Editing Critical Role (section)

==The Mercer Effect==
When Critical Role is mentioned, the term "the Mercer Effect" may come up as a point of critique. The basic idea is that Critical Role, being more popular, widespread and well-known than your mom's venereal diseases, creates an idea among new and a few older players that, ideally, a game of Double D should be played the way Matthew "The Merciless" Mercer plays with his friends. Of course, this idea is a tragic bit of nonsense - as the man himself stated, he has been playing as a DM for over twenty years, and his players are all professional actors with huge backgrounds within voice acting; there's no way you and the sorry gaggle of idiots you call your friends could play the way they do. Moreover, you shouldn't base your way of playing a game of make-believe on what other people do. As many dungeon-crawly players and DMs will fight to be allowed to tell you, Critical Role's way of playing isn't how they like it. 

Critical Role's style of game works well for them because his players are used to heavy roleplay and deep character study as good friends and actors. It may work for you, it may not; the only thing that matters is that you don't judge yourself (or worse, your DM) and compare you and them with Mercer and his merry band of misfits. You're probably not gonna be able to meet their level either way, so enjoy how you play and what you do well in your group, and accept what your group is like.

Alternatively, the term sometimes refers to a "grass is always greener" attitude about how much better an imaginary other group might be compared to the very-real group a player is stuck with now. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwjLAC1wh7U Seth Skorkowsky has discussed how in his mind, the problem far predates Mercer and pals].

Occasionally the term is used as a bit of a slur against players and fans who like Critical Role (which is a bit of a warped complement, given it's explaining a long-running cultural shift with a single program). If it's used that way, it's by people who don't like the show and thinks the Mercer effect is the term that explains how the show is ruining D&D.

To explain, while D&D has always had a bit of a divider between people who liked characters and plots and people who liked number-crunching and optimization (and people who liked both, but presenting it as an either/or is [[Stormwind fallacy|by no means new]] in either direction), the popularity of Critical Role has led to the latter blaming the former for taking the teeth out of the kind of D&D they like, where meat grinder combat and traps are the order of the day. Even fans who like the storytelling and roleplaying aspect don't necessarily like inter-player ''drama'', as opposed to the idea of a tight-knit group of friends vs. the world. Also, the observation that D&D has gotten a bit less traditional and a bit more gonzo is broadly accurate, and while this trend (and [[freakshit| attendant criticism]]) ''also'' [[Planescape|far]] [[Eberron|predates]] Mercer, Critical Role has definitely had a hand in mainstreaming it.

In either case, while there have always been a broader array of games more-directly focused on that, regular D&D starting to cater to that itch has caused more than a few older fans to complain that this is ''also'' part of the Mercer Effect, and while one should always have a certain amount of healthy skepticism towards old-timey fans complaining about kids these days and how much better things were back in the day, ''especially'' when they directly equate modern players who like a different strain of D&D to themselves to the people who used to bully them in their socially-awkward childhoods, it's also fair to say that, once again, Wizards attempting to ride the coattails of a hot new trend to hide the holes in their mismanagement isn't necessarily a good thing.

Mercer himself has stated that he dislikes the Mercer effect, and that people should lower their expectations for DMs who haven't spent two decades running RPGs and being literal professional voice actors and also discussed suffering from impostor's syndrome, yes even Matt Mercer is a victim of the Mercer Effect.