![]() ![]() They called it Critical Role, and the plan was pretty simple, the friends would sit around a table and simply play, exactly like they would at home. In March of 2015, Matthew Mercer and his group of friends, under the banner of the Geek and Sundry Production Company, began live-streaming the D&D game that they had started playing a few years prior. At its heart, D&D is not about winning or conquering, it’s all about working together to craft a really fun story. Anything is possible in the story, the only limit is the imagination of the players and the roll of the dice. They can explore, fight, and interact with anything in the world, and dice are used to see how successful the character’s actions are. Every other player is responsible for one character that they move throughout the story world. One player is the game master (or GM) who controls the overall flow of the plot and who is responsible for describing each scene as it unfolds. If you were to buy D&D at the store, what you would be purchasing is a game manual a book of rules that let you tell a story together with friends. Instead, players work together to create a story. When people sit down to play, they are not sitting around a game board and spinning a spinner-in fact, boards and tokens aren’t necessary at all. But to be entirely honest, D&D is so much more than that. It involves people sitting around a table to play, rolling dice, and you can, in theory, win. And some of us, myself included, could not be more excited about that.ĭungeons and Dragons is a game. The same D&D that was largely shunned by the church and left to be played secretly in basements by only the nerdiest of nerds is making headlines again and skyrocketing in popularity. Yep, the ultra-nerdy D&D that crept onto the scene in the 70s and then made media headlines in the 80s for promoting Satan worship and occult behavior (it didn’t do ether, by the way) is back. First, it’s important to understand that this is all about Dungeons and Dragons. To understand how monumental this is, however, it’s probably necessary to take a step back for a moment and look at exactly what is going on. The soaring popularity of Critical Role among the geek world was, and is, rooted in both the beauty of their tale and who they are as people. The success of their Kickstarter is huge, huge news for the geek community but it is also huge news for everyone else, especially those of us in the church who are seeking to engage with the world, and the culture, around us. After only four days, the Kickstarter has broken the record for most-funded TV or film campaign ever, and now, with 30 days to go, they are hovering at over $7.5 million dollars raised. The show airs every Thursday night on Twitch and has steadily gained a loyal following with each episode getting hundreds of thousands of views. The fundraising campaign was launched by the people at Critical Role, an online live-streamed Dungeons and Dragons game played by a number of well-known, and well-loved, voice actors. You read that correctly, this was a fundraising campaign for a show based on good ol’ D&D, and they raised $4 million dollars in one day. The most unusual thing, however, is that this Kickstarter was for a 30-minute animated show based on Dungeons and Dragons. dollars… within 24 hours, the total had passed the $4 million mark and was still rising. What was unusual about this campaign is that within an hour, the original goal of $750,000 had been blown away and pledges had surpassed a million U.S. That’s not at all unusual Kickstarters go live every day. On Monday March 4, a Kickstarter went live. ![]()
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