Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000187 · Creators & Streamers → Streaming shows → Tabletop gaming streams · 2015–present
Critical Role
Professional voice actors streaming D&D campaigns
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“Fans paid $11.3 million in 2019 to see a cartoon of a D&D game they'd already watched for 115 episodes.”
Why Noah kept it
Voice actors playing D&D on Twitch every Thursday since 2015, for four hours at a time, and in 2019 fans put $11.3 million into a Kickstarter for the Vox Machina cartoon. Nothing in the Ark covers actual play, and when I turned down The Adventure Zone I said this was the one to take.
- In the Ark since
- 28 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.7 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 177.1 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Role
What it is
Critical Role is a web series where a cast of voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons together, streamed live on Twitch starting in 2015. Matthew Mercer runs the campaign as Dungeon Master, and viewers watch them play through connected story arcs that can last years. The show spawned licensed comics, novels and animated adaptations, with fans called Critters building a substantial community around it.
Why it’s internet culture
It showed that long-form tabletop gaming could work as a live broadcast and that people would watch strangers play a game for hours every week. The success created a template for actual-play streaming and demonstrated there was an audience large enough to fund creator-owned productions independent of traditional studios.
From 2015, hundreds of thousands of people tuned in every Thursday to watch voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons for four hours, then paid for the cartoon themselves. It shows online audiences turning a private hobby into a spectator show and funding its creators directly.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2015 · Geek & Sundry's channel on Twitch · Also known as CR; Vox Machina; The Mighty Nein
- What it is
- Critical Role is a web show in which a group of American voice actors (people who perform the voices in cartoons and video games) sit at a table and play Dungeons & Dragons. In that game, players invent characters and talk through a story while one person, the Dungeon Master, runs the world and dice decide what happens. Episodes ran three to five hours, went out every Thursday evening, and followed the same characters for years.
- Where it came from
- It began around 2013 as a private home game, first played for Liam O'Brien's birthday and run by Matthew Mercer. Ashley Johnson mentioned it to the actor Felicia Day, and Day's company Geek & Sundry put it on Twitch, a website for live video, from 12 March 2015. Viewers watched live and typed comments in a chat box beside the picture. In 2018 the cast set up their own company and channels, and they left Geek & Sundry entirely in 2019.
- Why it mattered
- It turned a game played round someone's kitchen table into a show people followed like a television series, and it was the biggest of what got called actual play shows. Many people learned Dungeons & Dragons by watching it, and it's often credited with helping the game's sales rise in the late 2010s. The cast owned the show outright, so fans' money went to the people making it. That made it a well-known case of performers building an audience online and then leaving the company that first hosted them.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People would watch other people play a board game for four hours a week, for years, and then pay millions up front for a cartoon of it. It also changed the hobby itself, since new players arrived expecting their friend's kitchen table game to look like a show made by professional actors.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (1.8 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.5 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (52.5 KB)
- Original
- 177.1 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.7 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.2 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.5 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 7.18% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,477 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 1,869 |
History
Kept
“Voice actors playing D&D on Twitch every Thursday since 2015, for four hours at a time, and in 2019 fans put $11.3 million into a Kickstarter for the Vox Machina cartoon. Nothing in the Ark covers actual play, and when I turned down The Adventure Zone I said this was the one to take.”