In March 2019, a group of voice actors who play D&D on camera every week asked their viewers for $750,000 to make an animated special. 88,887 people pledged $11,385,449 in 45 days [1]. That is Critical Role, and it is the ceiling. Your stream starts at the floor: three friends, one webcam, and a DM who talks too close to the mic.
This guide gets you from the floor to a stream people can actually watch: the settings the platforms themselves recommend, what the rules let you charge for, and how to put the dice on screen.
Why bother?
- An archive. Your campaign's best night exists forever, not just in four people's memories, one of which is wrong.
- A deadline. Nothing gets four adults to the table on time like a start time printed on a channel page.
- Strangers. Somewhere, a person who has never played is learning the game by watching yours.
- A little money, eventually, within limits covered below.
Audio first, then everything else
Viewers forgive a soft picture. They do not forgive audio they must strain to hear, and there is evidence for that. Newman and Schwarz played people identical conference talks and radio interviews, some in good audio quality and some in poor. Same words, same speaker. Listeners rated the research and the researcher lower when the sound was bad [2]. Your DM's cliffhanger gets the same treatment.
What that means in practice:
- One microphone per person if you are all at one table. One mic in the middle picks up the loudest player, the fridge and the dice tray.
- Headphones for everyone if you play remotely, or the call feeds back into itself.
- A noise gate on each mic in your streaming software, so a mic stays silent until its owner speaks.
- The DM a touch louder than the players. The narration is what holds the stream together.
Twitch's own audio recommendation is AAC at 96 kbps, maximum 160 kbps [3]. Speech does not need more.
The settings, from the platforms themselves
Both platforms publish what they want. Use these, not a forum post from 2017.
Twitch (constant bitrate, 2-second keyframes) [3]:
| Resolution | Frame rate | Video bitrate |
|---|---|---|
| 1920x1080 | 60 | 6,000 kbps |
| 1920x1080 | 30 | 4,500 kbps |
| 1280x720 | 60 | 4,500 kbps |
| 1280x720 | 30 | 3,000 kbps |
YouTube (H.264) recommends 10 Mbps for 1080p at 30 fps, 12 Mbps for 1080p at 60 fps, and 4 Mbps for 720p at 30 fps [4].
D&D is people talking around a table. It does not need 60 frames per second. 1080p at 30 is plenty, and 720p at 30 is fine if your upload is slow. Twitch's own guidance: a stable stream beats a sharper one that drops frames [3].
How much data is a session?
The backup plan everyone suggests is a phone hotspot. Before you rely on it, here is what a stream uses (video bitrate plus 96 kbps audio; 128 kbps at YouTube's rate):
| Video bitrate | Per hour | 4-hour session |
|---|---|---|
| 3,000 kbps | 1.4 GB | 5.6 GB |
| 4,500 kbps | 2.1 GB | 8.3 GB |
| 6,000 kbps | 2.7 GB | 11.0 GB |
| 10,000 kbps | 4.6 GB | 18.2 GB |
If your hotspot plan is 10 GB, drop to 720p the moment you switch to it. Also: Twitch caps a single broadcast at 48 hours [3]. We checked, in case your table has that kind of session.
Cameras and lighting
- One overhead camera on the map and dice is worth more than one per player. Viewers want to see the dragon mini, not your ceiling fan.
- A face camera per player is the upgrade, not the start. Players who are shy on camera can start with audio only.
- Light from the front, soft, one colour temperature. A lamp behind a player turns them into a silhouette in witness protection.
Software
OBS Studio is free and open source [5]. Build a few scenes: "Starting soon", "Table", "Combat" (map large, faces small) and "Break". Switching scenes is how a one-person production crew looks like a studio.
Putting the dice on screen
Viewers love a roll they can see. Physical dice under the overhead camera work, until someone rolls behind the DM screen, or the die spins under the snacks.
Digital dice from this site, in three steps:
- Open a share. Press the share button (the two people) at the top of the roller and send the link to your players. Up to ten people, nine players and the DM, roll into one log, and everyone sees the same results. Players roll from their phones; no dice on anyone's desk.
- Put the share in OBS. An OBS Browser Source is, in OBS's own words, a web browser inside OBS [5]. Add one, paste the share link as its URL, and size it to your layout (the default is 800 by 600 [5]). It joins the share like any other guest, so it takes one of the ten places. The page draws its own background, so give it a corner of the layout or crop it.
- Turn on the 3D dice. With the d20 toggle in the roller's header on, each roll lands in 3D on every screen at once, with a line at the top saying whose roll it was. On stream, the barbarian's natural 1 is now public record.
