RPG rulebooks sometimes open with an “example of play” where players with whitebread names like Arthur and Samantha go through a scripted scene and probably some combat to give you an idea what roleplaying is like. Tabletop roleplaying games are a weird hobby, and back in the day if you didn’t have an existing group to join and were just going off the rulebooks like me, the only way to learn what they were like was by reading the adventures of Artie and Sam.
Now, you’ve got it easy. There are like 400 episodes of Critical Role online, not to mention Dimension 20, the Adventure Zone, Acquisitions Incorporated, and Dungeon Masters with Neil Newbon and Devora Wilde out of BG3. I would have killed for this many examples of how to play RPGs when I was a kid in a country town with no game shops around. All I had was ads in comics promising “The fantasy adventure of a lifetime!” Now I’ve got more hours of Matt Mercer saying “How do you want to do this?” than I’ll ever have time to watch.
Which is why it’s baffling that the YouTube algorithm and Reddit have spent several years vomiting headlines at me like “How to beat the Matt Mercer effect” and “The Mercer Effect is real and can be extremely toxic to your game.”
The idea of “the Matt Mercer effect” is that not only are actual-play series like Critical Role a bad introduction to roleplaying, they give new players dangerously high expectations, which are ruining people’s games. A generation of kids think every Dungeon Master will be as good at accents and creaky door noises as professional voice actor Matthew Mercer, goes the claim, and they will leave your table in a huff because you are just an ordinary human GM who can maybe do one Cockney goblin at a stretch.
I’m not saying nobody has ever complained their GM isn’t doing a good enough job and maybe even used Matt Mercer as an example of how to be a better one. I’m saying the problem goes back way further than Critical Role, and is one that’s been playing out for years before anyone was making a living as a professional Dungeon Master.
One of the most important tools in a GM’s bag is session zero. It’s the part before the game where you make sure everyone’s on the same page about what kind of game you’re about to play. It’s where you talk about whether there will be more action or roleplaying, whether player-versus-player conflict is allowed, which house rules you’ll be using, and so on. Are you down with adversarial play, or with romance, or with safety tools? Are you going to get narky because I’m neurodivergent and sometimes looking at my phone makes it easier for me to concentrate even if it looks like I’m distracted? These are the things you hash out in session zero so they don’t come up when play begins.
But the game taking place in the back room of a game shop probably doesn’t have time for that, and the game being run by your friend’s brother who let you join in this week but only because his parents made him probably doesn’t either.
Overwhelmingly, rants about the Mercer Effect end with the revelation that the person running the game was running it for a group that included strangers, usually at their local game store, without a session zero. And while it’s nice that those pickup introductory sessions exist, that someone who is curious about roleplaying can test it out in the back room of a comics shop then buy a rulebook on the way out the door, it’s almost always a terrible first experience.
Roleplaying is best eased into with friends. It’s a trust exercise where you need to feel comfortable spending a few hours pretending to be a gnome among people who aren’t going to make fun of you for it, with a GM who isn’t going to decide it would be fun if your character had to fight off a sexual assault, or had a magical pregnancy inflicted on them, or one of the many other nightmare scenarios that fill conversations like the Creepiest Person You Ever Gamed With topic on RPGNet.
That topic eventually reached 3,000 posts and was split into six separate subthreads if you want to understand how many gross dudes are out there. But anyone saying “You’re not as good at GMing as Matt Mercer” probably isn’t doing it because their first GM’s an absolute creep. They’re doing it because of a problem that’s even more prevalent if less fun to vent about online—a simple mismatch of expectations.
A clash between expectation and reality is inevitable, whether those expectations come from watching an actual-play show or just imagining what it’s going to be like. People who want more roleplaying being let down to discover the game they’ve joined is just another dungeon crawl is not a new phenomenon. Disappointment has been a common reaction to your first time roleplaying for decades. It was my reaction too, and all I had to build up my expectations were ads in comics and the adventures of Arthur and Samantha. Poor old blameless Matt Mercer had nothing to do with it.
