There’s Room at the Table

There’s Room at the Table

Critical Role, Darrington Press, and the Many Ways We Play D&D

For the better part of a decade, it was almost impossible to separate Critical Role from Dungeons & Dragons.

Critical Role did not create D&D, obviously, and D&D certainly did not create Critical Role. But the two grew together during one of the most important periods in the game’s modern history. Millions of people watched Matthew Mercer and his table full of voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons, and for a generation of new players, Critical Role became one of their first windows into the hobby.

Before Wizards of the Coast owned D&D Beyond, it was already a longtime sponsor of Critical Role. The relationship became so closely associated with the show that Sam Riegel’s increasingly ridiculous D&D Beyond sponsorship bits became part of Critical Role itself. Wizards eventually acquired D&D Beyond in 2022, but that relationship with Critical Role had been established years before the acquisition.

The connection between Critical Role and D&D went much deeper than sponsorships, though.

When Matthew Mercer Became One of the Faces of D&D

As Critical Role grew, Matthew Mercer was becoming a star within the larger D&D world in his own right, and Wizards of the Coast recognized his value.

Mercer wasn’t simply the Dungeon Master of a popular show that happened to use their game. For years, D&D regularly put him in front of its own audience. He served as Dungeon Master for Force Grey, appeared at major D&D live events, official streams, and special games, and became one of the recognizable faces of D&D during the rise of Fifth Edition.

I have a particular fondness for Force Grey, although overall I probably prefer the second series, Lost City of Omu. That table had Joe Manganiello (the original Flash Thompson), Deborah Ann Woll, Dylan Sprouse (the kid who wiped his own ass in Big Daddy), Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Brian Posehn (the speeder pilot from the first episode of The Mandalorian), and they were funny together. It felt like a group playing D&D rather than a group trying to demonstrate the proper way to play D&D, which is probably part of why I still enjoy going back to it.

The first Force Grey had its moments too, although Chris Hardwick was annoying. I’ve had players like that at my own tables, the guy who talks and talks and talks and doesn’t always realize that everybody else is waiting for a chance to play. That’s not really a criticism of Force Grey as much as something any Dungeon Master who’s been doing this long enough will recognize immediately.

What I’ve always loved most about that original series, though, is the opening. Mercer is inside Meltdown Comics when the horn sounds and everyone starts gathering together before disappearing into the back room to play D&D. There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about it. For a few seconds, playing D&D feels almost like belonging to a secret society. The signal goes out, the people who understand it gather, and the regular world gets left outside.

Maybe that’s why it has always stuck with me. That store reminds me of the pawn shop where I first discovered D&D so long ago. I can still remember being a kid looking at those books and maps and imagining these enormous worlds behind them. Obviously Force Grey came decades later, but that opening somehow found the same feeling again. The horn sounds, you find your people, you go into the back room and play D&D. I love that.

That’s one reason I remember that era of D&D so fondly. Wizards wasn’t simply benefiting from Mercer’s growing fame. They were smart enough to recognize what he had become and put him to work representing the game. Shows like Force Grey felt like a celebration of playing D&D, and Mercer was becoming one of the most recognizable Dungeon Masters in the hobby at the same time Critical Role was exploding.

The relationship worked both ways. Critical Role benefited from playing the most recognizable tabletop roleplaying game in the world, while Dungeons & Dragons benefited from having one of the most recognizable Dungeon Masters in the world enthusiastically playing and representing its game. For several years, Critical Role, Matthew Mercer, D&D Beyond, and Wizards of the Coast weren’t simply adjacent parts of the tabletop boom. They were feeding one another’s growth.

Meanwhile, Critical Role’s own world was moving closer to D&D itself. Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount arrived in 2020 as an official Wizards of the Coast campaign setting, followed by Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep in 2022.

Think about that progression. A home campaign became a streamed D&D campaign. The streamed campaign became an entertainment company. Its Dungeon Master became one of the most recognizable personalities associated with D&D, and eventually the world created around that table appeared beneath the official Dungeons & Dragons banner. Then Critical Role did something considerably more interesting. They started making games themselves.

Enter Darrington Press

Darrington Press is Critical Role’s publishing arm, and over the last several years it has become increasingly clear that this isn’t simply a side operation created to sell Critical Role merchandise with some game rules attached. It has become a legitimate tabletop publisher in its own right.

Not everything Critical Role and Darrington Press have tried has become the next big thing.

Candela Obscura is probably the best example. Released in 2023, it was Darrington’s first full tabletop roleplaying game, a gothic-horror game built around the Illuminated Worlds system. Critical Role put real production behind it and produced an accompanying actual-play anthology with some serious talent around the table.

