#ever since the weird indie ttrpg outrage over the monsterhearts oneshot

[luckthebard]

Gonna try to phrase this as specifically as I can, because I've been thinking about it for a while:

I think some of the ttrpg social media scene has a particular reaction to CR's success because they view them as outsiders or interlopers.

To explain: even though CR was one of the first (and certainly the first big) streaming D&D games, they were also set up for success in multiple ways that lots of other streamers just don't have access to. They didn't just try to stream on their own initially - they were pitched to and picked up by possibly the first "streaming studio" platform, Geek and Sundry. That meant that, from the jump, they had a producer, a dedicated space for the show in a studio, equipment, and tech people. We obviously saw the quality of especially the equipment improve over the years, but it was there from the start.

They also had a built-in potential audience, from multiple angles. G&S was an incredibly popular tabletop streaming channel hosting the Wil Wheaton's TableTop show and run by Felicia Day - who could easily have been described as "queen of the nerd internet" in 2015. And speaking of Felicia, there's a whole other layer to her involvement that guaranteed built-in and wide-reaching promotion. She has millions of followers and was huge(r) in the online nerd scene 6 years ago. Felicia tweets about the show? Potentially hundreds of new viewers tune in. I think a lot of people looking at everything now just have no concept of how big G&S was at the time - especially because it essentially no longer exists. They streamed every day, they had a dedicated studio, consistent G&S personalities, and dozens of shows.

Not to mention, the CR players themselves were bringing in a built-in audience. They were voice actors with established careers who were well-known in certain niche spaces. The show could be pitched as Roy Mustang or Gaara or Jaina Proudmoore or Ellie playing D&D. When people talk about CR as "lightening in a bottle" it's definitely a "right place right time" in terms of people being interested in D&D and enjoying a well-crafted story, but it's also that all of these elements aligned as well: Felicia and her studio, and the built-in base of G&S and animation/video game fans.

This isn't in any way meant to diminish CR's hard work or success - none of this would have mattered if they hadn't been extremely entertaining and worked incredibly hard on their story and characters. But they had an infrastructure around them by virtue of their industry that is not typical of ttrpg people.

And many up-and-coming streams now are coming from a very different place. And I think, to a large extent, there's a feeling that CR aren't "really" ttrpg people, and they aren't viewed as being part of "the hobby" in the same way game designers and people who only do ttrpg content are. And to a certain extent, they aren't allowed to be just "individuals who like games" because of some of the other support they had from the start. There's often a feel of "these actors who decided to be gamers for profit and stole the audience from the rest of us" coming from the ttrpg scene. Matt might be the exception to this, as he's often pointed to as a life-long DM and someone who's contributed via publishing to the space, but I think CR as a group/channel as a whole is sort of an outlier in the ttrpg space that has popped up since, and is therefore sort of resented as interlopers who have risen to dominance in another space via industry connections and name recognition.