Hey everyone,
I’d like to take a moment today to talk about the release of D&D 2024 on Roll20, including what’s happened so far, what’s launching next week, and what’s going to happen long-term. There’s a lot to get through, but here’s the quick version:
- Spell Upcasting for 2024 content and many bugfixes are already available today (changelog), and we’re continuing to release multiple updates per week.
- Automated Level Up and Starting Equipment will be available starting Thursday, October 10th.
- We’ll continue to release updates weekly for additional features including full mod script support, compact view for NPC sheets, and more.
What’s Happened So Far
The 2024 launch of D&D on Roll20 has been a major event that we’ve been working on internally for more than a year. Coming into this, we had three major goals:
- Fully support 2024 rules and 2014 rules in the same game so people could play their way and transition when they felt the time was right.
- Create a new sheet and builder on a modern codebase that will last us for the next decade of play
- Create an improved reading experience on our Compendium to better support browsing the rules and finding info you need during your games
To accomplish these goals, we put together a team of more than a dozen folks who have been working across development, design, data conversion, QA, and more. This whole project has been a massive undertaking with a lot of moving parts. We’ve been re-converting our existing fifth edition content to add additional data pieces so we can offer more automation in the builder and sheet, such as adding advanced functionality to features, enhancements to spells with a-typical effects, and more powerful conditional abilities. We also developed a new system for the Roll20 VTT which allows you to use the legacy 2014 sheet and the new 2024 sheet in the same game so you could use both at the same time with your group. We designed and implemented a completely new Compendium reading experience so we could present the new 2024 content in a way that really highlights the gorgeous art and allows you to browse it like a complete book. And of course, we’ve been hard at work developing the new sheet and builder to deliver a great experience.
As you may know, when the launch day for D&D 2024 arrived, our sheet and builder were released without some key features, including the ability to automatically level up characters after you built them, support for starting equipment in the character builder, and support for some key functionality in the sheet like upcasting spells. Our team was working on these features right up until launch day, and we had planned to have them done in time. Unfortunately, in the days before the launch, we realized that there were some truly game-breaking bugs that we only discovered when all of the pieces came together. We pushed on with releasing what we did have ready, and we immediately got to work to finish up these missing parts.
We should have done a better job of anticipating that these pieces were not going to be ready in time for the launch, and communicating that to you. We know that this release fell short of the quality you expect from us, and that we expect from ourselves. We were too optimistic in thinking that these key features would be done in time for launch, and it wasn’t clear until the last minute that they wouldn’t make it. We’re sorry for the confusion and frustration that we caused by not having it finished.
With that said, we’ve been working to fix the bugs that have been reported and continue to smooth out the rough edges of the new sheet and builder. Check out the blog post we published previously and you can get an idea of how many issues we’ve already addressed. We’re going to continue releasing multiple updates per week with fixes and new functionality.
Some folks have wondered why we simply didn’t update the existing D&D sheet and decided to build a new one. The existing sheet was built a decade ago on a much older version of Roll20. As the amount of supported content has grown to more than 150 source books on our platform, we’ve encountered an increasing number of issues updating the legacy sheet to support new rules. Not only has this affected us directly, but it has also made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for incredible third-party D&D publishers to push the edges further while utilizing our tools. It is common for us to try to make a change for a single new feature and have the entire sheet break in unforeseen ways. It feels, quite frankly, held together with duct tape. We’re confident we can continue to support the legacy sheet for what it does today, but we knew it would be impossible to update it to support all of the new rules changes that would be required to fully support D&D 2024 now and in the future.
Although we wish the initial rollout of the new sheet and builder would have been without issue, we’re confident that the new, modern architecture of the 2024 sheet and builder will allow us to support both 2014 and 2024 content moving forward and allow us to get back to innovating and improving the sheet instead of just keeping it functioning.
What’s Launching Next Week
On October 10th, we’ll be launching our next major update for the 2024 sheet and builder. Included in this update will be Automated Level Up and support for Starting Equipment. Along with Spell Upcasting for 2024 content (which is already out the door), these are the missing pieces of functionality we’ve received the most feedback on.
As mentioned previously, there were some serious bugs that we found in the Level Up feature, which is why we had to hold it back from launching day one. While these bugs are now resolved, unfortunately the solution required us to take a fundamentally different approach to how our data is stored. As such, if you previously used the builder to create a character before Level Up launches, we can’t level up that character without starting the character creation process over from the beginning. You can continue using the sheet and drag & drop functionality with these characters just like you could before this update, but if you want to use the builder to level up the character you’ll be prompted to start the character creation process over again.
We really wish this wasn’t the case, and we sincerely apologize for making our early adopters build their characters again. However, we’re confident that this is a one-time deal, and moving forward the Level Up tool will be fully forwards-compatible with future changes.
What’s Happening Long-Term
We’re very excited about D&D 2024 at Roll20. We think it’s a great evolution of the most popular roleplaying game on our platform, and we really appreciate everyone who chooses to run their game with us. Our goal is always to make it as easy as possible to bring your group together and play no matter where you are in the world.
We’re fully committed to making sure that the experience with this new content is best in class, and we’ll continue to release weekly updates going forward to address remaining issues, including:
- Providing additional support for Mod Scripts for the new sheet, and working with community script authors to update existing scripts to work with the new sheet
- Providing spell upcasting support on the new sheet for legacy content
- Introducing a new compact view for NPC sheets
- Supporting drag-and-drop for proficiencies
- Continuing to upgrade third-party 2014 content to better support the new builder
- Responding to your feedback to fix bugs and continue improving the experience
We’re really just at the beginning of the journey for D&D 2024. There are going to be hundreds of new source books, modules, and pieces of third-party content released over the next decade, and there are millions of groups that will play D&D on Roll20. Thank you for choosing to play with us – we truly appreciate the opportunity to be part of your adventures.