The Roll20 Compendium is one of our most useful and most-used features. It allows you to quickly and easily look up rules, monsters, spells, and a whole lot of other things right in the Roll20 VTT for many of your favorite games including Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and more.
However, it’s been showing its age for a while now. The original system was built at a time when we only had a few source books available for a few games. Did you know that today there are more than 450 source books available to unlock in the Roll20 Compendium? That’s a lot of data and information to make available to users, while still keeping searches snappy!
We’ve overhauled the VTT Compendium experience from the ground up. Not only will you find your searches return much faster (up to 10x faster for some complex queries), the new interface is much easier to use and presents a vast array of filtering options right at your fingertips.
Continuing with our approach of user-driven, testable user experience, our design team found new ways to take all of the complicated data underlying the rules from dozens of systems and present them to you in an understandable way that is primed for discovery.
After selecting a Category, you may see the new filter icon appear in the search bar. Just click on that to get a list of options to choose from. Want to see only 5E creatures that are CR 4? Easy. How about spells that Sorcerers can cast from the Conjuration school at 4th level? Takes about two seconds flat.
And of course you can always just type any keyword into the search bar like “Fireball” to find whatever you need to know to keep your game running smoothly – without having to pause the game to reference a physical rulebook. We also added a fuzzy search for those times that you type in a hurry or don’t remember how to spell “Eldritch Blast.”
Don’t forget, all of these great features are available for both you as the GM and your players, with the ability to share Compendium content into your games so everyone around your virtual table has access to everything they need to play! Whether you’re referencing a rule, looking up a spell, or dragging and dropping equipment out of the Compendium and right onto your character sheet, we think you’ll find that the entire experience has been made more delightful.
Like the Measure Tool, the new Compendium is part of our UI Redesign, so if you haven’t already, be sure to opt in when you’re in the VTT to check out all of the fun new features that we’ve been crafting for your enjoyment. Happy gaming!