Critical Role

[Nyte Dragon]

 Just curious as to how many folks here watch Critical Role? CR is one of my favorite programs to watch, not just on YouTube, but in media period. I have watched the entirety of Campaign 1 and am almost totally caught up with Campaign 2.

So for those fellow FR Critters here, I'd love to hear from you on your thoughts about CR. Which player is your favorite to watch? Who's character do you like best? What about guest's characters? Favorite episode, or scene? Any favorite one-shots? Or NPCs?

Just keep in mind about spoilers. PATY 

[Silver Shocker]

Sadly, I'm not been able to get into Critical Role much due to its massive length (3 HOURS?) but I have friends who are voraciously into it and won't stop talking about it, and it seems to have taken sections of the internet by storm. I get to be a hipster and be all "I knew these voice actors before it was cool!" though.

I do have some of the freebie versions of the comic books, so I may read those at some point, and hopefully they'll be easy enough to follow.

I might get more into it in the future, but for now all I'll say is Laura Bailey is an absolute good....except when she voiced Kid Trunks from Dragon Ball Z.

[Nyte Dragon]

I agree that the long play time is kind of daunting. That was one reason I hesitated to watch it at first. A suggestion would be to do what I did at first, watch it in segments. YouTube remembers where you left off, so watch for an hour, then take a break and come back later and pick up where you left off.

And if the comics have peaked your interest, there will be an animated series coming soon, as well. It was funded through kickstarter and was one of the fastest funded projects ever. The pandemic has through a wrench in the production, but it should be out on Amazon Prime, sometime in the coming Spring or Summer.

Also, yes, Laura Bailey is a gift, along with the rest of the cast. Her husband Travis Willingham is also a cast member.

[Silver Shocker]

I agree that the long play time is kind of daunting. That was one reason I hesitated to watch it at first. A suggestion would be to do what I did at first, watch it in segments. YouTube remembers where you left off, so watch for an hour, then take a break and come back later and pick up where you left off.

Oh, I watch many things in segments, and that would be certainly be one of them.

And if the comics have peaked your interest, there will be an animated series coming soon, as well. It was funded through kickstarter and was one of the fastest funded projects ever.

So I've heard, I'll have to check a lot of that stuff out at some point.

Also, yes, Laura Bailey is a gift, along with the rest of the cast. Her husband Travis Willingham is also a cast member.

Indeed, as I understand it Travis is quite a goof. I remember fondly a video from several years ago ("Stephanie's Rap", starring Stephanie Sheh) in which he spent the entire video dressed as a Ninja Turtle, without calling attention to it, purely to roast the VO they were roasting in the video for having played one of the TMNT in the past.

[Nyte Dragon]

I had not seen that video....



Looking at that, Travis would kill as a live action version of the Tick! (And if you've seen him as Grog the Barbarian you can picture it even more so!)

Thanks for that SS, I needed the laugh!

[Nyte Dragon]

I had to have a discussion with a fellow in my local D&D Facebook group to explain that you only need pencil, paper, and dice to play. You do not need to talk in funny voices, speaking clearly is fine. You do not need props, or annoying background music, or special lighting. Snacks and refreshments are more important than that. Heck, you don't even need to speak in character in the first person at all. Third person narrative expression is just fine.

I agree with that 100%. It's whatever the player is comfortable with, after all the whole point of the game is that it is a game. You're supposed to have fun. So it's whatever you're comfortable with doing. (Which CR's DM Matt Mercer has said himself on various interviews and videos. ) Hell you don't even need dice in some RPG games, the most important thing to have is fun... and a good imagination.

My current gaming group is a mix of different approaches. All of us are beginners to 5ed D&D, some to tabletop RPGs altogether. So we are all in varying degrees of how we RP our characters. Some use their normal voice and some speak in character. My character, Cassandra, is a drow elf that has a Scottish accent, and I love doing the voice. But another member's character, Perin, uses his normal voice. I like coming up with the background for my character (see the Fan Fiction section for the back story so far), while Burtio's player makes it up on the fly. Annnnnnndddddd don't get me started on our cleric, Scrotamus, and his backstory... or outfit. 

Now me personally, when I used to GM, I liked to use different voices for NPCs, to make them feel unique. Our GM does the same.... sometimes to his dismay. He made a goblin NPC with the goofiest voice, I kept him alive just to make the GM keep doing the voice. Pity the lil poop nugget got another NPC friend of our group killed and we had to put him down.

The main thing is to have fun with what your game. To paraphrase, you're playstyle may vary.

For the record, I do have Fantasy Grounds with the Ultimate License, should opportunity arise to put a game together.

I have FG as well, standard copy. Our GM uses it and I loved how easy it was to make and keep track of my characters.

