After hundreds of hours, there have been a lot of inside jokes on Critical Role. Here's what you need to know before you catch up.

After hundreds of hours of Critical Role campaigns, it isn't always easy to understand what the cast is joking about at any given moment. Sometimes, the cast jokes about a suffering weasel, a goldfish leaping off of a cliff, or a pigeon come to save the day with careful words of metagaming, and newer fans are left confused and defeated.

Still, some of the inside jokes are clever and incredibly funny. Though long-time fans will easily be able to understand them, newer fans also deserve a lifeline sometimes to help them keep up. And, given how many great running jokes there have been, it can get difficult.

At the start of every nearly Critical Role episode, Matt Mercer opens the show by welcoming fans to a show about nerdy voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons. Still, it's hard not to notice that Mercer is almost always laughing as he says it. The reason for that is simple: Those same voice actors scream funny lines just before Mercer kicks off the episode.

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As a joke meant more for the cast than the fans, it sets the tone early on with the same laughter and joy that most DnD fans experience around the table. It also helps to show viewers just how great an actor is, as Mercer sometimes manages to keep a straight face through it all.

A play on the song "Breaking The Law" by Judas Priest, after encountering a band of the typical DnD villains, the gnolls, the cast started regularly repeating the phrase "regular gnoll, regular gnoll" over and over again. While one member of the Mighty Nein often started it, the others would immediately join in.

It isn't the first song that the Critical Role gang parodied, and it certainly won't be the last. After all, when Scanlan was a part of the main party for an entire campaign, song parodies were certainly par for the course.

There was certainly rock and paper in the fantasy world of Exandria, but there weren't really scissors. That's why, when the cast needed to play rock, paper, scissors, they instead developed the idea of a renowned Exandrian game that spanned across every culture in the world: Boulder, Parchment, Shears.

The game has created some amazing moments, like each time the gang attempts a three-way game of Boulder, Parchment, Shears and ends up tying. Once, they managed to tie twice in a row, leaving half the cast desperately gasping for air and going to break after only a single hour of gameplay.

Twenty words. That was all Jester had to send messages with. It cost a spell slot and a spot of brilliance, as she desperately tried to keep her rambling to a mere 20 words. Jester often fumbled through the words without even sending the intended meaning, often causing the Mighty Nein to fail to get their messages through.

Related: 10 Best Critical Role One Shots, According To Reddit

Still, her attempts to send those messages were hilarious. After all, getting to hear Jester ask Yasha if she was pooping after she failed to return to the party, was genuinely funny. And getting to see her terrorize notable figures and Beau's terrible father? Even better.

If @matthewmercer asks, #Critters deliver. The metagaming pigeon is totally a thing now.#CriticalRole #criticalrolefanart pic.twitter.com/kKPj2q9HHV

In the DnD community, it isn't exactly popular to engage in metagaming. Metagaming, in and of itself, is taking advantage of and using information the in-game characters would have no way of knowing. It's generally frowned upon, as it destroys the fourth wall and ruins any hope of a mystery for the characters.

Still, metagaming is sometimes essential to prevent total party kills or other dangerous moments. That's why Critical Role developed a tool that allows metagaming without the drama: An imaginary pigeon that echoes information that no character could know. While it doesn't actually resolve the issue, it's a funny enough concept that most fans don't really mind. Besides, DnD is about fun, and if that means a fictional pigeon talking to the players, that's what counts.

During the Vox Machina campaign, cast member Sam Reigel began wearing some notable shirts. Often bearing his own face or another cast member's face on the front, there was a weekly surprise as Sam revealed his newest creation. While this didn't start until episode 52 of the first campaign, Sam secretly began coordinating his clothes in the second campaign to match whatever he was wearing in the first campaign's corresponding episode.

So, while Sam often played some of the best player characters, like Nott and Scanlan, it was his commitment to the bit that was his true talent. After all, it's hard to imagine how much all those shirts must have cost, even if he bought them in bulk.

Most web shops treat their advertisers with a lot of respect. Graphics, slow and calm voice-overs, and careful explanations of the product greet viewers from Youtubers and Twitch streamers all over. Thanks to Sam Riegel, Critical Role does it a little differently.

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Given Sam's notorious sense of humor, the stakes in the advertisements slowly began to ramp up. Eventually, it involved Liam O'Brien monologuing at the camera and mimicking old TV shows, a long and engaging narrative about the Nordverse, and a very serious table read depicting the events of the birth of Laura Bailey and Travis Willingham's child. Each time, it just manages to escalate more, and Sam entertains fans while still spreading the word about their newest sponsor.

For Vox Machina, there was only one Critical Role villain worse than Vecna: Doors. Monstrous creations with a capacity for cruelty worse than any vampire, doors defeated the incredibly powerful party time and time again. Whether it be locks that simply wouldn't be picked or doors that simply couldn't be smashed.

The party's troubles began as early as the first episode of the campaign, as Tiberius struggled to get through a door in Kraghammer. It came back to haunt the party still, harming Scanlan as he tried to escape the Scanbo incident and preventing the team from entering the Zenith Temple, despite wasting spell slots, lock picks, and a sword.

Sprinkle, post bath. Watercolor and pen.#criticalrolefanart #CriticalRoleSpoilers #CriticalRole pic.twitter.com/PdDkd8I5z9

Certainly one of the best Critical Role NPCs, Jester's pet weasel, Sprinkle, was one of the funniest characters in the series. While he was originally nothing more than mere decoration for Jester, he quickly evolved into a tormented pet with an ill temper and a false god living in his skin.

But the most fun part of Sprinkle was the cast's sense of humor. After realizing that Jester had been carrying the weasel through boiling water, desperate life-or-death fights, and other planes of existence, the thought of the poor enraged and traumatize weasel overtook the show. There's a reason Travis often mimicked Sprinkle asking for an end to his suffering, after all.

With Sam Reigel often picking up smaller characters that enjoy the idea of imbibing, Sam was gifted a gigantic mug by a fan. The size of it made him appear as if he was as small as Scanlan, which obviously appealed to him. By the second campaign, he was drinking out of an enormous flask. By the third, a gas can.

Sam also takes care to add stickers and mementos to his canisters. Each is often unique and reflects the themes of any given episode. In fact, by the third campaign, he even added a whiteboard to his gas can, so he can be sure that he doesn't have stickers falling off of his drink the same way he did during the Mighty Nein campaign.

Next: 10 Most Overpowered Character Builds In Critical Role History

Lukas is a recent graduate of the Macaulay Honors College in New York City and a former Assistant Editor. A lover of somewhat obscure Marvel comics, Lukas happens to write most of his articles with a cat on his shoulder.