It never really grabbed me. Looking at where Darrington has put its energy since then, Candela Obscura certainly hasn’t become the centerpiece that Daggerheart has. I don’t have Darrington’s sales numbers, so I’m not going to pretend I know whether Candela was a financial success or failure. What I can say is that it never seemed to break through culturally in anything close to the way Daggerheart has.

And that’s okay. That’s part of becoming a real game publisher too. You make things. Some connect with a huge audience, some find a smaller audience, and some simply don’t land the way you hoped. Darrington isn’t interesting because Critical Role magically turns everything it touches into gold. It’s interesting because they’re willing to keep taking swings.

Daggerheart was a much bigger swing.

Released in 2025, Daggerheart is Critical Role’s own fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. It occupies some of the same territory Dungeons & Dragons has dominated for decades: heroic fantasy, adventuring parties, long campaigns, character advancement, monsters, magic, and collaborative storytelling. More importantly, Daggerheart is clearly the game Darrington has chosen to put at the center of its RPG business.

That immediately created an obvious question. If Critical Role owns its own fantasy RPG, why would it continue playing Dungeons & Dragons? As it turns out, the answer seems pretty simple: why choose?

Critical Role Didn’t Leave D&D

The announcement of Critical Role’s fourth main campaign put a lot of speculation to rest. Campaign 4 uses Dungeons & Dragons, specifically the 2024 rules. Brennan Lee Mulligan took over the Game Master chair, the story moved away from Exandria into the new world of Aramán, and the format changed dramatically.

Underneath all of those changes, though, Critical Role is still playing D&D. At the same time, the company has put Daggerheart front and center through its own actual-play programming and continued development by Darrington Press.

That tells us something important about what Critical Role has become. It isn’t merely a Dungeons & Dragons show anymore, but it isn’t an ex-Dungeons & Dragons show either. Critical Role has grown into something large enough to exist independently of any single game system.

The Critical Role Divide

You really can’t talk about Critical Role and D&D without talking about the divide Critical Role has created in the hobby.

I was reminded of this over the weekend when I watched a recent Eclectic Goats discussion asking, Is Critical Role Dividing the Hobby? The panel included the Eclectic Goat, Grim Jim, Vicki and Dean from Everae Games, and Professor Dungeon Master. It was interesting because you had several people who have been around this hobby for a long time looking at the same thing and coming away with very different opinions.

Professor Dungeon Master’s position was probably the closest to mine. He likes Critical Role. It’s good entertainment, and it’s D&D. That doesn’t mean his table has to look like Matthew Mercer’s table. My table doesn’t look like Mercer’s table either. Why would it? That’s one of the great things about D&D. Every table eventually becomes its own thing.

Other people on the panel were much more critical, while Vicki and the Eclectic Goat seemed more interested in keeping some balance in the conversation. Strangely, the discussion itself became a pretty good example of the question they were asking, because Critical Role is polarizing as hell.

There is a huge part of the hobby that loves it. They love Vox Machina, the Mighty Nein, the characters, the live shows, and the kind of D&D that Mercer and that cast play. There are also a lot of people who are playing D&D today because they found Critical Role first. That’s simply a fact of the modern hobby whether you like Critical Role or not.

Then you’ve got another corner of the hobby where criticizing Critical Role has practically become its own form of content. There are DungeonTubers and social media personalities who can seemingly find something wrong with Critical Role every week. Some of that criticism is fair. Critical Role is a big company now. They make products and entertainment and business decisions, and people have every right to criticize them.

But come on. We also know how the internet works.

Critical Role gets clicks. Criticizing Critical Role gets clicks. Telling people that Critical Role is ruining D&D, that the latest campaign is terrible, that a live show was a disaster, or that Daggerheart proves Critical Role has finally turned its back on D&D gives people something to argue about. Once outrage starts paying the bills, there’s always going to be another reason to be outraged next week.

That’s where I start looking for the off-ramp.

I’m not some Critical Role superfan. I liked Vox Machina. I really liked the Mighty Nein. Bells Hells didn’t do much for me, and I haven’t watched Campaign 4. That’s not some political statement about Critical Role. I have five children, work, writing, Paladin Forge, games I’d actually like to play, and all the other things that come with having a life. Finding several hundred hours to watch another actual-play campaign just isn’t very realistic.

But I like Critical Role. I think it’s good entertainment, and I think it’s D&D. I don’t need Matthew Mercer to run D&D the way I run D&D to enjoy watching him do it his way.

