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Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.
Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.
That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.
Yes, that makes sense to me - there's an audience of people who like the idea of D&D more than they like D&D itself, and by 'idea of D&D' what I mean is a bunch of colourful zany characters quipping and having lighthearted adventures in a fantasy world.
One of the things I find most striking about D&D fans today is the level of, well, historical amnesia many of them seem to have? In theory one of the selling points of D&D 5e was the idea of legacy. The thing that makes D&D different and special, compared to competitor fantasy RPGs, is its history. D&D has been going since the 70s and it has a tremendous history to draw on. 5e core was definitely trying to evoke a lot of that history.
But if I look at talk around D&D today, I am regularly shocked by ignorance of that history. I don't even mean things like the way that Gygax-era D&D was closer to a wargame, had very little characterisation, and would have four GMs and twenty players around the same table all playing in real time, but even quite broad things in living memory. I recently watched Noah Gervais' take on Diablo and something that shocked me, in the section on the first game, is the way he blandly asserts, "Today the focus of something like D&D is much more about the imaginative aspects, the performative aspects. 90s D&D, AD&D, hewed closer to its name - dungeon-crawling, monster-hunting, complicated rules to facilitate each."
And that's not only incorrect, it's the exact opposite of correct. AD&D2e is the edition that games like Baldur's Gate were trying to evoke. It was the era when story was absolute king, when the game was played via these extremely story-heavy railroaded modules, where every campaign setting under the sun was getting incredibly detailed write-ups, and recurring characters were at their most popular. It's the era of the Drizzt craze, when approximately a million Dragonlance novels were published (based on published adventure modules from the 80s!), and every player had their own good-hearted rebel drow or half-elf archer with a troubled past. The story and setting and continuity got so elaborate that when 3rd edition came around in the early 2000s, it was marketed as a back-to-basics game, dropping all the increasingly-inaccessible storytelling in favour of a return to just kicking down doors and killing monsters. Late 80s and 90s AD&D is the most story-obsessed D&D has ever been.
But this is something that you only know, it seems, if you were around and played D&D in the 90s. I feel like now we have a crop of players who believe that story only started with 5e or with those streamed gameplay sessions, and who mentally write off everything before it as a dark age of decontextualised dungeon-crawling.
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