I love that this man's thesis is "There's no such thing as a Matt Mercer effect" and then goes on to describe what people call the Matt Mercer effect, say he's personally never seen it, and then say if it does exist it's your fault not Matt Mercer's.

I'm personally glad for this dude he's never experienced because the internet is glutted with horror stories of people who have.

I think what this bozo isn't getting is that most people who experience the Matt Mercer Effect don't explicitly say "I expected this to be like Critical Role, the Dungeons & Dragons podcast hosted by Matthew Mercer available on your streaming platform of choice."

They just show up, join a game, usually act completely fucking weird because they've internalized the behaviors of another table they'll never be part of, act utterly disruptively because their idea of the game is informed by one thing, and then quit after a few sessions.

parasocial relationships EX

Source: I have played in a game with one of these people. It was a Dungeon of the Mad Mage crawl and they basically decided they were going to be like two or three of the CR characters mashed into one (the tieflings), used terminology from the show, and at least once or twice just basically did something incomprehensible that dragged the table to a halt.

And said incomprehensible bullshit was them basically trying to do one of the bits that Mercer gleefully follows his players on, except that is a GM and player who have built a years long rapport and probably exchanged ideas off-camera between sessions, and this wa someone just trying to force the movie magic to happen.

I love how this fucking wingus is like "oh well just set expectations with players" you can't. That's the problem.

These people have watched a bunch of professional actors who are mostly lifelong hobbyists play a game that is so well put together that people regularly accuse it of being completely scripted.

That has been professionally edited together, at that.

Someone in the thread uses the metaphor of CR being an NBA game and your D&D game being a pick-up game at the park, and that's not true; in this metaphor CR is The Harlem Globetrotters except people don't know the Washington Wizards are in on it.

er, Washington Generals.

it's almost like the game where you're generally supposed to work in a team works best when you actually get to know the characters of the people you're playing with

weird

Your game, no matter how good you are, is competing with the Baudrilliardian Hyperreality version of a D&D game.

and not like. your ideas of what an Ideal DnD Game looks like

Or to go to a different theorist since I always wind up with my man Jean for elfgames; for those of us who grew up in a pre-AP era, a D&D game is the signifier and whatever mental images you got of you and your friends playing this out from the books was the signified.

For the CR (or other AP first fans) the signified is a specific version of a specific table they've been sold, and there's no way the signifier can reach this.

for me personally it's more like the brennan lee mulligan effect but the result is functionally the same

(it's mostly the brennan lee mulligan effect because like. the matt mercer effect is localized almost wholly to D&D, whereas the brennan lee mulligan effect, due to brennan showing up notably in games that are not just running a 5E campaign, will occur in Literally Anything, Anytime)

(I also prefer Brennan's quirks of tabletop play to Matt's.)

(and it's just like. no, sorry, you're not going to rock up to a table being endowed with the spirit of one of the greatest improvisational performers of our generation, you are just gonna have to learn to calibrate to the table's baseline instead, actually)

Yeah, you and rukafais hit it exactly - all tabletop is a dialogue, no matter how mechanically lopsided the system is, and you need to dial it in to what you, your table, and your chosen game are capable of, and the Mercer or Mulligan Effect is that people due to the hobby prevalence of high-production Actual Plays don't get that in droves.

yeah. part of what makes mercer and mulligan able to do what they do in a way that brings an audience to it is they have years of experience as performers to draw on, for one thing, and for another, both of them have been playing tabletop games and specifically D&D since their age could be counted in the single digits

yeah like the rapport they have with their specific tables is because 1) group synergy 2) theater kids 3) so much fucking dnd

that's not a replicable feat for esp. a pickup game you fell into off the roll20 forums or wherever

Nor is it a slight on your poor DM who is running out of a module or on some vague ides that they can't do a dozen different voices or get flustered if you throw a massive curveball at them and derail the plot.

yeah, absolutely seriously.

especially on the voice front

Mercer can do it because he is literally a professional voice actor. he does this kind of thing for a living, because he is that good at it.

yeah he's made it his career

frankly if you want voices to be more separate and distinct without killing your poor pickup game DM: TEXT GAME LOL

THIS

THIS SO FUCKING HARD

(also i am perhaps just generally way more comfortable with text games in general)

i can only do the variety of character voices i do in text

otherwise i'd be straight fucked

it's also like

I don't have the time or money to have BEAUTIFUL SETS AND MINIS

I wish I did

god I would kill to have the time and resources to build some of those sets.

god

those sets

but I don't and neither will 99% of tables.

like, those are amazing and beautiful sets and honestly with most tables you will not have people with the time and/or money to make those sets

because those are custom sets, I am certain.

Yeah. Full professional staff for those shows doing things like that.

oh they are 100%

yeah, whole ton of behind-the-scenes work

like the dimension20 shows are designed to be SHOWS from the jump

Also I wanna make this clear; I don't think Mercer or Mulligan are the great satan or anything. I like what they do, I love that it's brought new eyes to the hobby, they have a genuine love and passion that shines through and have become faces of a new way to enjoy the hobby.

Oh, absolutely

We're better off for having them. But they have also caused a new problem for the rest of us who can't literally make a living at this.

and hell, Mercer has gone out of his way multiple times to say "please don't expect or demand your game be on the level of what we show" IIRC

so has Mulligan.

but it's really hard to stop people doing that.

the entire cast of critrole are professional voice actors, and i'm pretty sure they all have a lot of experience with improv as well. to say nothing of the fact that they're all long-time friends and they literally play d&d for a living, and have for the past ~8 years or so

and they mainly play in a setting that mercer has been developing continuously as a passion project for more than a decade now, in large part for this specific group of friends

all of which combines to create a table atmosphere you'd be hard-pressed to replicate anywhere else

Yeah. The Mercer Effect is people expecting any table they roll up to to be that because one of those high-production Actual Plays is their sum total experience with the hobby.

It's basically the TTRPG version of Paris Syndrome.