My Life as a Gamer: The Critical Role Meltdown

A character on the popular D&D show Critical Role died, and people lost their fucking minds. The Pundit comments:

The Pundit is correct. This episode exposes that Critical Role's audience is dominated by non-gamers who have no interest in ever playing any form of RPG (nevermind Dungeons & Dragons) and thus approach this show as they would any other television show. The reaction is not out of line to the sudden and unexpected death of a character on any other adventure series, especially one that doesn't conform to audience expectation of what deaths are permissible and what are not.

This is only a problem because Wizards of the Coast wants to turn D&D into a Lifestyle Brand, and these upset watchers are not gamers- they're Fans of the Brand. Real D&D has characters croaking on the regular, often permanently, as one would expect in any game derived from wargaming. If anything, Mercer's been a softy and there should be a small stack of corpses by now.

The only good response here is "It's a game. Characters die. It happens. (Player) will just go roll up a new man and get back into it." but the soy had its way and here we are looking at grown men and women having a fucking meltdown like toddlers. WOTC has to know this doesn't make their brand look good, and they ought to be stepping in to do damage control; play the Lifestyle Brand game, get the Lifestyle Brand bullshit.

What is clear here is that neither Critical Role nor any of its fellow reality shows are Real D&D. They're all Fake D&D, pushing Fake Gaming (see the previous posts on the tells; we're seeing them here), and facilitating the fraud that is D&D as a Lifestyle Brand by allowing this farce to continue. (Look, there's going to be D&D-branded shoes for sale at the San Diego Comic Con; how fucking more obvious does it need to be that WOTC wants to make this pivot?) Frank, what time is it?

Indeed, Frank. It is time to stop- to stop merely tolerating Fake Gaming, especially Fake D&D.