CritRoleStats 2021 Roadmap and Survey Review

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Thanks to everyone who took part in our survey! It’s a new year, and after much processing of your feedback and deciding what is feasible for us to tackle, we can finally show you what changes we’ve already made based on your input, discuss potential future projects, and address a small number of the requests we received. This is a long read, but it should give you a good idea what we’ve already changed and what we have in the works for 2021.

Implemented Updates

We’ll start with what we’ve already acted on based on your feedback.

I didn’t know that you did [cool thing you’ve done for a while]!

As we suspected when we created the survey, one of the more common statements we’ve seen regarding many of our collections is that critters didn’t know that we created or curated them in the first place. While we already are fairly public when we publish things like lore, Talks Machina, and Narrative Telephone, we’ve made a few changes to make them easier to find.

What kind of indexing and site navigation changes have you made?

First, here’s some of the navigation changes on the website we’ve made since we put out the survey, with the goal of making the content we’ve made easier to find.

Can you do [something that you’re already doing]?

Here is a list of some of the things that you’ve requested that have already been available.

Can you announce the cool stuff you do on Twitter more?

We do, we really do! Understandably, those get buried by many other tweets we put out. We announced @CRStatsNews, which will present the site news and project updates without the livetweets, and hopefully give you more opportunity to see these announcements.

Can you make the roll data easier to download, or grant API access? Downloading all 100+ episodes one at a time is tedious and I want to make something cool.

For a variety of reasons, we don’t have the bandwidth to set up and properly maintain an API service, but we can set up something a little easier. You can now find a new tab in each of the All Rolls sheets that contains every single player roll ever rolled on stream titled “All Episodes.” Any aspiring data analysts should find it easy from there to download that tab as a csv and run with it!

Vox Machina’s is obviously complete, but we’ll add to the Mighty Nein sheet as episodes air. You can expect updates to the M9 full sheet at the same time you find a new episode tab, usually by the Tuesday morning after an episode airs.

For Future Consideration

Next, we’ll address some suggested projects that we haven’t started yet, but are entertaining to fill our spare free time this year. There were a lot of requests for projects that are not so easily implemented, including a few that we’re willing to work on but will require a lot of effort to do. We also have to evaluate how we would be able to tackle them, but here’s what we have for consideration, based on expressed interest. We asked our Patrons what they’d like to see next, and we’ll try to spend our time accordingly.


Priority One: Homebrew Resource Hub

Many critters, especially DMs, requested a dedicated collection for homebrewed resources used in the main campaigns. The sentiment of requests in both the survey and from our patrons seems to be for a single dedicated location to find these things. This, we can provide.

This new page will be a nexus for all homebrewed resources used in Critical Role. Although we will list what we can on our site, this will NOT include rules or items listed in official source guides (professional courtesy), which will instead come with a citation of where you can find this information. We’re also limited by the same restrictions we use for the character sheets: if it’s not publicly expressed, we don’t know it, and we won’t bug CR for the details, and ask that you don't bug CR for those details on our behalf. 

As we began creating new charts and content, we realized that almost all of Critical Role’s homebrewed information is available somewhere. For the content we’ve already created like monster analyses and information about significant items, we’ll make sure to represent the data so you can find it. However, rather than republish someone else’s content on our own site, this hub will also feature links to already-published resources, such as the Critical Role Wiki’s pages or Matt’s subclasses on the DM’s Guild.

Features Taken at each Level

The second-most requested major project on our list is a dedicated page for each individual character’s level selections. Our Level Up article series already explores this for each member of the party, and hovering over each box in our Level Up chart will also show this information, but depending on how much everyone wants to see the mechanical progression of their favorite playable characters in a single convenient file, we will find time to work on a different presentation.

New Episode Tags

Site search has been a common concern, and searching by episode number has not yielded the results that some of you expect. We’re aware that the tagging system is somewhat hit and miss, especially if you don’t know the episode title off the top of your head. It’s been suggested that we also add tags that use an episode number, such as “C1E006” or “C2E093.” There’s over a thousand posts to go through, but we’re willing to add another tag system to our blog, if enough critters deem it worth the time. We’ve begun implementing this series of tags in recent episodes, and will begin replacing the older tags on our site as time permits. This change will only take place on our website, and not affect our current tagging system on Tumblr.