That’s where I think we’ve made this whole thing way more complicated than it needs to be. You don’t have to like Critical Role. You don’t have to watch the live shows. You don’t have to play Daggerheart. You don’t have to think every Critical Role campaign is great. Hell, I don’t. You can watch Vox Machina or the Mighty Nein and decide Bells Hells isn’t for you. That’s just having an opinion about entertainment.

What I don’t understand is this idea that Critical Role has somehow been bad for the hobby because the D&D at Mercer’s table doesn’t look like the D&D somebody else played in 1987, 1997, or 2007.

Critical Role brought a hell of a lot of people into tabletop roleplaying. Those people bought D&D books. They started running games. They went into game stores and bought dice, miniatures, terrain, adventures, and campaign settings. Then some of them started looking around and discovered Pathfinder, Shadowdark, Call of Cthulhu, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Daggerheart, and all the weird little independent games scattered throughout this hobby. Some of them probably wandered far enough down the rabbit hole that they’re playing Basic D&D now.

Good. That’s how this is supposed to work.

People come into the hobby through different doors. I came into it one way. Somebody twenty years younger than me might have come into it because they watched Critical Role. Neither one of us owns D&D more than the other guy.

Then Things Got Really Interesting

The actual relationship between Critical Role, Darrington Press, and D&D is considerably more interesting to me than the internet fight surrounding it. While everybody online is busy deciding whether Critical Role is destroying D&D or whether Daggerheart is coming for D&D’s throne, the people actually involved seem perfectly capable of working together and competing at the same time.

That became particularly clear in 2025 when Darrington Press announced that Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford were joining the company.

If you’ve followed modern Dungeons & Dragons, those names require very little introduction. Perkins spent decades at Wizards of the Coast and became one of the most recognizable creative figures associated with modern D&D. Crawford was one of the game’s principal rules architects and played a major role in the revised 2024 rules.

Now they’re at Darrington Press, where Perkins became Creative Director and Crawford became Game Director. They’re not there as ceremonial hires either. They’re working on Daggerheart and helping build the future of a fantasy roleplaying game that absolutely competes with D&D for some of the same players and dollars.

Neither man was exactly a stranger to Critical Role before joining Darrington. Perkins had appeared with Critical Role over the years, and Crawford had worked as an editor on Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. Both also worked on Call of the Netherdeep. Their move to Darrington wasn’t two worlds suddenly colliding. Those worlds had been crossing paths for years.

And then Critical Role turned around and chose the 2024 D&D rules for Campaign 4, with Perkins and Crawford helping Brennan Lee Mulligan develop homebrew material for the campaign. Apparently nobody told these people they’re supposed to be at war.

That’s what makes this relationship so interesting. Two of the most influential people behind modern Dungeons & Dragons leave Wizards, join the publishing company created by the people behind the most successful D&D actual play in history, begin developing material for that company’s competing fantasy RPG, and then help Critical Role play Dungeons & Dragons.

You couldn’t design a cleaner illustration of how interconnected this hobby has become.

Competition Doesn’t Require a War

There is a tendency in this hobby to treat every new game as if somebody has declared war. Daggerheart exists, therefore it must be trying to kill D&D. Critical Role publishes Daggerheart, therefore Critical Role must secretly want to abandon D&D. Critical Role continues playing D&D, therefore Daggerheart must have failed.

None of those conclusions are necessary.

Darrington Press absolutely competes with Wizards of the Coast. There are only so many gaming groups, only so many hours in the week, and only so much money people are going to spend on RPG books. When someone buys Daggerheart, that money could have been spent on another game. That’s competition, but competition doesn’t require hostility.

Critical Role can publish Daggerheart while continuing to play Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards can benefit from Critical Role putting D&D in front of an enormous audience, while Darrington can benefit from Critical Role’s historical association with the world’s largest tabletop RPG. Players can buy and play both without declaring their allegiance to anybody. Radical concept.

Did D&D Help Create Its Own Competitor?

There is an irony here worth appreciating. Critical Role became enormously successful while playing Dungeons & Dragons, and D&D gave the show a common language that millions of gamers already understood. Critical Role returned the favor by introducing an enormous audience to the game and helping prove that watching people play a tabletop RPG could become entertainment in its own right.

The relationship continued to deepen as both sides grew. D&D Beyond sponsored Critical Role years before Wizards owned the platform. Wizards embraced Matthew Mercer as one of the recognizable faces of modern D&D, putting him behind the screen for Force Grey and bringing him into live events and official productions. Eventually, Exandria itself crossed into official D&D publishing through Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount and Call of the Netherdeep.

By that point, Critical Role had built something much larger than an actual-play show. It had an enormous audience, valuable characters and settings of its own, merchandising, publishing experience, and enough independence to begin asking what it could create without relying entirely on somebody else’s game. Darrington Press and eventually Daggerheart were natural results of that growth.

