Regardless of what strain of geek you bleed, odds are Matthew Mercer and Marisha Ray share some of your DNA.







Mercer has voiced Leon in “Resident Evil,” Law in “One Piece,” Levi in “Attack on Titan,” and many other characters whose names don't start with L, in addition to work on and behind the camera. Among her varied projects, Ray hosts “Super Power Beat Down,” has protected Gotham as Stephanie Brown-era Batgirl and voiced Margaret in “Persona.”







They have worked together on multiple projects including “School of Thrones,” “PROXY: A Slender Man Story,” and most notably, “Critical Role,” where a group of voice actors play through a massive Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with Mercer serving as Dungeon Master and Ray is Keyleth, the half-elf druid.







The Swerve Magazine had the opportunity to speak with the pop culture power couple at Tekko.







The Swerve Magazine: I've heard you both talk about being hesitant when you were approached about “Critical Role.” What were your concerns about making the series?







Matthew Mercer: One of the main ones for a lot of D&D games and role playing games, especially when you've been doing it for a while and you've established these deep connections and inside jokes, is to broaden that into the world, you're afraid that might change the dynamic and how you play. And you're afraid that if that changes, it's not going to be as fun, it's not going to be as important to you. Plus, whenever you take anything that's unproven or very genre-specific and put it on the internet in front of a lot of people, it's the internet firing squad. You're ready for them to set fire to something you love, so there was that worry, too.









So there were our worries about that, our worries about how the internet would receive it, and also making sure the format was right for what we were doing.





Marisha Ray: We didn't want it to change at all. We really wanted to keep it pretty much our good old classic game that we'd been playing for the past two years. That was a very strong kind of sticking point for us was to keep it raw.







MM: We didn't want to have to pre-film it and edit it down, and make it all nice. We were just like, “Put cameras in there and let us play, then we'll agree to it.”







SM: As Dungeon Master, what do you enjoy, and how much time do you put into working through this whole craft?







MM: I put at least as many hours weekly into each session as what we play. So anywhere from four to six hours of preparation time between preparing the actual story, the encounter balance, preparing for things that might or might not happen and adjusting long-term things that might occur based on the actions of the previous sessions.







What I really enjoy about it is creating this web that the players then get to pull and pluck and play with. It's like building this sandbox that you're really proud of and then having all the kids come in and play in it. You just can't help but get joy out of seeing their joy, and seeing their faces light up when crazy things happen and they succeed at something amazingly or fail at something amazingly. It's the gift of letting them play that fulfills me.







SM: Did you guys ever expect the reaction you would get to this? Marisha, I look at your twitter feed, and it's just full of fan art.







MR: Definitely not. We were all convinced that no one was going to want to watch a bunch of people sitting around a table playing D&D for 3+ hours. We were like, “This is going to be so boring. No one's going to care,” and we had a sort of pact that if after six weeks, we weren't enjoying it if the internet was getting too nasty, we would go back to playing in our house, and call it a fun little experiment. As you can see, that didn't happen.







It's become something none of us ever expected, and it's still becoming something none of us ever anticipated, so we're just holding on and seeing where it goes.







SM: With it getting so big, does that put additional pressure on you?







MM: It can, but I try to not let it. That's the fight. Because yeah, you have a lot of people who are watching, many who know the rules better than I do. Many who have different opinions about how things might have gone, and that's part of the fun of it, is people having their own interpretations and their own discussions and their debates, and that's totally awesome. And there a little part of you, that you can't help but think, “Oh man, I wish I could do this better, so that people would complain less.” or “People want to see this thing, should I do that” and you have to cast that out of your mind, and say, “No. The core of this show is that I am making a game for myself and my players.” I don't want to ever change.







You hear all the voices, and you do your best to shut them out. The fact that somebody took the time to reach out and be like, “Actually, the rule is when this happens, the grapple check should be a disadvantage.” At first, you're like, “Oh man, it's my game!” but then you think, that person was so invested in your show to write you and point that out and help you out. You have to take the moment to appreciate it, and then push it away and not let it affect how you run your game.







MR: As a player, you often get, “Hey, don't you know that this spell can do this, so you should use this spell right now,” and I'm like, “Let me do me. You do you.” Like he said, you have to take it because they are so invested, and ultimately it's a compliment.







SM: Shifting a bit, with “Super Power Beat Down,” as the fights get bigger and bigger, how long does that take to film one of those?







MR: A while. There's a reason why they only put them out once a month or so. What people need to understand about web production in general, is that it's not like we're dealing with the resources or team of a multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster. It's generally like four people cranking this out, and with “Super Power Beat Down,” we have an amazing VFX artist based out of the Czech Republic, Nikolay (Zamkovoy), and he's great. That's the other thing with the web, is that you start to go global with the people who will start working on your projects.







