#cr undeadwood

[xombigirl]

All right, so update.

As of right now, almost 7:30 PM on Thursday July 6th, 2023 any and all content containing Brian W. Foster has been either removed or privated on the Critical Role YouTube channel.

This includes:

Honey Heists 1 & 2

Bar Room Blitz

Club of Misfits

All of Undeadwood

All of Talks Machina

All of Between the Sheets

All of Game Ranch and Off the Ranch

Edit: Also his episodes of Narrative Telephone.

Some of these things have already been archived and there are folks working on archiving more as well.

[frankensteins-mt-dew]

ANJALI. Do not apologize for asking questions. It is how we learn and how we get better. You are amazing and I love you

[utilitycaster]

Interested in seeing how Candela Obscura as a series does - the long stretch between the Twitch episode and the YouTube VOD means that the fandom response seems much smaller, but the video seems to be doing very well on views, and I know they're taking the actual game to a bunch of conventions which might bring in new viewers.

[maliro-t]

everything i've heard about the candela live show is solidifying the direct line i've seen since launch from sagas of sundry to where we are now and I'm just so 👐👐 excited about it

[fully-functioning-pigeon]

I watched the trailer immediately after it got dropped

Holy shit this is so cool

Is this a play on ten candles? Is this something new? This cast is incredible!

[diabeticgirl4]

Cinderbrush is so good hhhhhh

Why is there next to no info on it hhhhhh

[thequeenofmyownscreen]

I was talking with friends about our CR summary of 2022 on our discord channel, and since I've rounded up the numbers already, I thought I'd shared them here too.

In 2022, I have watched :

34 Campaign 3 episodes + 8 episodes of 4 Sided Dive

82 Campaign 2 episodes + 62 episodes of Talks Machina

12 episodes of the 1st season of The Legend of Vox Machina

4 episodes of Exandria Unlimited : Calamity (my beloved)

at least 7 one-shots, many of them in relation to Campaign 1, but not only !

4 episodes of UnDeadwood

also the first 2 seasons of Travis Willigham's Yeehaw Game Ranch, so 19 episodes

also the 1st season of All Work No Play + the podcast, so 23 episodes

also the 1st season of Narrative Telephone, so 8 episodes

I did NOT count the rewatches (mostly TLOVM one or twice !)

No wonder my Tumblr year was occupied by CR, huh.

[faggotwilliamwisp]

I do miss cr…………. Just a little bit…

[luckthebard]

So this is a very niche rant that is probably only something I've noticed or been annoyed by, but:

The longer Critical Role has gone on and the more changes they've made/content they've created, there's been an increase in weird people who are desperate and determined to prove that changes or content they don't like are "an objective failure" - but often lie or deliberately misunderstand viewership statistics to do so.

There are a few big "facts" I see repeated by people to argue that CR has "gone in the wrong direction" that are just plain wrong, and I think what annoys me most is seeing so many people engage with those "facts" without bothering to double-check them or push back against the certainty with which people state them. An example of one I keep seeing now is "twitch streaming numbers are down" and it's like, yeah, sure, in comparison to when they didn't simultaneously air on YouTube. If you add up the YT and Twitch numbers these days it's about the same as mid-late C2, but people love to act like YT streaming doesn't exist to make a point that "people don't like C3". And I tbh don't care if people like or dislike C3 but why this determination to falsely quantify and validate a personal preference?

The earliest I saw this was an intense agreement on reddit that Exandria Unlimited was a "failure" for CR, "unlike Undeadwood," because viewership numbers were lower. And it was tbh baffling to not see pushback against that narrative, because it's just objectively untrue. Original EXU's VOD streaming numbers are higher than every single episode of Undeadwood, and it premiered literally years later. It also has a lower "drop-off" in viewership (comparison of how many views episode 1 vs the finale has) than Undeadwood, despite frequent claims to the contrary. And don't mistake me here, I really enjoyed Undeadwood, but it actually was a viewership misstep for CR to the degree that they didn't try anything like it again for a while after and significantly changed how they approached marketing and airing miniseries. (A big one being: don't air a long miniseries simultaneously with the main series, it's too much content for most people to invest in during a week.)

(Sidebar, but another great miniseries CR did that didn't get a lot of viewership love is the Elder Scrolls Online trilogy, so I'm going to plug it here. It has some weirdly low viewership numbers on episodes 2 and 3 and I promise you they're both well worth it.)

