No One Ever Thought They’d Get Famous Playing This Dorky Game. Then This Guy Came Along. (2024)

As a high schooler, Matthew Mercer felt that his fellow classmates didn’t take Dungeons & Dragons seriously enough. His first ever role-playing campaign was shared between him and a few of the track-and-field jocks who frequented the school’s video game club. Those upperclassmen treated the game with an offensive insincerity. Mercer wanted to weave mirthful tales of elves, dwarves, and men—united in brotherhood and adventure—in the lineage of Tolkien and Pratchett. He believed that a great RPG could make you laugh and cry, lifting everyone involved to a wondrous, hysterical plane. But the boys around the table kept goofing off, from the vantage of ironic distance, and Mercer could never get into character.

“They were very irreverent, and it wasn’t the experience I wanted it to be,” Mercer, who is now 41, told me on a recent call. His brown hair swoops low and is neatly cropped parallel to his collar. In another realm, he could be mistaken for one of the courtly knights of his stories. “So I started my own campaign with my friends.” It was the first time he felt empowered to make something to share with other people and have them interact with it. And the more he did it, the more fulfilling it became. “The memorable experiences we had were on par with anything we were doing in real life,” he said. “An addiction kicked in, and I’ve been the Game Master ever since.”

Decades later, Mercer’s wish came true. Today he is, without question, the most famous Dungeons & Dragons player in the world. Every Thursday, he and a group of friends gather in a studio for the latest episode of Critical Role—a show, broadcast on the livestreaming platform Twitch, which doubles as Mercer’s weekly tabletop RPG campaign. The structure should be familiar to anyone who’s palmed a 20-sided die in their youth: Mercer, as Game Master, is the primary storyteller. He provides the narrative elements, motifs, and obstacles for his players, who reciprocate by embodying a band of high-fantasy ne’er-do-wells who explore the world he’s created. (There’s been Pike the gnomish cleric, Vex the half-elf ranger, and Grog the Goliath barbarian to name a few.) Together—seated around a set made to look like the torchlit halls of a stone-wrought castle—they roll dice, slay monsters, and dream up their very own Lord of the Rings–sized epic. In one episode, the crew descends into a labyrinthine sewer system to fight off a massive spider. In another, they infiltrate a royal ball that exists between dimensions. Dungeons & Dragons is essentially an exercise in collaborative storytelling, which means Critical Role is unedited and unscripted—those who tune in watch the saga unfold in real time.

This was a radical premise when the show launched in 2015. Dungeons & Dragons was not considered to be spectator entertainment—much less an entrepreneurial enterprise—at any point throughout its previous 40-year history. Nobody, least of all Mercer, expected Critical Role to be a hit.

“On paper, it sounds like something nobody would give a sh*t about,” said Mercer. “We were fully aware of that.” But, he figured he’d give it a shot and see what happened. If the show didn’t work out, he’d return to the drudgery of daily life.

The rest is history. Critical Role is a miraculous success, with 2 million YouTube subscribers and an additional 1.3 million followers on Twitch. Critical Role’s first season, called “Vox Machina,” ran for 115 episodes over the course of two-and-a-half years, demolishing the meager expectations of the eight-player cast. Those episodes, often four hours in length, were produced by the digital media brand Geek & Sundry, but in 2018—when Mercer reconvened the Critical Role crew for a second season—they did so as a fully independent LLC, called Critical Role Productions. With that, his leisurely nights around the table officially transformed into a for-profit endeavor.

The pivot paid off in spades. A 2021 data leak out of Twitch confirmed that Critical Role is one of the richest channels on the platform, generating a mammoth $9.6 million in revenue between 2019 and 2021. The show has quickly become a fixture of the geek-media ecosystem and is blessed by a litany of third-party investments. There are now Critical Role novelizations, comic books, and most notably, an animated Amazon Prime television adaptation. Mercer was not the first Game Master to make his campaign available for public consumption; Dan Harmon’s Harmontown podcast contained a beloved D&D segment, and The Adventure Zone, produced by the McElroy brothers, is a legitimate phenomenon. But Mercer and his friends did blow the ceiling off what anyone thought possible in this proudly niche, fearlessly nerdy lane of entertainment. His hobby is now the fulcrum of his portfolio—Critical Role is a genuine multimedia empire. Mercer is still trying to figure out where that leaves him.

