Decline The Critical Role kids are wrong about gaming —— An extremely Stella Brando analysis

[Stella Brando]

1. Introduction

The theatre kids seem to have wildly misunderstood the short history of RPGs. If you ask them, they will tell you that Dungeons and Dragons (and it's imitators) were a painfully nerdy pass-time, fit only for making fun of in movies and TV. The young actors then got involved in the hobby, made it more dramatic, more about emotional expression and personal fulfilment, and created a hobby you can now be proud to put on your CV. This is very far from reality —— and I will endeavour to explain why.



2. Twelve Chadly Men

It's game night.

As a gaming group, I've collected 12 players —— a dozen characters from fiction and reality, who each have a perfect 10/10 COOL score.

Among these Joe Cools, I have included the The Man With No Name, Snake Plisskin, 'Mad Max' Rockastonsky, some Charles Bronson character (I can't remember their names), a Lee Marvin character, and a Samurai, lol.

So far, I have chosen 6 men. I will also include 4 debanoir lady-killers. These are: Sean Connery, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Cary Grant.

Finally, I pick a pair of wild-cards that don't really fit the first 2 categories: these are James Coburn (for his teeth) and Bruce Campbell (for his chin).

You may notice that there are no women. This is because of your rampant sexism. Please try to do better, Codex.

Once I've coralled my pack of human studs, I will herd them into the next chapter: The Game

The maximum COOL dream-team

3. The Game

And so we come to the big kahuna itself: The Game. I invite these twelve men to my home (stop giggling at the back, please) I push all furniture in the house into one long Mr. Burns dinner table, and take up my position at one end on my evil throne. As official Dungeon Mistress, I gently clear my throat, a polite way to suggest that people need to shut-the-fuck up. Without further ado, I begin my game.

At first, I just play D&D the old-fashioned way. We're focused on gaming itself: statistics, rolling dice, combat, whatever. My contention here is that if you just grabbed a group of extremely cool people and just took them through the mechanics of table-top gaming, there wouldn't be a problem. Someone like Charles Bronson, who basically made a career of pretending to shoot people, couldn't really object to the idea of rolling some dice and pretending he's stabbed someone with a sword. And so my game (or at least the first half) goes just fine.

But in the second half of the game, we start to play in a much more modern style. I explain to my cool-as-a-cucumber group that they should pretend to be a bunch of half-elves, half-orcs, and goblins, speak in appropriate voices, and stay in this role all night.

Suddenly the whole room goes silent. The Man With No Name fixes me with his trademark steely glare. 'Mistress of what?' Snake Plisken wonders aloud. Max becomes even madder. As the idea is translated to him, the Samurai makes a face like I've personally bombed his home. The group all makes hasty excuses, suddenly 'remembering' that they have to be elsewhere. They leave me sitting on my Evil Over-Lady throne, now all alone.

Conclusion

Although I've seriously damaged any hope I had of ever seeming cool, my experiment has been a success. I've proven once-and-for-all that it's not rolling dice and playing a game that make you uncool.

It's doing so while proclaiming loudly that you're Fagglore Fancy-Pants, Lord of All Faerie-dom.

Spoiler

Thank you for reading.

—— Dr. Stella Brando
J. Liang School of Arts
5 September, 2024

 

[Cheesedragon117]

Disturbing post... why did you make an AI "portrait" of yourself?


I've heard numerous times from numerous sources that Critical Role ruined TTRPGs and the community surrounding them by inundating the hobby with normies, the aforementioned theatre kids and other undesirables. I haven't been really able to understand the full context of this question, not being a TTRPG player myself, but I would be curious to hear some more 'dexian perspectives about how this came about.

So from what I gather, your main contention is that TTRPGs used to be much more about the G (stats, dice rolls, combat, AKA "the crunch") then the TTRP (acting, roleplay, storylines, AKA "the fluff"), making it not to dissimilar to a sort of co-op wargaming?

 

[Lemming42]

You imagined gathering a group consisting largely of actors... and decided that they'd have something against acting.

 

[TheCumGuzzler]

I did not read but I completely agree

 

[Hell Swarm]

Disturbing post... why did you make an AI "portrait" of yourself?


I've heard numerous times from numerous sources that Critical Role ruined TTRPGs and the community surrounding them by inundating the hobby with normies, the aforementioned theatre kids and other undesirables. I haven't been really able to understand the full context of this question, not being a TTRPG player myself, but I would be curious to hear some more 'dexian perspectives about how this came about.

So from what I gather, your main contention is that TTRPGs used to be much more about the G (stats, dice rolls, combat, AKA "the crunch") then the TTRP (acting, roleplay, storylines, AKA "the fluff"), making it not to dissimilar to a sort of co-op wargaming?

TTRPGs have always been a popular hobby. They were nerdy but for the most part accepted and mainstream, the same way Star wars/trek or computer games were. And like computer games every generation has their cut off point for when the "normies ruined it". Same way they say the iPhone ruined the internet despite that generation being considered a cancer by the usenet generation. For some reason they all want to deny their hyper commercial hobby was main stream and give up their fake nerd cred. It's a weird Jewish power fancy where LE NERD got bullied and now here's LE GIGACHAD and better than everyone else because.. He bought a book that sold millions of copies and had an international audience.

The next time a nerd wants to tell you DnD was a niche hobby in the 80s, ask them what game single handedly built Games Workshop from the ground up and had international distribution rights.. It was DnD.

The line between wargaming and roleplaying has always been blurry. There's wargamers who bend all the rules to write a fluffy story and roleplayers who never bend a single rule and play DnD like a strategy battle game. Both groups look down on each other (as do all tabletop nerds) but in the 80s there was barely a distinction in the rules and as more people grew up with multi-purpose gaming stores you would find the same group played DnD, warhammer and magic the gathering on different nights of the week.

 

[Dark Souls II]

Wow, a thread about everyone's favourite, world-famous D&D playthrough that kickstarted the RPG boom and indirectly led to so many games we love? Let me contribute!

Spoiler

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Counterargument: the OP is a man.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Counterargument: the OP is a man.

Grim.

 

[Forest Dweller]

 

[Beastro]

Kids?

 

[Hag]

Great thread

Waiting for your next analysis on those trends making the web of cultures that we call society that are the real treasures in this world of encounters we call life.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I don't know what Critical Role is, nor did I read the OP.

My question is this: Why would you care the least what some other people think of a hobby you pursue in your privacy with close friends, let alone define it?
"Oh but there is so much woke content these days!" -- It's not like you can't use manuals from the 80s and the 90s, the 'technology' imagined in those doesn't suddenly become obsolete.

 

[Berengar]

You expect me to believe a woman registered on the codex in 2005?

 

[Vincente]

I don't know what Critical Role is, nor did I read the OP.

My question is this: Why would you care the least what some other people think of a hobby you pursue in your privacy with close friends, let alone define it?
"Oh but there is so much woke content these days!" -- It's not like you can't use manuals from the 80s and the 90s, the 'technology' imagined in those doesn't suddenly become obsolete.

We're fighting a culture war here goddammit!

 

[Stella Brando]

God damn hippies.

 

[Stella Brando]

You expect me to believe a woman registered on the codex in 2005?

I was 12 years old and Uncle Crispy sent me an invite, it was very thoughtful.

 

[That_Scumbag]

Oh, one of my buddies currently in college gets so many new players that think ttRPGs is just World of Warcraft with funny voices and gender identities. And they all ask him to imitate Mercer.