The other one I keep seeing is "4 Sided Dive has lower numbers than Talks" which is also just not true. Most 4 Sided Dive VODs have nearly twice as many views as Talks VODs (and I'm using the ones that aired directly on the CR channel as a metric here, not the ones re-uploaded from G&S which lost numbers in the change-over). And I'll tbh chalk that up to the fact 4SD airs much less frequently - people are more likely to think it's necessary to watch whereas with Talks if you weren't interested in the guests you might skip a week. I'm not making any claims about the quality of either show, but the use of false viewership statistics to support "one of these sucks" is so rampant and so weird.

All this to say that yesterday I saw a weird viewer-hungry YouTube clickbait video titled "Midst a FAILURE for Critical Role!!" with a truly absurd confidence on what the VOD streaming numbers for the Midst YouTube videos mean for the series mere days after the premier and snapped.

tl;dr, people just make shit up and say whatever on the internet all the time and we hopefully all understand and expect that BUT (and here's the more annoying thing) 9 times out of 10 people just engage with that WITHOUT LOOKING INTO IT THEMSELVES

[cw-ianthe]

i understand why CR has deleted everything with Brian in it & support the decision. but i'll miss yeehaw game ranch & talks & undeadwood

[night-filled-mountain]

Hey, if anyone has copies of any of the (understandably!) deleted/privated CR videos and is awesomely down to share, I’m looking for the following:

Honey Heist 2: Electric Beargaloo

Critical Role and the Club of Misfits

All of UnDeadwood

All of Between the Sheets

Many thanks in advance!

[thetragicallynerdy]

AO3 Fic Meme

Thanks to @dragonmuse for the tag, this was fun!!

Rules: go to your AO3 account and find the following:

What ratings do you write most of your fics under?

Explicit (33), Teen & up (16), Mature (14), Gen (8)

What are your top three fandoms?

Our Flag Means Death (TV) (38)

UnDeadwood (31)

Critical Role (2) (altho I think one is a double tagged UDW fic still, so main CR is tied with Leverage, also at 1. Those are also the only 4 fandoms I've written for, so.)

What is the top character you write about?

Jim Jimenez (36) and Clayton Sharpe (27)! Big surprise there XD

What are your top three pairings?

Matthew Mason/Clayton Sharpe (20)

Tied with Oluwande Boodhari/Jim Jimenez (also 20)

After that it's Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Jim Jimenez (15)! Coming in hot with the rarepair for the last one XD

What are the top three additional tags?

Smut (22)

Hurt/Comfort (21)

Oral sex (18)

Does any of this surprise you?

LMAO not really! Oral sex as a top tag made me laugh, I wasn't expecting that but it's not surprising per se. I was a little surprised hurt/comfort was so close to smut, because I think I write a lot more smut than I do whump or hurt/comfort these days - but I suppose a lot of my smut also includes hurt/comfort??

As to characters and ships and fandoms - not surprised in the least. I've only really written a lot for two fandoms, and I have an extremely clear favourite character in both.

Tagging, if you feel like doing this - @alfalfairy, @skollwolf, @thewollfgang, @windwardstar, @bringinghometherain, @mithrilwren , @kawaii-queen-kaiju , @candyfloss-esophagus ! And anyone not tagged who sees this and feels like sharing, please consider yourself tagged!

Note: I now keep a tag list of folks who have told me they'd like to be tagged in writing/author games! If you'd like to be added onto the list, or taken off the list, please let me know!

[utilitycaster]

Regarding Editing and Innovating in the space, 2 people who get a Fraction of the credit they deserve are Ivan Van Norman & Marisha Ray. I mean, they created and developed one of the original mixed media cinematic interactive actual plays, Sagas of Sundry: Dread, and then Sagas of Sundry: Madness, and Marisha (later hiring Ivan as well) has continued that trajectory in some of the more intriguingly edited mixed format Actual plays at CR, like Call of Cthulhu, Undeadwood, and others, and being Instrumental in the developments at CR. Like, when you do watch the interviews you get a sense of just how Much of CR's current content designs, ttrpg intentions, and series are marisha's brainchilds, and it sucks that she doesnt get the credit others involved in similar projects, and even those projects, do.

This is a great point. I've mentioned this before w/r/t the fandom - Marisha, perhaps more than anyone, gets reduced even by many fans to "she's pretty and her characters are like what if a girlboss were a girlfailure" and her creative direction goes unheralded. It feels like this has gotten worse in recent years; I was baffled at how many people seemingly resented Calamity or Candela for taking up space they felt should go only to the main campaign when those were not only showcases for Marisha as a performer but also clearly something in which she had a strong hand in designing. Whenever people whine about there only being two main campaign episodes in a month because of Candela Obscura, I do think "You realize this was probably Marisha's call?"