Suggested Lists

There were a LOT of interesting requests. Some may find their way in a future quick answers, some may end up in our regular running campaign stats, and some are creative but not trackable. We’ll try to address those that are in the first two categories when we can.

Question & Answer

Finally, we’ll address your feedback regarding various features on the site, from the various challenges to tracking and presenting information, how our mission statement informs how we approach our projects, and other miscellaneous issues and perspectives. Despite being a long read, we obviously can’t address every single request or response, but we’ll try our best to address what we don’t here in future interactions. Even if we don’t talk about it, there’s a chance we’re implementing it behind the scenes, or have already worked on it!

 

Lore and What We Know About

Although most people use the wiki for their lore needs (of which we strongly approve), many were not aware of our collections that break down what we know about the world of Exandria. There were also a lot of requests for better organization, which we are exploring at this time. Our goal is to not to recreate information that is already being kept elsewhere (seriously, props to the wiki), but to help highlight information, stats, and history that enhances enjoyment and appreciation of the show.

Can you update your past What We Know About articles when new information comes to light?

We do update our Compendiums with relevant links and transcripts, every week. However, it’s a LOT of work to compile the information that we have up to the relevant point, let alone extend the information for every single article we’ve ever written. We’re happy to occasionally explore the new web of information, and the transcripts will always be up to date, but the articles themselves will have to remain relevant up to the episodes for which they were published.

Can you provide links to significant moments?

We can be more exhaustive than that: our compendiums (linked on the respective campaign lore pages) collect EVERY transcript regarding characters, locations, or significant series of events. These transcripts are also labeled with and linked to the episode they air in, so you can watch it after reading it.

A couple people asked for smaller compendiums focused on specific characters or interactions, such as a single member of the Cerberus Assembly instead of including every significant moment, or focusing on the interactions between two characters instead of everything significant about one character’s backstory and development. Unfortunately, this would require predicting certain significant events, and also placing added weight on these interactions.

While we’re happy to explore significant events after they’ve happened and explore the implications and forgotten details in our What We Know About series, our compendiums will continue to exist as encyclopedias of data, leaving the sub-classification to you for any projects that spring to your mind.

Can you display an overall Exandrian Timeline?

Our calendar for the Wildemount Campaign currently highlights special events over the Mighty Nein’s history, but we are still researching options to display a timeline for significant events spanning the entirety of Exandrian history. We haven’t found software we like yet, but if we ever do, we’ll elevate this project’s priority.

More conspiracy boards! More random thoughts! More wild speculation in your lore!

It has always been very important to us at CritRoleStats to report the events and facts of Critical Role as objectively as we possibly can. We’re very wary that any speculation or personal opinions we publish in an official capacity about the show could be taken as fact, and try very hard to present only things that we objectively know are true or possible.

 

Other Shows

Can you continue setting aside weekly fun facts for Talks Machina, even if the show doesn’t use them?

We will always support Brian, Dani, and the crew behind Talks, and we’re happy to continue looking up any details that pop in their head over the show’s run time. However, as they don’t need the trivia each week anymore, we’d rather conserve our energy toward something that others can use. That said, if there happens to be a particularly fun fact that we stumble across in our regular archive duties, you can rest assured that we’ll let you know.

Can you create an archive of all the questions that have been asked on Talks Machina?
Talks Machina recently celebrated 151 episodes; congratulations to them! That also means about 300 hours of content to pore through, without the aid of transcripts. The sheer scope of listing and indexing every single question ever asked, quantifying how many questions get asked per episode, and comparing how many questions each player has received makes this nearly impossible. This one would require a colossal amount of community interest to implement, and most critters seem to prefer we spend our time focused on the main campaigns.

Can you create another color-coded table that tracks how accurate each Narrative Telephone storyteller is to each other, or how long every non-original detail lasts across stories?

This is a LOT of work, and admittedly, we’re already being fairly subjective in the details we’re focusing on as it is with the original story details. We still include the data in all of our posts about how accurate each player is and how much data they added, but this addition probably isn’t worth the time it would take to figure out how to present it.

 

Twitter

Several people seemed unaware that our livetweet articles are not actually on Twitter, or that the articles are updated and edited versions of our live tweets. You don’t even need to visit Twitter or have an account to read them; just visit our site when they’re published, no social media involved!

