as words; while certain vague words, in turn, have become the flag standards under which misunderstood concepts march. Collaborative sounds positive. It gives a vague idea of what it's meant to convey. Surely, it's something that matters around a D&D table, for definitively, it's a thing "produced or conducted by two or more parties working together." That sort of sounds like what goes on.
But... how, exactly? How is the collaboration improved? Oh, of course, through communication... which is another one of those convenient jargon words that covers a lot of sins but doesn't really have the specificity needed to base a structure upon. All these "weasel words" represent a language that claims a clear meaning but in fact wriggles out of any actual commitment. They allow a company, or a seller, to imply authority and goodness, without having to show evidence of result or take ownership of same. You're told that D&D is collaborative. How? You figure it out.
In fact, the problem is such words succeed because they DO state a given fact. D&D is collaborative. It is also played by human beings, who must by definition be alive, and distinguishable from one another, and probably having come into existence through a gestative process, while being able to breathe air, eat food, sleep occasionally and a host of other extremely obvious things that have exactly nothing to do with game play.
My point is that when traditional D&D took hold, "collaboration" was not a word used to describe the experience because it was obvious in a plainly unhelpful, irrelevant way. Knowing the game was collaborative didn't help me DM it; it didn't help the players play it; it didn't help in the preparation of the game, nor in game play itself, nor in managing players with complaints. It existed, in the way that air does, but we didn't describe the game that way because to do so would have produced flat, blank stares and a probable comment like, "Thank you Captain Obvious."
The language has emerged through the need to explain the game to those who don't play, or to rationalise it for marketing, or as streaming, for the sake of discourse. People want to be part of something "collaborative." It promises an absense of being lonely. And now you have people patting themselves on the back for being a part of it, like it was something hard to achieve, or as though D&D were special in some way. A workspace is collaborative, three people standing in line at a Tim Horton's is collaborative, sitting at a bar drinking beer is, and so it sex, and so is watching TV with others, or going to a theatre, or even driving to work in your car next to thousands of other cars. Human existence, by and large, is remarkably collaborative. Doesn't mean a fucking thing.
The problem arises from deciding that this isn't something we just "do" (the actual definition of the word) but that it's something we're trying to achieve (the goalpost not actually existing). Put four people in a room and tell them to "achieve collaboration" and you soon have a problem. No one has any idea what the end result is, while at the same time we're flooding the net with an insistence that there IS an end result.
Oddly, what's intended to be a good thing rapidly becomes something that no one knows how to succeed at, which manufactures anxiety. Once collaboration becomes an objective instead of a condition, it creates a culture of failure, in the sense that each player's compulsion becomes a certainty that they're not a part of it, while at the same time accusing each other of failing to engage collaboratively enough. DMs worry that they're games are "properly collaborative," so that they anxiously fill reddit with missives begging others, supposedly with the secret knowledge desired, to explain how to make their games "more collaborative." Which, semantically, is like a cult of people asking how to make water more wet.
Try as we might, there is no gradation for collaboration... yet this is the hamster wheel the game culture has locked itself into, through a catastrophic failure in the ability to understand the meaning of words.
But it seems to work so well for Critical Role, right?
I've had a few red-faced true-believers scream into my face over the years that the performance isn't scripted, based on... zero personal knowledge about the cast or, indeed, improvisational theatre. I indulged in some improv off and on during my theatre days... I went to high school with this fellow, as far as I know the nearest person to someone famous that came out of those classes. He was quite good at improv. Which is beside the point, but I felt a compulsion to discuss a collaborative thing I did outside D&D. Oh, wait, I bought a coffee today from the market up the road. Okay, two things other than D&D.
I'll let you in on a secret. Do a fair bit of improv, which involves inventing characters, motivations and dialogue on the fly, and you'll find pretty quickly that you reuse material. In fact, you wind up building a lexicon of go-to stuff that you can plug into any situation, often with just a tweak or two. For those who used to watch the old show, Whose Line is it Anyway? — Brit and American versions — it's easy to pick up on that after two or three episodes. Some of the performers had a great range, others not so much.
Critical Role doesn't try to hide it — they wear their actor credentials right there on their sleeves. Any one of them would drop the show in a blink if they got a real part... it's one of the reasons they began. Problem is, really, none — including Mercer — are particularly talented. That's not just my opinion. The recent D&D movie with Chris Pine was a terrific opportunity to give Mercer a walk-on role, one that would have been worth at least half a million theatre tickets... and the opportunity wasn't taken. Guess why.
As collaboration, the ensemble is not playing D&D, they are performing a narrative art form in which the game itself is utterly immaterial. The world they're playing in is defined by editing, lighting, timing, rehearsal, professional familiarity with each other and a guaranteed commitment to "making it look good" for people not actually present when they're performing. If your D&D group at home had to be conscious that whatever they said or did at your game was going to be broadcast on the internet, they'd certainly be a lot easier to run. And if they, yourself included, as a group received around 18.6 million a year in annual revenue for playing (estimated) they'd certainly care a lot less about whether or not your last call about their ability to use a spell that way was wrong, in their opinion. It wouldn't really matter, would it... since all your calls would be based on, "what would the audience like?"
Too, it wouldn't hurt if you had 91 overall employees to help you "collaborate."
The everyday tensions that make running difficult — engagement, rules disputes, awkward silences, players not showing up for games — get neutralised by the economics of being paid money for appearing. It doesn't necessarily make Critical Role evil or fraudulent — though I personally would have rathered it had never existed — but it does make it something that no table anywhere can achieve without those resources or motivation. It's therefore ridiculous for a DM anywhere to suppose, "I want my game to be like Critical Role." But then, people are very often unrealistic about things they don't understand.
No one is helping, either. From those people who cannot rationally, patiently or usefully explain what traditional D&D is to those who insist repeatedly that concepts like "storytelling" or "backstories" work in a game setting, the entire discourse is an unmitigated disaster. Throw into that a vast number whose education is sorely lacking with regards to history, literature, human behaviour, language or the necessary emotional quotient to manage other human beings, regardless of the age, and the landscape is now completely dystopian. If I were to judge the culture (stress on "cult") by the youtube videos out there that spout, "I ran a game that cost $5,000," I'd say it's gained an unmistakable fanservice vibe, not far from those groups of people who still get together at shows to gush over their pogs and beanie-babies. On that level, it's never going away. But it isn't D&D in any sense that I recognise.
In the 1943 film, Edge of Darkness (watch here), the failed nazi writes the following page at the point of his greatest despair:
Talking about D&D has been boiled down to a language of aspiration, nothing more. From the clowns writing endless blog posts about the next product to the reddit fans bemoaning their ills, its a lot of people who want to be admired in some fashion, who want popularity, who find there's none at the crooked road's end that they've trod. And that feels like a cheat, a lie that's been perpetrated upon them by a community and a company that promised "a world of imagination" and delivered only carping, criticism, emotional decay and loneliness.
All in all, it's become a pathetic grimdark.
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