I was focused in my response much more on Daggerheart, and so on the game design side (quick side note - reviews of A Familiar Problem, which Marisha worked on, were pretty positive; I wonder if something's happened in the past 2 years since that's when I've really felt this Damn Critical Role energy among actual play journalists), but I had been thinking about Sagas of Sundry and Undeadwood! I think I mentioned Sagas of Sundry in one of my posts about how Kollok isn't, in my mind, impressive. I loved Dread but never finished Madness before Alpha folded, but actually I was imagining something like Madness - fully on a set, people walking around like it's a play - for Kollok! When I saw everyone at a table with that rotating rock I was like "is this...it?" And, you know, Sagas: Madness wasn't entirely for me, but you can't fault the innovation. Similarly, when I think about the (baffling) criticism from one of the prominent actual play journalists I've had in mind while writing this, that Candela Obscura the show did not fully teach people Candela Obscura the game, I think about how Ivan Van Norman did straight up teach Savage Worlds during Undeadwood. Whenever people gush over the shadow puppets in Burrow's End I think it's deserved, but when they claim it's utterly new? Nah. Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Crystal Palace did it first. And Marisha had a guiding hand in the creative direction of all of these.

I think this is sort of elaboration on one of my points in my original post: I think a lot of the journalists are really out of their depth. I don't remember seeing their names when I first started watching CR in 2018, or when I got deeper into the fandom in 2019. My first actual play was TAZ, which I binged in late 2017. I really think a lot of the journalists flat-out don't know Sagas of Sundry or Undeadwood because they didn't show up until after Alpha folded. I've mentioned this elsewhere but so much of the claims of novelty and innovation are completely incorrect and not even terribly obscure. Look, I've seen/listened to most or all of 9 actual plays (this is counting D20 and CR each as one single unit, by the way - I've seen all but scattered one-offs from either), and seen or heard an episode or two of many more. I think that simply by doing that? I know more than a lot of these journalists.

Again: Worlds Beyond Number? The innovation is with the Witch class and the Wizard of the Citadel subclasses, and the allowance of extremely long downtime, but: longform podcast actual play with sound design? RQG did it starting in 2015. Griffin McElroy and Emily Axford have been composing their own music since 2017 or 2018 for their respective shows, both of which are also longform podcast actual plays. Again, Brennan pretty explicitly said "I don't think D20 is new, nor longform" in a quote and the article that quotes him argues that Fantasy High is new and longform...and that article also talks about how before D20 most AP video was livestreamed before talking about how boundary-breaking D20 was for having a livestreamed second season (you know, the thing that they just called old hat a paragraph earlier) that quickly pivoted to remote (even though remote livestreaming was actually quite common in smaller productions well before the pandemic, since you don't need anything but laptop cameras to produce it). I don't even keep up with much in the really indie AP scene, but those people I know who do are even less impressed by the state of Actual Play journalism than I, because D20 executes a lot of things extremely well, has a very talented roster of performers, and a budget most productions cannot hope to match, but a good deal of what it's credited for inventing (and which, again, it never claims to have invented. I want to be clear that the journalists decided to be like this for no clear reason) already existed. And, by placing this heavy emphasis on production, they are automatically making it hard for indie productions to impress them. For all they claim to be going after the 700 lb gorilla, they are simply cozying up to the 600 lb gorilla. It's real "um, why don't you try this little indie game called Pathfinder" hours.

I am fairly sure a lot of the people in prominent journalistic positions in the actual play sphere today came in only after the collapse of Geek and Sundry, is my point, and so I think they literally do not realize how much the medium owes to, for example, Marisha Ray and Ivan Van Norman, because they weren't watching in 2016 nor even skipping through the G&S archives, as I did as a new CR fan. I think they're absolutely out of their depth, and most of them don't even realize it.

[gorgynei]

oh my god cr deleted undeadwood.. i know it's bc he's in it but.. undeadwood gone forever???? oh :(

[punkrockgenasiashton]

Looks like CR pulled all the episodes of Talks Machina off their podcast feeds and youtube, as well as Undeadwood. While I agree with the decision to do this (I even opined they should do as such back when the news about BWF broke), it still sucks to lose so much good because of the inclusion of somebody who turned out to be a terrible person.

[fully-functioning-pigeon]

Really hoping that if anything from the CR backlog becomes a movie, it’s Calamity. If we were in a perfect world where I get everything I want, it would be UnDeadwood. Mainly because I’m obsessed with the aesthetic and I wish I could watch it for the first time all over again. But man would Calamity be beautiful animated on screen.

I can’t really think of anything else that could be used as a movie, other than maybe EXU prime but that would be odd with the assumption that this all will keep building to a tv show per campaign. If y’all have any other ideas about what the movie could be please reply and/or reblog in the tags im very interested in this opportunity that CR has with this prime partnership.