For over 20 years, I've played Dungeons & Dragons with the same core group of people. Throughout the years, we used items like army men, coins, and even a Blob action figure from X-Men: The Animated Series as our tokens on the battlefield. Luckily, as D&D became more and more popular, a mountain of high-quality miniatures have become available to the public.

And within that mountain of miniatures, there's a smaller market of unpainted minis for people who really enjoy painting. In my years of tabletop gaming, painting minis was never something I did nor something I thought about doing. When it comes to art, I am, for lack of a better word, crappy. I don't have a natural talent for it, and I get frustrated because of it.

So when WizKids sent me a bunch of Critical Role unpainted figures, I figured "what better time than now to see what this is all about?" What I thought was going to be a failure of hilarious proportions turned out to be one of the most serene and tranquil times I've felt during the pandemic. That's not hyperbole.