I’m not on Twitter!

That’s totally cool! Sorry, we should have kept that in mind in our survey questions. Our livetweets only use Twitter as a medium, so if you want to continue to stay off Twitter but still want to read the play-by-play of the shows, our next-day Livetweet articles are perfect for you.

More stats, less story! More story, fewer stats! More details, less summary! More summary, fewer details!

...So, we realize that we can’t be everything for everybody. Rounding out the feedback, we’ve found that we fill a particular community niche rather well, with others in the community filling the other requested needs.

Can you conclude each episode with the current HP of each party member?

We learned through personal experience with Team Alpha that exact numbers don’t exist in D&D. Since the best we can do are estimates to what ultimately ends up on the sheets, we’ve found our energy is better invested elsewhere. The exception to this is if we’re anticipating a major encounter in the following episode, and the party is low on resources. Then, we might put forth the effort to investigate and place our best estimates.

Can you put your tweets in threads, or use Twitter’s Moments feature?

We’ve learned that Moments cap WAY before we get to the number of tweets we use in a single night. We’ve also looked into threading our tweets; unfortunately, while order would be maintained on the main feed, it comes at the cost of visibility. Our solution to this is to visit our profile page during the episodes, and our livetweet threads the day after.

Can you use more tags on your tweets, like by episode number?

If Twitter were like Tumblr, you’d better believe that we would add as many relevant tags as we could. Since tags subtract from the character limit, we’ll stick to the lone standard tag.

Can you add timestamps to your tweets?

We’re not sure what you mean, though Twitter does share time posted without taking up character space.

Your tweets are spam and spoil the episodes.

As always, if you are on Twitter and don’t want to see our tweets, we support and encourage blocking us so that you receive the experience you wish to receive. We find accessibility to all is more important than inconvenience to a few.

 

Livetweet Articles

Can you publish your livetweet articles immediately after the episodes end?

On a very, very, very good night, after the broadcast has concluded, it takes approximately three hours hours to review and copy each tweet, reorder in reverse Twitter-chronological order, edit the content of and add context to each tweet, paste into our blog editor, edit again for formatting, readability, section titles, and final corrections, and schedule for release. This timetable increases if the episode runs over four hours, if there’s a lot of lore or RP, or if other external forces are at work. (The lone editor who works on these is fortunate to already be awake at these times.)

We have started posting them as soon as our editor has them ready to publish, by request. We had been posting the article on a schedule, 12 hours after the original broadcast began, though European and East Coast critters seem to prefer to have it as soon as it’s ready instead. In our fastest time, we were able to publish an hour into the first rebroadcast. While we’re proud we were able to publish as soon as we did, we can confirm that having them available before the rebroadcast begins is impossible. This is our best case scenario; there have been multiple times when complications have allowed us barely enough time to complete edits for our previous scheduled posting time.

Can you add timestamps to your livetweet articles?

Since we publish our articles shortly after the episodes first air on Twitch, the Youtube timestamps are kind of hard to come by. Weighing the time it would take to add Youtube timestamps to all previous articles versus the number of people interested in this makes this prohibitive.

Instead of tweets, can you write a summary of all major events in the episode?

That’s a separate project from livetweets, the latter which is already written in an editable form by the time the episode ends. Several sources, including both the wiki and Dani’s Critical Recap, usually provide some form of episode summary, so we’ll let them continue to do what they do best as we focus on what we do best.

Are you planning on updating your archive of livetweets for all of Campaign 1?

At the bottom of our Major Project List, we offered to revisit Campaign 1 via our Livetweet articles. We are pleased to present episode C1E076 to the end of Vox Machina’s run, available in livetweet form for your reading pleasure. However, the general consensus from both the survey and our patrons seems to indicate very little interest in any further episodes. Pairing this community disinterest with the effort it would take to complete the remaining episodes from scratch (yes, a complete do-over), we likely won’t invest further energy into Campaign 1. For the remaining one-shots we’ve tweetcasted since CR became their own entity, we’ll get to them as time permits, especially if they are ever rebroadcast.

