Taliesin Jaffe


 * See also:  Category:Art by Taliesin Jaffe.
 * This page is about the actor.  For the character from a one-shot campaign, see Taliesin Jaffe (character).

Taliesin Jaffe is a voice actor and director, and he plays the character Percy on Critical Role. He also played Mezek in and a fictional version of himself in.

RPG Background
Taliesin's first role playing experience was the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS) in high school when he was thirteen years old. He also hosted a Rifts game, a World of Darkness game, Paranoia, and HoL: Human Occupied Landfill. He also gave HoL core rulebooks to now-Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer for his birthday.

Before Mercer's Pathfinder-based Exandria campaign (which evolved into D&D-based Critical Role), fellow voice actor and player Marisha Ray and he were in another pen-and-paper RPG game together.

Critical Role
In the first session that Mercer's Exandria group played together, Taliesin played a dragonborn paladin. Because he was one of the more experienced players at the time, his purpose for that first game was to try to ensure that everyone else stayed alive.

When the players decided to continue playing past the first session, Taliesin created a new character and chose the gunslinger Pathfinder class because it was interesting to him and he felt it could fill a role that did not exist within the group.

When converting the campaign from Pathfinder to 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons in preparation for beginning the Critical Role livestreaming webseries, Matt had to create a custom martial archetype for the fighter class, since Percy was a gunslinger. Matt and Taliesin sat down together and spent a full day to convert the character and all of his stats and abilities.

When asked which character from Vox Machina he would like to play if he was not Percy, Taliesin chose Tiberius.

He is often called the "Anti-Wheaton" by other members of the cast, as he rolls frequent critical successes.

During Percy's resurrection ritual in, Taliesin was watching from another room. After the ritual succeeded, Matt revealed that Taliesin was the one who ultimately decided if Percy would want to come back, depending on the actions of Vox Machina and their players during the ritual.