Hacker Cinema
Critical Role
2015 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Matthew Mercer, Ashley Johnson, Marisha Ray, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, Laura Bailey, Liam O'Brien, Travis Willingham
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventureComedyDrama
Critical Role is a weekly actual play series that uses tabletop role-playing game mechanics as a means to explore and develop stories from the vast fantasy worlds of Exandria, Aramán, and beyond, with sweeping narratives intricately woven through collaboration between Game Masters and players.
3 positive3 neutralfrom 6 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
6 comments on Hacker News
Video game and movie illustrators are completely fucked which is sad. Very interested to see how this plays out in the comic/graphic novel space. I could theoretically see the big hitters getting behind human artists for the marketing points, but if some new or smaller comic book studio starts churning out AI content and it takes off they might be forced to follow suit. I think a lot of this might depend on how comic book stores themselves operate e.g if they also get behind the artists and refuse to stock AI generated works. But I don't know how many people are buying comic books from stores vs online, as a relatively outside observer it seems to be one of the only types of retail businesses that seem to have stood up pretty well against the online onslaught, probably because of how much they operate as a community hub.
Other prediction: Theoretically anyone with a semi-interesting TTRPG campaign could just feed in their weekly adventure into the program and have a comic book generated from the results. We could end up with a Soundcloud style situation but instead of songs there's 100,000 new comic books being generated a day. From there, it's not a stretch to say the same is going to happen to movies, because once you've got the comics (which are essentially storyboards) and the technology gets perfected for video, it's probably not a lot of effort to feed the comics into the AI and have it generate the movie.
Will be interesting to see how the quality vs quantity dynamic plays out. Either we'll start consuming more content from local creatives and indie studios or there will be so much dross to sift through we'll happily pay globo corps more money for the highest quality stuff. It'll probably be somewhere in the middle. At the minute, I'm about 8 episodes into Critical Role's 2nd Campaign and questioning why I even still have Netflix when I can access entertainment like this for free on Youtube.
They're specifically targeting Critical Role. It's a serial youtube and twitch series of professional voice actors playing D&D together, with Matt Mercer as the DM. They've been running since 2015, and they're massively popular. Millions of people watch who never play D&D, but also many more people started playing D&D because of the show. It's had such an effect that some long time players complain that newer players expect the game to be like it's on the TV show and they can't agree on playstyle anymore.
But the point is, Critical Role is a behemoth in the RPG space now, and while their popularity helped massively increase D&D's popularity, they're also making buckets of money. Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro get none of that money, though they certainly gained more revenue from the free advertising of their game. Hasbro got greedy. This entire gambit was about coming for some of that money, not really about other publishers at all. And that gambit backfired massively, and drove tons of creators and fans to other games.
> Stranger Things and Critical Role
I was taking to a friend about this, Stranger Things and Critical Role, bought a lot of new players to D&D, meanwhile WoTC isn't doing half as much, they could be doing an animated series, to explore the settings. They are making a live-action movie, it isn't the first, but this one has a bigger budget.
Critical Role - bunch of voice actor friends sit at the table and play DnD. Campaing 3 just started, Campaing 1&2 have 250+ episodes combined approx. 4h each. A lot of content but definitely worth it. Also, animated series based on the show comes up in Feb 2022.
Highly recommend if you looking for something to listen to
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Role
Excerpt:
"Critical Role is an American web series in which a group of professional voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons. The show started streaming in March 2015, joining the cast part way through their first campaign together. "Campaign one" ran for 115 episodes, and ended in October 2017. The cast started playing "campaign two" in January 2018, which is still ongoing as of September 2019."
Also related:
Kickstarter Campaign: Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina Animated Special
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/criticalrole/critical-role-the-legend-of-vox-machina-animated-s
(The Kickstarter Campaign is over, but it was apparently very successful... $11,385,449 successful, to be exact...)
I started to DM and in order to find people, my wife and I put out requests on Instagram and now we play with some extended acquaintances and old friends. It is going great and never would of happened if we didn't put out that open ended request. I also recommend watching Critical Role as a way to experience the game without being able to play.