best podcast narrative, hands down.

Critical Role is, in many ways, the gold standard of narrative actual plays. Everybody embodies their characters so well, and the story is full of twists and turns, but quiet moments of contemplation and drama. Really, the only fault of the podcast is that it doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from the livestream. Tighter editing to remove dead space, waffling, and references to visuals that are no longer present could probably bring these episodes down to a more manageable hour or two, instead of the three-to-four hour behemoths they currently are. If you want to listen, you really need to commit to listening, currently, and that's just not possible for many.

Theres nothing wrong with the content of Critical Role itself, but recently they have started to insert multiple podcast only ad breaks randomly in the content of the episode, sometimes between sentences that should really not be split by up to 60 seconds of ads for things I will never use (like the unaccredited "therapists" from better help) There is a clearly defined break in the middle of the show where they used to play these ads, and now its just a small bumper about their own products, this is on tip of the sponsored ad reads at the very start of the show from the livestream itself. Critical Role makes more money than God from Teitch revenue alone, I severely doubt they need the extra trickle of money from injecting ads into the middle of the podcast that dont exist in the source material, and ill find a different way to listen or just stop listening entirely if it doesn't get better, or gets worse as these things tend to over time.