And back to CR, I do have another suggestion for getting into it. Check out some of the one shots they have done (granted alot of them aren't D&D based) to get a feel of it. I highly suggest the 'Darrinton Brigade one shot if nothing else but to see the characters they made for it. Taliesin Jaffe's character shows his true inner comic book nerd off so well.

[Silver Shocker]

Here's something tangentially related you might like. I saw this on Gamespot. Laura Bailey on a podcast where she talks about a few things, including D&D and other fantasy games, The Last of Us 2 (I skimmed through it, so there might be some spoilers in there) but also her early voice work, such as Kid Trunks in Dragon Ball Z (the only voice work I recall by her I actively disliked) and the kinds of female characters she's played over the years, including ones that were overly sexualized and ones that were more focused on being good characters in more recent work (starts at @19:12 mark, there's at least some mild language, such as the word "bada$$" and some mildy suggestive stuff, such as discussing the game Bloodrayne).

Very neat stuff to listen to while doing various other things. One thing I find neat, but too surprising, is there are times her voice sounds almost completely different than what I'm used to her sounding like, even though I've probably heard her in dozens if not hundreds of projects. I noticed the same thing with Liam O'Brian, both in that goofy Cuttlefish video and a podcast he did that I listened to many years ago. Kinda like how the iconic voices of James Hong, Jeffrey Combs and Gilbert Gottfried are actually not their real voices.

It's especially funny since one of my favorite roles she ever did (and probably the first one I recall hearing) was Lust from Full Metal Alchemist, who was written and drawn by a woman who once said "Men should be buff. Women should be vavoom" (though there are some bad@$$ characters in that series for sure who aren't sexualized, such as Lanfan and Olivier Mira Armstrong). I think the first video game role I remember by her in a game I played was Sara from Final Fantasy XIII, who got upgraded to the main character in the game's sequel.

I would be very interested in knowing how she feels about voicing Chun-Li, who she may very well still be voicing, as SFV is still getting new characters added, and every new character gets a story mode, where they interact with other fully voiced characters (I can't remember if Chun-Li is featured in the DLC ones - I think she's in Juri's one, but that was right at the beginning). Very sexualized character for sure (she has the most alternate outfits of any character in SFV) but also a very fun, strong character (she's a mom in the games later in the timeline, such as SFV, and in fact a decent chunk of the main plot of the game and her character story mode is about her adoptive daughter)

The topic of Chun-Li came up during the Last of Us 2/Abby controversy and people brought up in a dismissive way how Chun-Li was sexualized, I found that interesting and a bit disappointing given she's one of the best characters in the lore. She was always my favorite to play as from the very start with SF2 as a kid, only unseated in IV by Juri, then when Juri was nerfed to Hell and back again in 5, Chun-Li got usurped for me all over again by the TK crystal-ball flinging awesome that is Menat.

"And I always the wife, or the sidekick, or the chick who needs rescuing, or something like that, and it was pretty frustrating, and there's been a lot of progress in that area in the last decade". Again, the first game role I recall from her was Sarah from FFXIII, the younger sister of the main character, Lightning (who was a female character as well) and she was in deed a damsel in that game. But again, upgraded to the lead in the sequel.

She also mentions Tomb Raider and Laura Croft. Funny thing, the only version of TR I really liked was the 2013 reboot game with Camilla Luddington. I made sure to get the two sequels as well on the cheap but never finished it.

She says in the podcast she started voice acting when she was in high school. That makes me so jealous. When I got out of high school I found out the 2nd English dub voice actress for Ash from Pokemon was younger than I was and that made me jealous. She also talks about her early work being old shame. Which I can relate to, I did voice work for mods for Freedom Force back in the day and I'm disappointed my voice work wasn't better, especially since my avatar in the Forum Battle Royale was OP as hell but had an embarrassingly cringe voice pack.

Also she said her dad showed her the video game Quake when she was a kid. Holy crap does that make me feel old.  I'm only a few years younger than her, and I played Quake TWO when I was a kid.

Saints Row got namedropped, which makes me happy. Anyway, one of my favorite female leads in gaming who I consider very positive is Kat from Gravity Rush. GR II came out right at the same time as Horizon so it got completely overlooked, which disappointed me, but I've always maintained that that game would be actively worse with a male lead because there's something about her character and that narrative that feels very well suited to a well-meaning female lead. It's an open world superhero game from a Japanese anime-style aesthetic, and the narrative and many of the sidequests tackle classism and wealth disparity as Kat flies from the shantytown lower cities to the luxurious wealth-leaden upper cities and vise versa helping the downtrodden. The English localization of the game renamed her Kat as her Japanese name was Kitten, and I find the NA name much better. The funny thing is Kat's never been dubbed into English (I always imagined New York based VO Elleen Stevens, who voiced Kitty Pryde in the Astonishing X-Men motion comic, would be ideally suited for her in English).