“It was deeply terrifying,” he said. “Historically, when friends go into business together, it doesn’t end on a positive note.” Mercer admitted that there are plenty of aspects of Critical Role that feel like work; sometimes, he and the rest of the team find themselves logging 60- to 70-hour weeks. “But our campaign—our Thursday night show—is still this sacred space,” he continued. “We all look forward to it. When we show up to the studio and sit around that table, all of our stresses and anxieties vanish. For the next three to four hours, it’s just us again, making up stories, making each other laugh. It’s magical. We’ve done so much to make sure that that doesn’t change and it stays protected.”

Mercer has his own theories about why Critical Role struck oil. He believes the troupe came together at the right time, during the dawn of the livestreaming revolution, when the world was still adjusting to what was possible with this brand-new hyperspeed broadcasting medium. It also helped that they all, including Mercer, were voice actors of some renown before signing up for the campaign. (Ashley Johnson, who has appeared in all three seasons of the show, is best known for playing Ellie in the acclaimed The Last of Us video games, and Travis Willingham, who serves as CEO of Critical Role Productions, has stepped into the booth to portray everyone from Sandman to Thor for Marvel.) The stars each had a robust presence on social media, which they dutifully funneled toward their newly formed Dungeons & Dragons series. One of the great revelations of the 2020s is that anything—even a weekly tabletop group—can become a full-time job if enough people are paying attention.

But if you ask most fans, the rise of Critical Role directly correlates with Mercer’s one-of-a-kind talent as a Game Master. He’s a maestro with the dice in his hands, weaving interlocking plot lines and complex thematic threads out of thin air—ping-ponging across his vast inventory of actorial affectations, giving even the most minor characters a sophisticated weightiness. Mercer is an expert improviser, and—in the adjacency of other performers—he’s preternaturally comfortable onstage, switching to guttural Goblin incantations and highfalutin Wizard whimsy with a covetable lack of self-consciousness. In other words, Mercer has the innate ability to make a Dungeons & Dragons campaign feel like a tightly wound limited drama. Under his tutelage, a role-playing game becomes consumer recreation. He’s just that good.

“Mercer has found a way to make Dungeons & Dragons into an artform. It’s akin to the difference between doing improv in a class and putting together a Hollywood movie,” said Timm Woods, a for-hire Game Master and writer in New York. “Dungeons & Dragons, when it’s played for fun, isn’t art. But Critical Role elevates it.”

It can be downright intimidating to watch Mercer when he’s at the peak of his powers. As a career voice actor, he possesses all of the subtle performance intangibles that saturate his storytelling with life: the timing, the verve, the language flourishes. He’s a master of onomatopoeia, to the point that there are YouTube videos counting down the greatest improvised sound effects that have flipped off his tongue—an iron shield clattering to the ground, a cork squeaking as it’s ripped out of a wine bottle. Mercer has a nose for a buckling plot twist, to the point that fans weave wild Critical Role fan theories in the same way you and I might breathlessly speculate about the next season of Severance. (One thread on the Critical Role subreddit postulates that one recently introduced character, named “Bor’dor,” might actually be a border collie in disguise.)

In fact, Mercer is so good at Dungeons & Dragons, that the greater role-playing game community has coined a term, called the “Mercer effect,” to describe Game Masters who try, and fail, to replicate his elusive narrative magic. Yes, Mercer might be able to launch into beautiful soliloquies as he describes a legion of menacing orcs, but you and I are much more likely to gum up our words into a bleary mess when we speak up at the lectern. Quintin Smith, a journalist and founder of the table gaming website Shut Up & Sit Down, actually encourages incoming RPG game masters to forget everything they know about shows like Critical Role before starting a campaign of their own. Us bush leaguers are better off aiming much lower.

Still, in a world where Mercer’s abilities are on public display, they’ve naturally become something to aspire toward. The problem is that he and the rest of his hugely artistic group of players are world-renowned professionals. Critical Role is a job, and a party of amateurs bound together in the name of casual, Saturday-night Dungeons & Dragons—the purest incarnation of the hobby—is unlikely to eclipse what Critical Role is capable of in the studio. It’s an odd paradox: The face of Dungeons & Dragons does not necessarily deliver a version of Dungeons & Dragons you can experience at home. Mercer would be the first to agree.

