Danny Quach: Hey y’all, my name is Danny and I’m the Community and Social Media Manager for Roll20. My pronouns are he/him, and I am super stoked to have a special guest with us today.
Jenn Ritchey: I’m Jenn. I’ve been working here at Roll20 for almost four years now. And my pronouns are she/any.
Danny: There’s really no right way to play D&D, or tabletop RPGs in general, whether it’s around the coffee table, or on a virtual tabletop like Roll20.
Danny: As long as you’re surrounded by friends, and you’re ready to tell some weird and wacky stories. Because you’ve kind of come from like this homebrew, very community oriented setting, and now there’s virtual communities based around role playing in D&D. How have you seen Roll20 help maybe people get started or get their foot into playing a expansive game like D&D?
Jenn: There’s so many ways to customize within Roll20 that you can say, like, if you want to be using feats, your GM can choose which books you even want to be pulling from, if you’re using the in-game Compendiums. There’s so much official content that you can plug into immediately and it just gets started.
Jenn: It’s plug and play. The maps are set up, the Dynamic Lighting walls are set up. You can pull straight from your Compendium books, like your Player’s Handbooks or your Dungeon Master’sGuides. And a nice thing about Roll20 is what you buy on the Marketplace, you own forever. That you, you own that.
Jenn: It’s not, we keep Legacy content, so if you bought stuff that’s no longer for sale, you get to keep that. We don’t, we don’t take those purchases away from you. We have the original Strahd, or the updated and revised Strahd, you can choose which set of that content you want to pull over.
Danny: Yeah, that’s really cool that you can build up like a virtual bookshelf where you can use some of the Legacy content and then you can even pull in some of the newer content that does get remastered or does get that 2.0 treatment. Let’s say you have this weird fantastical setting in the Feywild. Who says you can’t just bring in Strahd and have him visit because you can just drag and drop that token into your game?
Jenn: Yeah, I, compared to like 15 years ago where we were, we were on our reusable mat, putting pieces of paper over the rooms.
Jenn: It’s really nice with Dynamic Lighting to be able to sort of see, like, your range of vision. You can’t see the whole room. Unless your character has that much vision if, like, the room is dark or the torch is set up.
Danny: I love the immersive feeling that you can get in a virtual tabletop setting that might be a little bit harder to emulate in real life.
Danny: So it’s really cool when you’re super deep into a campaign and you turn a corner and you For whatever reason, open up a door that’s closed, and then boom, your DM has set up something just wild for you to encounter.
Jenn: We do so much of the math in the character sheets, you don’t have to remember all of your attributes, just click the button and you’ve rolled exactly what you need to roll for that specific attack.
Jenn: You’ve got it all set up, the math’s done.
Danny: It is nice that Roll20 does help you do math. And then we have that updated toolbar now, which makes it so much easier for DMs to set up Dynamic Lighting and switch between the layers of tokens and lighting and map layers. And then of course the measure tool too that’s been updated that a lot of people in our community have been asking for, we heard them.
Danny: And now we can implement it and now you can measure to your heart’s content. You can measure however you want to measure. We’ve had a lot of cool updates. So now we have Roll20 Characters where you can build characters outside of the VTT, which is awesome.
Jenn: I know so many people that they, that’s just what they do.
Jenn: They get, come up with an idea for a character and then they, they just make it. They don’t have a campaign for it. They don’t have anything. They’ve just got all of these characters in reserve, ready, ready to go.
Danny: There’s kind of this, repository that you can, if you built a character maybe only for like a short campaign or one shot that you want to revive, you can just copy it and add it to a new game and revive that character.
Jenn: There’s so many times where I’ve done a one shot or I’ve done like a streamed show and I’ve only gotten to play that character once or twice and I’m like, oh, but I really like them and I’ll bring them back or I’ll bring them back…edited, like, hmm, I didn’t really quite like this, but now I can do this and that.
Jenn: I do have a couple NPCs whenever I GM that end up in all of my games, like a fun shopkeeper that has specific traits about it, or a fortune teller that comes up in every campaign and tells the fortunes of all the party. They’re real easy to move around like that.
Danny: You just made me think of Planescape, and that, that setting is all about the different multiverses.
Danny: What if we created one character, and then made copies of that character, but we had to change them up just slightly for the different multiverses that they go visit? That’d be really cool. When we talk about game content on Roll20, what gets you excited?
Jenn: Uh, Lost Mines of Phandelver, which was the first adventure that came out.
Jenn: It was actually the Starter Kit before even the Player’s Handbook came out for D&D 5E. With, uh, Lost Mines of Phandelver, we’ve actually updated it internally since we’ve started getting our systems better to make it an even better Product that more matches the original and really gets you into the content.
Danny: Yeah, along with Lost Mines, there’s been some remasters too, right?
Jenn: Yeah, so there’s been a ton of different remasters that we’ve updated. We’ve already mentioned, like, Curse of Strahd, the Icewind Dale updates, Avernus. Yeah, we’re just keeping up with all sorts of content.
Danny: So what are some things that you’re looking forward to in 2024 when it comes to D&D or Roll20 or both?
Jenn: There’s so many things I’m looking forward to that I can’t say anything about just yet.
Danny: Teaser teaser, maybe, ooh.
Jenn: Well, we do have a brand new characters coming out. Brand new way to build your characters.
Jenn: Well, we’re gonna be doing a bunch of stuff at Gen Con this year, of course we’ve got the 50th anniversary for Dungeons & Dragons coming up. But in terms of things that I can talk about, we’ve got Jumpgate coming up.
Danny: Putting this out there, it will be in beta for Pro users by the end of quarter one this year, and it’s just coming with a plethora of updates to our virtual tabletop.
Danny: As the VTT progresses and these quality of life updates come, it makes it easier for people to play the way they want. To tell the stories that they can and to have fun together, which is the biggest part in our communities.
Danny: So yeah, this has been why you should play D&D on Roll20. Go ahead and create a character on Roll20 Characters.
Danny: Check out our official D&D Products on Roll20, including our remasters and our community content all over DMsGuild until next time. See y’all later.
Read more about our plans for Dungeons & Dragons in 2024 and our work on the upcoming Dungeons & Dragon character sheet!