You could argue that D&D helped create one of its own competitors, but I don’t think Wizards made a mistake by helping Critical Role grow. Quite the opposite. This is what a healthy creative industry should look like. Creators begin inside an established ecosystem, develop an audience and their own ideas, and eventually create something new. Competition is not necessarily evidence that the original relationship failed. Sometimes it’s evidence that it succeeded.

There’s Plenty of Room at the Table

I don’t want Daggerheart to destroy Dungeons & Dragons, and I don’t want Dungeons & Dragons to destroy Daggerheart. The same goes for Shadowdark, Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, and the hundreds of smaller games being produced by independent creators. I don’t think tabletop gaming benefits when we treat every new system as another combatant in some imaginary war for the soul of the hobby.

What I want are good games and more people playing them. I want publishers experimenting with mechanics and designers moving between companies. I want somebody to discover tabletop gaming because they watched Critical Role, buy a D&D Player’s Handbook, eventually try Daggerheart, and then walk into a game store and discover an entire wall of games they never knew existed. Maybe five years later they’re running some strange little independent RPG written by somebody working out of a spare bedroom in Arkansas. That’s how hobbies grow.

That’s why I find the current relationship between Critical Role, Darrington Press, and Dungeons & Dragons much more interesting than the simple story that Critical Role either belongs to D&D or abandoned it. Neither happened. Critical Role began as friends playing D&D and eventually became one of the game’s most influential ambassadors. Matthew Mercer became one of the recognizable faces of modern D&D, Exandria became part of official D&D publishing, and the success surrounding that relationship helped Critical Role grow into an entertainment and publishing company capable of creating its own fantasy roleplaying game.

Now Darrington Press employs Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, two people who helped shape modern D&D, while Critical Role itself is playing the 2024 D&D rules for Campaign 4. That’s not a divorce, and I don’t see much evidence of a corporate war. It looks more like something that happens when creators and companies grow alongside one another and eventually become peers. They work together when it makes sense, compete when it makes sense, and each is capable of standing on its own.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that for the rest of us. We don’t have to play D&D the same way, and we sure as hell don’t have to like all the same things. Somebody loving Critical Role doesn’t hurt my table, and somebody playing an old-school dungeon crawl doesn’t hurt theirs.

Apparently there’s plenty of room at the table.

And really, there isn’t one table. There are millions of them. There are tables playing strictly rules as written and tables where Rule Zero rules the day. Tables are running sprawling, character-driven campaigns that would feel right at home on Critical Role, and tables kicking down dungeon doors, checking for traps, killing monsters, and hauling out treasure. Tables are playing with miniatures and terrain, tables playing theater of the mind, tables running official adventures, and tables playing in worlds somebody has been building in a notebook for thirty years.

Jeffro Johnson and the BrOSR crowd are actually a good example from the other end of the spectrum. They’ve spent years encouraging people to go back to the original books, take those rules seriously, and play those older games much closer to the rules as written. That’s fine too. If that’s the D&D you love, there are people out there who want to play it with you.

Heck, look at the current debate over Chainmail. More than fifty years after it was published, we’re still arguing about how important Chainmail was to the original game. You’ve got people going back to those old rules and building retroclones, some released free or pay-what-you-want, while other creators are launching crowdfunding projects built around Chainmail. At the same time, you’ve got people arguing that Chainmail’s importance to actually playing early D&D has been overstated or dismissing it almost entirely.

And here’s where it gets interesting. I’m not even convinced that everyone currently making money from the Chainmail revival understands what made Chainmail relevant to D&D in the first place. But that’s probably another article.

Think about that for a minute. We can’t even agree on how to interpret the foundations of a game published more than half a century ago, and somehow we’re supposed to agree on the one correct way everybody should be playing Dungeons & Dragons in 2026?

After years of arguments over the “right” way to play D&D, the larger hobby still hasn’t fallen into line behind any one version of the game. Of course it hasn’t. D&D players have been ignoring rules, changing rules, inventing rules, misunderstanding rules, arguing about rules, and throwing out rules they don’t like for fifty years. Getting D&D players to agree on exactly how D&D should be played might be the least D&D thing imaginable.

That’s Dungeons & Dragons. The game doesn’t belong to Critical Role, Wizards of the Coast, Jeffro and the BroSR, the grognards, the DungeonTubers, or whatever group happens to be making the most noise online this week. It happens at the table, and there are millions of those tables playing this game in a million different ways far far away from social media.

Play rules as written. Play Rule Zero all day long. Play like it’s 1979. Play like it’s Thursday night on Critical Role. Just find some people, roll the dice, and play the damn game.