[4] The group's first campaign began two years prior to the start of the series as a one-off, simplified Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition game for Liam O'Brien's birthday.

[10][12] In order to streamline gameplay for the show, the game's characters were converted from Pathfinder to Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition before the web series began airing on March 12, 2015.

[26] In June 2018, Critical Role Productions launched its own Twitch and YouTube channels, with cast member Marisha Ray announced as the creative director of the franchise.

Its LinkedIn page lists employees in roles including marketing, business development, photography, editing, and even one person responsible for keeping track of the lore, or details in its fantasy world".

[53][54][55] Cheryl Teh of Business Insider stated that "Beacon essentially gives people what they get with a Twitch subscription — instant access to VODs of their livestreams, but with some additional perks".

[11] Each episode usually runs for three to five (in some cases six) hours and is streamed live on Critical Role's Twitch and YouTube channels on almost every Thursday, with possible breaks from the show being announced at least one week prior to the broadcast.

[65][66][67] Academic Jan Švelch commented that "Riegel's comedic approach to sponsorship announcements, which often involves only loosely related skits, has become a running gag of Critical Role".

[65] Additionally, a number of Critical Role's streams have also served as a donation drive to support nonprofit organizations such as St Jude, 826LA, Extra Life, and Doctors Without Borders.

The set, nicknamed "Felicia's Bedroom", had numerous issues including poor audio, cameras which blocked the player's eyelines and long distances between the tables.

[75][76][31] The Alpha version featured a number of digital "enhancements" including "special real-time dynamic character sheets, damage and heal animations, and visualizations.

The D&D Beyond sponsorship, starting with the premiere of Campaign Two, led to an immediate impact "in the physical space of the gaming table" as the players "now had tablet computers in front of them, allowing them to access their digital character sheets".

It follows the exploits of an adventuring party known as Vox Machina, previously known as the Super High-Intensity Team (or S.H.I.T.s), a rag-tag group of mercenaries originally formed in the swamp town of Stilben.

[112] Episode 36, titled Winter's Crest in Whitestone, features a summary of the pre-series history,[113] with artwork created by Wendy Sullivan Green and voice-overs provided by the cast.

[115] The show begins in medias res with the characters regrouping in the city of Emon after approximately six months apart and the streamed campaign picks up where the cast's original home game left off.

[77] In 2019, over a year after the first campaign ended, Critical Role produced three canonical one-shot games that feature Vox Machina in the time frame after Vecna's banishment.

This one-shot takes place a year after the events of The Search for Grog/Bob, as Percy and Vex renew their wedding vows on a beach in Marquet, with all of their friends and family present—as well as a few uninvited "guests".

The Mighty Nein campaign is set about 20 years after Vox Machina's final battle against Vecna and takes place in a time where tensions between two of Wildemount's mightiest nations are very high.

[135][136][137] The cast reprised their roles again for an episode titled The Mighty Nein Reunion: Echoes of the Solstice, which was recorded live at the OVO Arena Wembley on the October 25, 2023 and streamed over Twitch and YouTube the following night.

"[182] Noelle Warner of CBR commented on how the show has become more polished since the first campaign with the cast spending "far less time on activities in-game that viewers might consider dull to watch" and instead focused "on creating compelling narrative moments between Matt Mercer's carefully crafted encounters".

Furthermore, Critical Role's aspirational status among role-playing communities, exemplified by the so-called Mercer effect, is not limited to the cast's acting and storytelling skills, but arguably extends to the lavish presentation of its gaming table with artisan-made accessories and detailed battle dioramas. [...]

Critical Role makes full use of this new mediatized reality of tabletop role-playing and its underlying economic logics, providing both spectator entertainment and extensive physical merchandising".

The progression of Critical Role from a home tabletop game, to live broadcast, to mass-media partnered animated series, to in-canon campaign guide, exemplifies the prolific impact that convergence culture has had on D&D's modern resurgence and popularity".

[18][73][196] Emily Duncan of Tor.com stated that the "popular consensus" is to start Critical Role's first campaign at episode 24 after Acaba's departure as "everyone at the table is more comfortable and the energy of the group is more vibrant after the removal of a player who caused some tension within the first two arcs".

[19] Emily Friedman, in the book Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop RPGs and Fandom (2021), highlighted that "while the public statements by all were civil and warm, fan speculation was so rampant that the Critical Role Reddit page [...] has an entire FAQ section on what can and cannot be discussed in relation to Acaba and his character Tiberius Stormwind [...].

[196] The FAQ of The Legend of Vox Machina Kickstarter states that Tiberius would not appear in the show; Jones wrote, "while there are many possible reasons for this exclusion, the result is the same: the ultimate distortion of the narrative of Critical Role".

[197][198] However, following a strong negative fan response to the sponsor, the Critical Role team chose to take down the VOD,[197][198][196] and announced via Twitter that they had donated their sponsorship profits from the one-shot to the Farm Worker Justice organization.

[198] Jones commented that decision to remove the Feast of Legends episode was "presumably" made by the show's "development team for purposes of branding and controlling the criticism circulating about the failed experiment".

It features Brennan Lee Mulligan as the Dungeon Master and stars Iyengar, Ray, Riegel, Willingham as players along with newcomers Lou Wilson and Luis Carazo.

It will feature Critical Role cast members Mercer and O'Brien as players along with newcomers Jasmine Don, Alex Ward, and Celia Rose Gooding.

In late November 2015, Geek & Sundry's Twitch channel held a special Doctors Without Borders fundraiser, with nearly half of the $10,000 goal being raised during the four-hour Critical Role broadcast.