Here at Roll20, we know how important it is for players and game masters alike to be able to build characters quickly for their games. Nothing feels better than creating fresh new characters with a robust personality and backstory and then bringing those characters to life during gameplay.
However, since Roll20’s inception, we have noticed that creating characters or setting up character sheets isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, especially for new folks within the TTRPG space. Additionally, we noticed that people who came to us wanting to learn new game systems would have issues learning the rules quickly. I’m sure some of you reading right now might relate with your players peppering you with questions about what their character can and cannot do, how to build their character, or just other general game mechanic questions.
You may have seen the blog post on behalf of the design team here at Roll20 talking about what type of research went into the VTT rework and redesign. Today, I’m here to talk to you about how the design team is building a better future for creating characters on Roll20.
You may or may not know already, but we recently released the new Marvel Multiverse RPG Core Rulebook on Roll20. This game system will allow you to tell your own amazing stories within the Marvel universe! You may ask yourselves, “how does this relate to the blog post?” Well, the new Marvel Multiverse RPG comes with a brand new vision of what it means to build and play characters within the VTT.
We have completely redesigned our character builder from the ground up, packed with all kinds of improved user experience, visual design, and learning tools. Additionally, we have brought a new vision to the character sheet experience and design along with the character builder.
Defining Problem Areas
First, I want to talk about how we decided on the current character creation problem areas, within both the previous sheet system and the character builder. Based on previous surveys we had done we knew that behind the VTT redesign that character sheets were the next highest pain points for our users.
Character Builder
Let’s start with the character builder. Just like the VTT redesign, we conducted interviews with real users, who consisted of the following: GMs that were brand new to the game system. We decided to target these folks because they are the ones we wanted to solve for. They know the problems their players experience with new game systems and character creation. They also know how hard it is sometimes for them to learn new game systems themselves.
Here is just a (very small) snapshot of our gathered insights based on observations in our interviews.
We categorized our insights based on thematic problems with the current character builder and how it would work alongside a brand new game system, like Marvel Multiverse RPG. We pulled out opportunities as a result of seeing these problems all grouped together to let us see the bigger picture.
We now had a good foundation to work from and we defined the following key areas that we needed to really focus on for a brand new character builder that could support Marvel and other future game systems. Based off our research, we knew that the new character builder needed to have the following:
- Learn as you build. Some of the biggest feedback from our users was how difficult it was to learn game systems when coming to Roll20. Our previous character builder – Charactermancer – did not provide a quick and easy way for players to learn how to build their character. There was endless reading on super long text blocks and some of our users would spend up to 10 minutes in one section of the current builder just reading! We needed to provide a way for users to quickly understand the basics of their character as they built it so that they could get to what matters: playing.
- Support of pregenerated characters. With the new Marvel Multiverse RPG, they offer the support of premade Super Heroes for people to just choose and get right into playing. We needed to build a character builder that not only allows you to make custom characters from scratch, but also the ability to choose preset characters from the game system for those who do not want to fuss with customization.
- Guidance as opposed to punishment. In our previous Charactermancers, players would often go through the character creation process and reach the end, only to be told they had errors or discrepancies that they would then need to go back and fix themselves. With the new builder, we knew that we needed to catch errors before the users reached the end of the process.
- It needs to scale for every game system. We knew when going into the research phase of this project that we wanted to build a character builder that could go beyond supporting Marvel Multiverse RPG. The foundational elements of the system needed to be agnostic enough to have other game systems call it their home in the future.
So, what comes after our defined focus areas? Well, its design and testing of course!
What you see in the image above is a small portion of the new custom character builder design, featuring the Marvel Multiverse RPG! You’ll notice that it has a small portion of the book rules on the current section (which is rank). This allows our users to be able to read more about the section if they want to, but since it is curated to the current section they are on, they do not need to endlessly scroll (unless they want to).
Note: Designs are still works in progress, so what you see here may not reflect what you see currently in the working product. We aim to reach the final vision of it incrementally.
With the above design, we also tested it against our users to see how they felt. At the end of the test, we asked them a series of questions. Here are just a few of them on how they felt about the new builder:
There were additional questions we asked, but this gives you some small insight on how we knew that what we were designing was going in the right direction or not! There are other major features about this new builder that I could get into and talk about our focus areas for it further, but for the sake of time for our readers, we suggest you check out the new system yourselves!
Character Sheets
Now, let’s get into the new sheet. Just like the character builder, we conducted interviews with real users, who consisted of the same user type as the character builder (GMs new to the game system) to really understand how they and their players were using sheets. Unlike the character builder however, we needed to understand the underlying architecture of how the people preferred to play. In other words, we needed to know what aspects of the sheet were most important to players and game masters.
Here is just another small snapshot of our gathered insights from our sheet research for the Marvel Multiverse RPG. In our interviews, we had our users rank how important each aspect of the game mechanics were and how often they had used it in the Marvel Multiverse RPG Playtest sometime ago. This helped us understand where to place certain gameplay aspects on the sheet in relation to how much it is used.
We now had a good foundation to work from and we defined the following key areas that we needed to really focus on for a brand new character sheet that could support Marvel Multiverse RPG’s rules and game mechanics. Based off our research, we knew that the new sheet needed to have the following:
- Learn as you build. Just like the character builder, it was equally important for the users to be able to learn as they build on the sheet. This was specifically for the number of our users who decide to edit directly on sheets to be able to have learning tools at their disposal right within the sheet itself.
- Character Immersion. The new sheet needed to be visually supportive of the Super Hero you created for the Marvel Multiverse RPG. For example, if you were playing a pre-generated Deadpool character, the sheet should feel and look like Deadpool. It should really give off a Marvel vibe.
- Rethink traditional character sheet architecture. We know that no one RPG system is alike and thus, we needed to break the mold of where things are usually placed on the sheet.
- It needs to scale for every game system. Just like the character builder, we knew when going into the research phase of this project that we wanted to build a character sheet that could go beyond supporting Marvel Multiverse RPG. The foundational elements of the system needed to be agnostic enough to have other game systems call it their home in the future.
What you see in the image above is the Marvel Multiverse RPG character sheet, featuring Elektra as the playable character! You may notice a stark difference between this sheet and possibly other sheets from Roll20, besides the visual changes. Here is a sample of major differences that tied into our four focal areas above:
- The architecture is different. We decided to tuck things away that were deemed as less vital to the gameplay during combat, so we separated other aspects (like roleplay) into a tab system, so that users can just switch with one action to change to a different aspect of playing the game.
- Shortcuts to review the game rules of each section. We added icons that open that portion of the book so that players can learn the rules without having to find it within the full book.
Note: Designs are still works in progress, so what you see here may not reflect what you see currently in the working product. We aim to reach the final vision of it incrementally.
With the above design, we also tested it against our users to see how they felt. Specifically, we tested it against people who did not know the game system rules and asked them to find certain things on the sheet. At the end of the test, we asked them a series of questions. Here are just a few of them on how they felt about the new sheet:
Just like the character builder, there were additional questions we asked, but this gives you some small insight on how we knew that what we were designing was going in the right direction or not.
Conclusion
What you have seen here today is just a small taste of what is to come for the future of character creation on Roll20. The design team has big ideas on how we can possibly scale this to support other game systems in the future. As always, the design team here makes data based decisions for every idea to make sure we are delivering the best possible products to you.
Keep a lookout for further updates around the Marvel Multiverse RPG system, as we plan to bring more and more features and improved experiences to you!