In Dungeons and Dragons (as well as other tabletop roleplaying games), the Matthew Mercer Effect is the phenomenon of inexperienced gamers expecting professional acting and writing skills from their Game Master, or/and expecting their game campaign to adhere to the plot beats and homebrew rules system depicted in the YouTube web series Critical Role, hosted by professional voice actor Matthew Mercer.
In Critical Role, every player is a professional entertainer with a prolific history in voice acting, and many of them are also improv comedians, proficient at coming up with witty quips off-the-cuff, and skilled at bringing their characters to life through body language and vocal quirks. Mercer himself is a veritable chameleon, characterising dozens of enemies, NPCs, and ally characters with such extreme differentiation that they are instantly recognisable by vocal inflections alone.
Mercer additionally puts the kind of work into developing his campaign plots which one would expect from someone doing it as a full-time job, with no conflicting other duties, and supported by an entire writing and production team and audience focus groups who can screen-test a story idea before it is inflicted on the party of players. These conditions are not typical of amateur tabletop gamers, who are generally just trying to have a nice time with a few friends every couple weeks, while navigating the party's conflicting work schedules and outside obligations.
While Critical Role has brought on a massive increased interest in tabletop roleplay among generations who previously had not had the pleasure of experiencing it, the Matt Mercer Effect has also led to detrimental mismatches in expectations about how gameplay will transpire and how much of a GM's time will be committed to polishing a story before bringing it to the table. Sword and sorcery narratives are only a small slice of the available genres and stories for tabletop, and while D&D is certainly the best-known and most popular tabletop system, it is far from the only preferred system among experienced gamers. In light of some ethically dubious actions by Wizards of the Coast, pertaining to the copyright surrounding D&D and player-generated intellectual property, many experienced tabletop gamers resent the extreme interest in D&D, dwarfing new player investment in other systems not owned by WOTC, because it can make it prohibitively difficult to find players willing to join a Pathfinder or Call of Cthulhu campaign: the overwhelming abundance of brand new players want to play not only D&D, but specifically a version of D&D based around Mercer's "Exandria" campaign setting, featuring Mercer's own original characters and story beats.
Tabletop, as any pastime, will always have its toxic and entitled participants bringing down the quality of the experience for others, and the Matt Mercer Effect is merely the newest excuse to be a bit wretched toward one's friends. As with any newfangled thing in tabletop, the blessing is mixed, but this noder regards it overall as a positive change. One extremely beneficial outcome of the Matt Mercer Effect is the increased interest in spectating tabletop games, not as a player, but as part of a peanut gallery audience making background commentary or just passively enjoying the show. This aspect of tabletop is a fairly new innovation in the tabletop fandom, and makes tabletop far more accessible a pastime for a diverse range of people who otherwise would not be able to participate: those whose schedules are too unpredictable to reliably attend sessions (yet who can watch a recorded session after the event), those with various social and physical disabilities that would impair more direct participation, and those who simply enjoy being told a story more than they enjoy co-authoring one in realtime. Mercer's performances have normalised spectators as a valid category of participants in tabletop, opening the community to those who - out of stage fright, inconvenience, or because of other personal obstacles - would otherwise be excluded. Greater inclusivity is widely regarded as a desirable outcome among tabletop gamers, many of whom can remember a time when geekdom and nerdery were maligned rather than ubiquitously embraced, and being known to one's peers as a tabletop gamer could be socially ruinous. Anything which expands the accessibility, enthusiasm, and creativity of tabletop participation is to be encouraged.
Iron Noder 2023, 3/30