The rolls stay in the log after a reload, so "what did you roll?" still has an answer at the recap.
A chat command such as !dice that posts the roller's link lets viewers roll along at home.
Layout
Two layouts cover most nights:
| Layout | Big on screen | Small on screen | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theatre of the mind | Player faces | Party names, session title | Roleplay-heavy nights |
| Tactical | Overhead map or virtual tabletop | Faces, initiative order, dice | Combat nights |
Keep one corner for your schedule. The viewer who wanders in halfway through wants one thing: when you are on next.
Keeping viewers
- The same time every week. A schedule is the cheapest promotion there is.
- A 60-second recap at the start of each session, for everyone who missed last week (including your players).
- Let chat vote on things that do not matter: the name of the barkeep, which of two doors, what the goblin is wearing. Never on what happens to a player's character.
- A Discord server, so the conversation lives between sessions.
Safety, on camera and off
A stream adds an audience your players did not meet at session zero. Agree before you go live what stays off the table, and what happens mid-session if someone is uncomfortable. The TTRPG Safety Toolkit, co-curated by Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk, is a free collection of tools used before, during and after a game [6]. Write your chat rules down and give a moderator the power to enforce them.
Music and copyright
Background music is the easiest way to lose a stream. On Twitch, a copyright notification you do not dispute earns a strike, and three strikes means Twitch terminates the account [7]. Use music you hold a licence to stream, or none. The same goes for art: your own, licensed, or not on screen.
Money, and what the D&D rules allow
Twitch Affiliate (subscriptions, Bits, ads) needs four things: 25 followers, 4 hours streamed, 4 different days streamed, and an average of 3 concurrent viewers on 4 different days [8].
Wizards of the Coast's Fan Content Policy covers D&D streams, and it draws one clear line. You may cover costs with sponsorships, ad revenue and donations, including Patreon and Twitch or YouTube ad revenue. You may not require payment, subscriptions or sign-ups to access your fan content [9]. A tip jar is fine. A paywalled episode is not. Sponsors must be clearly identified and not be a competitor of Wizards [9].
Before your first stream
- Every mic tested in a private recording, played back on headphones
- Bitrate set from the tables above, and your upload speed tested
- Scenes built: starting soon, table, combat, break
- Dice on screen: overhead camera, or the roller as a browser source
- Safety tools agreed; chat rules written; one moderator
- Music you are licensed to use, or silence
Start simple. Your first stream will have a mic that nobody unmuted. So did everyone's.
Table Talk
James: Best part of streaming? The whole world gets to see my natural 1s.
Rohan: Nobody sees anything if they can't hear you. Audio first.
James: Come on. Sixty frames a second. Cinema dragon.
Rohan: It's people talking round a table. 1080p at 30. Twitch says a stable stream beats a sharp one that drops frames.
James: And if the internet dies, I'll run it off my phone.
Rohan: Four hours at 6,000 kbps is eleven gigabytes. Check your plan first.
James: Fine. My tip: one mic each, and a noise gate so the fridge stays off air.
Rohan: Mine: no music you can't license. Three strikes and Twitch terminates the account.
James: Cheerful.
Rohan: Accurate.
References
- Critical Role. (2019). Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina Animated Special [Kickstarter campaign, 5 March to 19 April 2019]. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/criticalrole/critical-role-the-legend-of-vox-machina-animated-s
- Newman, E. J., & Schwarz, N. (2018). Good sound, good research: How audio quality influences perceptions of the research and researcher. Science Communication, 40(2), 246–257. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547018759345
- Twitch. (n.d.). Broadcasting Guidelines. Twitch Help. https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/broadcasting-guidelines
- YouTube. (n.d.). Choose live encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions. YouTube Help. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702
- OBS Project. (n.d.). OBS Studio [home page] and Browser Source [Knowledge Base]. https://obsproject.com/; https://obsproject.com/kb/browser-source
- Shaw, K., & Bryant-Monk, L. (n.d.). TTRPG Safety Toolkit. https://ttrpgsafetytoolkit.com/
- Twitch. (n.d.). DMCA Guidelines. Twitch Legal. https://legal.twitch.com/en/legal/dmca-guidelines/
- Twitch. (n.d.). Joining the Affiliate Program. Twitch Help. https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/joining-the-affiliate-program
- Wizards of the Coast. (2017). Fan Content Policy (last updated 15 November 2017). https://company.wizards.com/en/legal/fancontentpolicy