“We’re actors, and performance is a place that we exist in for our work and for our training. And we now have thousands of hours of playing Dungeons and Dragons behind that,” he said. “You can’t expect to be there on your first session. One of the downsides of the growth of Critical Role is a lot of people put me on a pedestal that I didn’t want, and that makes me really uncomfortable. I hate to think that I’m being used as a cudgel for new players.”

All of this puts Mercer in a curious position. Before Critical Role and the advent of Twitch made him an RPG superstar, there was no gold standard of Game Masters, nor did they acquire any sort of neo-celebrity reputation. There’s more scrutiny on him now than there ever was during his home games; yes, even a Dungeons & Dragons superstar can curry haters. “There are many people who tell me, every day, that they hate how I game master,” said Mercer. “There are people who laud me far more than I deserve, and people who hate me far more than I deserve.”

With that kind of stature in the community, he sometimes needs to manage his fandom like a Dungeons & Dragons Taylor Swift. In 2020, when he and his friends embarked on a new tabletop campaign for Critical Role with a Twilight-esque teen-vampire setting called Monsterhearts—Mercer fumbled some of the rules. A number of hardcore Monsterhearts tweeted their misgivings to Mercer, which caused Critical Role fans to raise arms in defense of their favorite Game Master, and a brief, inter-hobby flame war ensued. Eventually Mercer stepped in to put out the fire. “It does not help discourse to dog pile on my behalf, whether I am present or not,” he posted. “If anything, it makes me worried to engage in meaningful conversation about criticism for fear of conflagrating a discussion I can handle myself.”

It’s strange to think that something as inert and apolitical as an approach to game mastering could become a hot topic—capable of generating a BTS Army–like rebuke—but Mercer reminds me that tabletop RPG campaigns are usually pretty personal for those who participate in them. If there is ever a moment where Mercer is not a pristine arbiter of the form, they’re ready to pounce.

“I think a lot of it is perceived judgment on their skillset, and a fear of being compared to someone that they think they don’t stand up against—which is also not true,” said Mercer. “People are angry. We’re living in the fall of Rome. And they have to put their anger somewhere. And if you can’t make your politicians feel it, why not make the people in your gaming group feel it?”

And yet, despite the prickly nature of his fame, Mercer’s Critical Role has been undeniably crucial for the growth of tabletop gaming across the country. We’re in the midst of a legitimate Dungeons & Dragons renaissance—the brand celebrated its biggest year ever in 2020, proving that proud, unapologetic geekdom is as close to the inner sanctum of mainstream culture as it’s ever been. There are a multitude of reasons for the boom: Stranger Things built an entire mythos out of D&D terminology, and tools like Roll20 have allowed players to run games remotely, across time zones, over Zoom. But surely, when Stephen Colbert is signing up for his first RPG campaign in 30 years with Matthew Mercer as his Game Master, it’s undeniable that his talent has helped scrub clean the clammy reputation Dungeons & Dragons used to hold.

Gamers have taken notice of Critical Role’s financial resonance as well. Hundreds of other Dungeons & Dragons campaigns have been monetized under the Mercer model. Twitch overflows with gaming groups, sitting in a circle, rolling dice in pursuit of that same furtive viral spark. Woods, the full-time Game Master, told me that he, too, hasn’t been able to eliminate the hustle itch in a world where role playing has become a professionalized enterprise. Sometimes he pinches himself to remember that, at the end of the day, Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be fun.

“Lots of people want to imitate Critical Role’s success. Monetizing it has been essential for my career, but I definitely have moments where I’m like, ‘I want to run a game for my family, but I’m not going to get paid for it, so maybe I’ll record it and put it up online,’ ” he said. “There have been times in my life where I haven’t been considerate enough to just enjoy the hobby without putting a price tag on it.”

Mercer largely agrees with Woods’ sentiment. As long as a Dungeons & Dragons group is focused on the action at the table first and foremost—before being taken by any celestial fantasies of you and your friends quitting day jobs to roleplay full-time—then Mercer doesn’t see anything wrong with a little ambition. “If anything comes of it, it’s a great bonus,” he said. “If you want to aim for the moon, go for it. But you might end up on the stars, or even just a cozy little island with your friends.”

In the meantime, Mercer has a game to run. It’s Episode 323 of the never-ending Critical Role campaign. Keyleth, a half-elf druid, has suffered a nasty wound. The only cure lies in the accursed Grey Valley. The stream fires up, the dice tumble out, and thousands of fans hang on every word.