We’ve been keeping a secret: At the beginning of the year, we broke ground on a complete redesign of the D&D Character Sheet and Builder! Now, it’s time for us to let you in on the secret, show you our progress, and see what you can expect in the coming months
We’ve been working with Wizards of the Coast to fully support both D&D 5e and D&D 2024, and as a part of that initiative we are rethinking our D&D experience from the ground up to bring you an upgraded character sheet and builder experience.
This is just one part of our huge year of D&D. That’s not all we’re doing, though! In celebration of Dungeon & Dragons’ 50th anniversary, you’ll see exciting updates across all parts of Roll20, including:
Project Jumpgate: Improved VTT performance and design like you’ve never seen before, ensuring that everyone in your group can join your games with ease and confidence.
D&D Past, Present, & Future: We are supporting D&D 2024 across our services; but until that’s released, you can play all current and past editions of D&D on Roll20 today! With access to 37,000 D&D titles between the Roll20 VTT, DMsGuild, and DriveThruRPG, your options are limitless.
If you are interested in learning more about our D&D 2024 plans, check out the announcement!
Work in Progress / Designs Not Final
Redesigned UX & Workflow
We’ve followed a very similar design method for this sheet as we did with the Pathfinder Second Edition Remaster and Marvel Multiverse RPG character sheets. Testing is at the forefront of our UX and Design processes, leaning into experiments and testing with D&D fans to ensure we are designing with users in mind first. We want your game to be the best game it can be. The tools we make need to take a back seat to the fun you’re having, while supporting you in everything you need to make the experience richer!
This means testing for ease-of-use as well as asking for your qualitative feedback about what you like and dislike. The best way to achieve our goals is through an iterative process, where we test individual pieces of a design, gather your feedback, consider it against other feedback, adjust as necessary, and further apply those concepts to other areas of the sheet… and then we do it all over again and again, until we get it right!
For example, we look at metrics like time-on-task and misclick rates to help us find elements on the sheet that may not be intuitive for users, as well as overall metrics on how people felt about the designs they saw. Based on our tests, over 70% of respondents strongly agreed that they had an easy time finding information, the grouping of the sheet was intuitive, and overall they liked the design of the sheet; we consider that a huge success in terms of giving you a sheet that you’ll enjoy using!
Building and testing both the character sheet and builder in parallel has also allowed for us to make those two experiences consistent, so that the builder doesn’t seem like a completely different experience than just playing around on your character sheet! When you build your character via the new character builder, you’ll seamlessly enter into a sheet that has familiar architecture and layouts.
Here’s an example of our methodology that’s worth highlighting: We received numerous pieces of feedback from our test users about maximizing screen real estate. As a result, we added collapse functionality to a couple of places on the sheet for skills, AC, and speed. We now keep less-important information hidden until you want it, so that you can focus on the things you need to use in your game.
Previously, we were originally showing a lot of information about skills on the sheet. Based on feedback, we’ve condensed much of that information while keeping just the most important bits for each skill visible, while the rest is hidden behind an edit function. And in addition, we’ve also allowed you to collapse that whole section to the left so that only the skill names themselves are shown, making more room elsewhere for other vital gameplay information.
As a bonus, though, you can still roll skill checks from the collapsed version of that panel, so you don’t need to open the section up and then reclose it every time you need it during play.
Advanced Automation & Customization
As with our existing 5th Edition sheet, we’ve made it a top priority to ensure that GMs and players have the final say on how they want to play the game. Support for DMsGuild and your own homebrew content is at the forefront of our minds; we want you to be able to use the sheet in the way that makes sense for your table, without sacrificing automation across the sheet.
One thing we’re upgrading within the new sheet is adding access to settings wherever it makes sense: Want to use an optional rule relating to ability scores (e.g., turning on Honor or Sanity)? Now that setting will live within the ability score setting panel, so you won’t need to hunt through the campaign settings or sheet settings to find it.
Another thing top-of-mind is allowing you to manually adjust modifiers without losing any sheet automation. For example, if your GM has given your table a bonus to AC for some boon in their campaign, you can manually increase your AC to reflect it. You won’t have to worry about recalculating if you change armor later on, since your ad hoc AC value will automatically be accounted for when you make further changes. We recognize that there may not always be a rule that captures everything that happens at your table, so quickly adjusting a score on your sheet will propagate throughout, meaning campaign- or session-based calculations are maintained!
Improved Spells & Inventory Management
We’ve also heard feedback suggesting that we should make it easier to navigate sections of the sheet, such as the Spells section, that often hold large amounts of information, especially as your game progresses.
As a result, we have been looking really closely at spells for D&D 2024 to ensure we make the experience more intuitive and quicker to navigate. We also want the design decisions we make here to apply where it makes sense to other areas of the sheet (e.g., in your Inventory). Improved search capabilities will allow you to find something specific with ease, and then filtering options, such as being able to filter your spell list by spell level or your inventory by item type (like weapons or armor), will make managing your sheet easier.
For spells specifically, we are exploring ways to allow you to customize how you sort items on your sheet in either a card or a list view; this way, by switching to list view, you’ll be able to condense details down into a single line to optimize your screen real estate. We are also doing a lot of work on how you manage your spells, add them to your spellbook, learn new ones, or prepare spells for the day via a new interface.
D&D 2024 & Backwards Compatibility
Because D&D 2024 will be backward compatible with 5th Edition, we are building the updated sheet with that same flexibility in mind, so you can play with the rules that suit your table the best.
Regardless of how you play, using older rules, newer rules, or a combination of both, it will all be available in your game so you can browse and apply whatever you need. We are also working on a tool that will allow you to convert your existing “D&D 5E by Roll20” sheets to the new sheet so you can get all the benefits of the new character sheet, without the hassle of having to recreate your character from scratch.
Better Performance
Like the last few official sheets we’ve released, the new Dungeons & Dragons character sheet and builder benefits from Beacon SDK. (What is Beacon SDK, you ask?) It is a reimagining of our sheet infrastructure, which completely rewrites how character sheets function in Roll20 Tabletop, allowing for more customization, more advanced features, and overall improved performance. This means you’ll see a snappier sheet and builder overall, no matter how much content you have access to.
Coupled with Project Jumpgate, a major overhaul of Roll20’s rendering and game engine which will make your game the fastest and smoothest it’s ever been, Beacon SDK sheets will make for the most performant VTT experience you’ve seen yet!