 

Character Stats

Our character sheets are by far our most visited pages, which is fair to expect from a site called CritRoleStats. From Campaign 1, our sheets started out as a fun puzzle where we’d deduce what skills and abilities each character had as circumstances would demonstrate. In campaign 2, this pattern continues, with us taking the time to update when we have the opportunity to take out our calculators and conspiracy boards. Our character sheets are the results of our team’s independent research and verification. As long as we remain third party to Critical Role, under no circumstances will we disturb the cast or crew for a direct look at their official characters sheets. We encourage everyone else to do the same.

Why do you let the sheets fall out of date with the episodes, rather than update them immediately when new information comes to light?

More often than not, we can’t afford to jump to conclusions, and we update when we have the time to confirm that our new changes are correct. We’ll also try to update the sheets to how we suspect the players are using them; RAW changes, such as subrace stats, may not come into play for several episodes at a time. Occasionally, things will escape our notice, or we’ll make a note to update something but have our focus turned on other matters. Unless an update has a significant impact on the character’s build and is expected to dramatically change the way they play, we’ll usually wait to make adjustments to a level sheet at the same time we create the next level’s sheet. This wait is especially true for interchangeable attributes like items or unconfirmed information like spell lists or feats.

Can you create an archive of every item they’ve ever attuned to by episode, instead of the regularly updated Attuned Item page?

Items often change hands mid-episode (sometimes several times), attuned items change partners, and often characters don’t tell us what items they have attuned for several episodes at a time. We’ll continue to keep what items are currently attuned to the best of our ability as of the end of each episode, but a dynamic list for every episode is overly complicated, especially since it would require a full-series review.

Can you make a page that conveniently shows party inventory and currency per person?

No, and we can tell you why: the players themselves have all the items in front of them and still aren’t sure what they have. Sometimes they don’t write it down, and the numbers change; welcome to D&D. We can do our best with our Money, Goods, and Services Exchanged tables and guess what has ended up where, but we assure you, it is an impossible task to nail these down accurately in a single contained file each week, every week.

Can you do a format other than PDFs for your character sheets, or a host them on a site other than Dropbox?

We’ve received several alternative requests over the years, and almost no two the same. Dropbox with the official WotC character sheet PDFs is currently the easiest for us to access and maintain as a team.

 

General

Um… What’s the difference between the survey questions “Are things in general easy to find?” and “Generally, are things easy to find?”

None. Forgot to take out the second question before the survey was published. Whoops.

Have you considered moving your work to Reddit, Twitch chat, or another medium?

In the same vein that people talk about their unfamiliarity with Twitter and Tumblr, we feel equally out of our depth on those platforms. We have nothing but the highest respect for the moderators there, but those particular mediums aren’t for us, and we’re spread thin enough where we are as it is.

Have you considered collaborations with other major community members?

We haven’t stumbled across many projects that cross crafts, but should time permit and opportunities present themselves, we would love to work with other notable critter chroniclers.

Please improve the search bar!

Unfortunately, this is more or less out of our hands. We use a built-in search tool from our website provider, so we can’t do much to improve things there. We’ve done our best to tag episodes with relevant titles, but… sometimes “site:critrolestats.com [query]” from your preferred search engine might be a better tool than our built-in option.

Can you make massive amounts of data easier to read on mobile?

We’ll be honest: we don’t know of an optimal mobile form for presenting many rows and columns of data. We have made changes over the years to make general site navigation and article reading easier, but if you are trying to access a table like our Google Sheets, you’re going to have a much better time fitting it all on your screen on a desktop than on your phone. Considering also that spreadsheets are the most compact way of holding as much data as we collect, converting all of it to text to fit on pages on our website is also not feasible.

Why did you ask if you can’t do anything different anyway?

We have made a lot of changes, and we are definitely listening! Collecting data is a lot of work, and understandably, we use it and value it differently than many other critters do. Ideally, we’d like to create content most people value. This survey was intended to both spotlight the things we have done that don’t receive a lot of attention, as well as determine what are some things that the community values that we may have been too hyper focused on other tasks to notice.

Thank you for your work!

Thank YOU! We’ve focused mainly on suggestions we received here, but it’s easy to lose focus on all the wonderful people who appreciate the work we have done and help make this community what it is. We will continue to work with the tools we have, and we thank all of you for your support over the last five years as we’ve found our place to serve you in this wonderful community!