Welcome to the latest update from Roll20! Let’s take a look at the major releases that came out in 2022 and preview what you can expect by the end of the year. Be sure to check out the impressive list of Roll20Con 2022 Licensing Announcements!
Roll20 and OneBookShelf Level Up
Roll20 and OneBookshelf, two of the world’s leading digital tabletop roleplaying content platforms, are joining forces. This change forges an alliance of industry experience in the TTRPG space, fusing more than a century of combined executive leadership with publisher and community relationships to create the best tabletop platform experience. Next year, we’ll make your DriveThruRPG PDF library accessible within the Roll20 virtual tabletop experience, and it won’t count toward your Roll20 storage quota.
We have a lot more in the works that you’ll hear about at the start of 2023.
Your Suggestions & Ideas on Roll20
In 2022, the Roll20 product and engineering teams set an ambitious goal: deliver 5 of the top 10 most requested features on the Suggestions & Ideas forum for our users. We’re on track to complete that goal, having completed 4 of the top 10 most requested and 9 suggestions overall this year. By the end of the year we will both accomplish our goal of 5 out of the top 10 and close out one additional suggestion, bringing our grand total to eleven completed suggestions this year, or about 45% of all suggestions completed in the past 7 years! We’re listening and working even harder to give you the best Virtual Tabletop experience for your games.
Release Highlights
Operation Fire Bolt. This year, we announced Operation Fire Bolt, a team dedicated to improving performance and stability on Roll20. The vast majority of games now load up to 50% faster, and 50% of all games load in under 4 seconds. We also added new error messages to help some users with specific problems. We enhanced the performance of text dice rolls, increasing speed from click to appearance in chat by about 20%, without impacting the performance of 3D dice rolls. Unfortunately, we still can’t help you get those critical hits when you need them.
Operation Fire Bolt is in the middle of beta testing the retooled Roll20 Voice & Video chat to make connecting faster and more reliable. We redesigned our connection system, and built a new signaling server from the ground up. It’s all available to try right now in your next game with the Voice & Video Beta. This system is dedicated to making the connection, so it doesn’t get bogged down with any other kind of request. Voice & Video chat technology has come a long way in the last few years, and we’ve baked all the best practices into this system, and so far it’s been performing at about 100 times faster than the previous tech, with more stable connections, too.
Dark Mode. Dark Mode has, for a long time, been our #1 top-voted suggestion with over a thousand votes. You’ve wanted it, and we’ve wanted it. You can see this now on the VTT, the D&D 5e Character Sheet by Roll20, and enable it for the website under your Account.
One-Way and Transparent Barriers. One-way barriers block light and vision from one side of the line but let it pass through the other side, letting players see an object while blocking vision beyond. Transparent barriers block movement, but not sight, so you can use them as windows, for magic walls, or for force fields.
Token Updates. We’ve added more control over your tokens on the Virtual Tabletop. GMs can lock a token in place on any layer, and have the option to show token nameplate and bar overlay on hover. We also put tokens in the hands of players by adding the ability for anyone to add artwork from their Art Library to their tokens and portraits.
PDFs on the VTT. PDFs can now be fully shared on the Virtual Tabletop, one of Roll20’s largest platform updates for 2022. You can directly upload or drag-and-drop your PDFs to the VTT when you are a GM in a game. GMs can search, navigate, and show handouts from the Journal, and you can add PDFs to multiple games.
Chat and Compendiums. GMs have greater control over the Virtual Tabletop chat. If they made an accidental roll or whisper, they can choose to hide the line of chat. This also hides it from the chat archive.
Users who have compendiums shared with them can read them outside the Virtual Tabletop. They’ll appear under My Library, and the adventure itself is hidden to avoid spoilers.
Dynamic Bundles. You can save more on the Roll20 Marketplace when you buy in bundles. And now, if you own one or more items in the bundle, you get the rest at a discounted price. It’s a great way to complete your collection.
Companion App Updates. The mobile companion app has added some more features for Roll20 players. We’ve added a stand-alone dice roller and the free version of D&D 5E, called the SRD, so you can search and use the Compendium while you’re out playing. Your 5E compendiums are available too, giving you even more power at your fingertips. Don’t forget that the app is free for players to download from the Apple Store and Google Play.
Character Sheets. Roll20 has worked with publishers to create top tier character sheets and compendiums for your game. New Roll20 character sheets this year were made for Cyberpunk RED, Fallout, Power Rangers, Marvel Multiverse RPG, Zweihander, and Coyote & Crow. We made significant updates to Vampire: The Masquerade, the D&D 5E character sheet to allow dark mode, and we created a ship sheet specifically for Spelljammer. We also updated our compendiums for D&D’s recently released Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse.
Did you know there are over 1,000 character sheets on Roll20, and 1,200 community sheet creators? They make your games possible by investing their time and expertise to build out their favorite RPGs. Thank you, creators!
We still have a bit of time left in the year, so we’re focusing on a few more projects.
Future Updates
Printable Character Sheets. You’ll soon be able to save or print your 5E character sheets from Roll20. You can download a formatted PDF of your character to take with you, wherever you play. We’ll also unlock the ability for sheet creators to add the Print button to their own character sheets.
Image Placement Logic. A key feature release this year is image placement logic, or smart placement. When you add a new map or token to your Art Library, you can set the dimensions for that image so it always goes onto the VTT at the correct size. If you’re placing a map, the VTT will suggest the image size and size of the page and automatically set it for you.
That’s a wrap for 2022, but there’s a lot more in store for you from Roll20 in the next year. We’ll be back in January with our plans for 2023!
Rather watch our Year in Review? Check it out on YouTube.