Even with Critical Role, half of our official artists are in different countries. “Super Power Beat Down” it's still just a labor of love at this point, but so much goes into them and it's a tiny crew. So when anyone's on the internet like, “Mmwaah, why's it not up yet?” I'm like, “Hey! Hey, you will enjoy your free content when it gets here!”







SM: With “Muzzled,” how did that come about?







MM: My creative partner on a number of projects, Zach Grafton, and I did a webseries back in 2009 called “There Will Be Brawl,” which is a live-action Nintendo parody, and then we did “School of Thrones,” which is like “Game of Thrones” in a John Hughes 80s high school film.







We're both fans of musicals, I come from a musical theater background, and he as a writer enjoys musicals. He had this inspiration to write this story. He came to me with the idea of “Muzzled,” and we began to develop it. We're about to do a Kickstarter for it, even a couple of years before the Kickstarter went live, and a friend of ours who's a production guy is like, “Wait, don't put it on Kickstarter yet, I want to sell this project.” We're like, “OK, we guess. We don't know what we're doing.” After a year of him trying to sell this project for way too much money, trying to sell it to Universal and other companies, we got the rights back to it and said we're going to go to the community that we know and launched the Kickstarter.







We assembled a great cast of YouTube talent, and people we have worked with previously. Ashly Burch did a phenomenal job. The community rose up and helped us get those three episodes produced, and we got to tell the story we wanted to tell. Sean Becker, the director, did an amazing job. I had to step back from the directorial role because things were blowing up in other avenues, and I knew the project would suffer if I directed it in addition to all the other chaos in my life.







SM: You have both used Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to fund certain projects. What do you think of the impact of those platforms have had on entertainment productions?







MM: It has its missteps. There are many people who have abused the system, many people who have gone into it no understanding the scope of what they were trying to undertake, and those little blemishes are an issue to get over. Largely, I think it is a way to bypass an old and dying production system where content creators and creatives have to go through the business rigmarole to have anything produced and reach the audience, and in many cases have the creative vision diluted or changed so drastically by committee by the time it sees the consumer, it's nowhere close to what the original vision was.







Now we have the creative take it straight to the audience, and then, conversely, have the audience and the consumer have a direct, not just say, but direct involvement in what they want produced out there and cut out that middleman. It's building a closer bond between the creator and the consumer in this wonderful collaborative way. It's still in its baby steps, I believe, and it's finding its way, but it's helping build this atmosphere and social awareness that if I like something, I can give money to it and help make it happen.







MR: The internet, in general, has really opened up media to whatever you want can be provided. Whatever you're looking for, you can find it. You're not just beholden to what's on prime time television. If you want a webseries about World of Warcraft, it's there for you; it exists now. With things like Kickstarter and Patreon, it's this great new era of the consumer being able to pay for exactly the content that they are wanting and looking for and they can find it.







MM: And support the people who inspire them, and that they want to see do well. It's one thing to see somebody and say, “I hope that person succeeds in their career” and cross your fingers, it's another to say, “I want that person to succeed. I'm going to give them $10 a month to show my appreciation for what they do.” Now that artists has a better chance of making a living and spend their time creating what it is that they do that inspires you. I think that's really, really cool. I give to many different Patreons of people who inspire me.







SM: Given that you've acted, written, directed and produced, you've made the sausage at every step of the way. Does that affect how you consume other entertainment?







MR: For better or for worse, yeah. We have a hard time now going to movies or watching other shows without being like, “Well, I mean, if I was producing this, here's my opinion. Which is worth exactly what it is, which is nothing.”







MM: Or conversely, looking at a really, really well-shot action scene, instead of going, “wow,” going, “I bet they used this sequence and used this shot, and composited that shot over the stuntman, but you couldn't tell because...” So once you get into the technical bones of it, you do tend to have a different look at it.







MR: You can hear ADR lines, now. “Oh, Scarlett Johansson said that in a booth. That was ADRed, I can tell.”







MM: Or voice-matched. She couldn't make it in that day, and somebody did a good impression.







I'm making a conscious effort to try and step away from that. I'm getting better at stepping out of my adult constructive mind and returning to my 8-year-old self, and just going “wow.” It's a process.







MR: I think it's worse as a storyteller because you start deconstructing story aspects, and you have a hard time being like, “Is this the gun in the third act? Is this going to happen here?” You can have a hard time releasing sometimes, so you be conscious about just enjoying the ride.





















