★ Roll20Con 2023 ★ Executive Team AMA | Nov. 3

Roll20Con is this weekend, kicking off on Nov. 2 with a special edition of Roll20 ReRoll airing at 3pm PT! We'll show off the latest releases and chat about some exciting upcoming features. The next day, members of our executive team will be here on the forums to answer your questions! Our team includes: Ankit Lal, CEO Steve Wieck, President Morgan Buck, CTO Riley Dutton, Founder in Residence Mike Todd, VP of Technology Austin Kelly, CFO Jose Artiaga, Director of People & Inclusion Feel free to leave your comments below and we'll kick things off on Friday!  Roll20Con is Roll20’s annual online convention that celebrates community, gaming, and charity. We're partnering with Extra Life to support their annual Game Day on November 4. Join our team!

Thanks for all the updates you guys have been doing. I have some suggestions, but don't want to be demanding. Keep up the great work!

That's an All Star panel! Looking forward to it.

How do we list Games as participating in Roll20CON 2023? In past years there was a checkmark and I can't find it this year beside "Schedule Games" for November 2-3-4-5, yet

I'll start this off with some questions for the Team to reply to :) 1. Will Roll20 have the "newish" D & D 5th Ed that comes out in 2024? 2. What's the road map for Pathfinder 2nd Ed, and as well will you be more forthcoming on what will and will not be released for this system in a timely manor (IE we can only guess 80% of the time on Paizo Product street date here on Roll20....) Will we ever see Pf II NPC sheets have the conditions check boxs like the PC sheets? 3. Starfinder 2nd Ed, will you have the Playtest here on Roll20 this upcoming 2024 GENCON and have FULL support of it when it is officially launched in 2025 GENCON?  For Starfinder 1st Ed will you have The Scoured Stars and Mechageddon Adventure Paths?  And finally why did you not have the Expand book out as it has many key changes and expanded classes and mechanics?   Thank you Tom

Hello, I'm a long time subsciber and DM on the platform. Over time, I have purchased a number of products and had some questions relating to that for you. Are there any plans to make shopping on the platform easier? Currently, it can be pretty time consuming and hard to find the products that you are searching for. There doesn't seem to be much policing of creators regarding the search tags. I would definitely shop more if it was faster and easier. Are there any plans to streamline game creation for DMs? When creating a new game, your purchased products should be easily available to select but currently you can't even search for them. Add-ons for your newly created game can be messy also. Perhaps being able to sort them into folders and organizing them alphabetically would help? Finally, the page folders are great and will make things much easier. Is there any plans to make looking through the pages easier, as they are currently huge icons and you can only view a few at a time. Would it be possible to view them in a list similar to the old UI, or make the icons smaller/expand the viewable area? Roll20 is a great platform and I wanted to thank you for all the work and improvement over the years.

When are we going to have customizable compendiums?

Ron said: Would it be possible to view them in a list similar to the old UI Just a quick note here, since I have seen confusion over this in several places lately. The Roll20 page menu has never been a vertical list. That's a third party extension.

Does Roll20 have an initiative to become fully accessible?

Gold said: How do we list Games as participating in Roll20CON 2023? In past years there was a checkmark and I can't find it this year beside "Schedule Games" for November 2-3-4-5, yet I have been informed that the option went live this morning. :)

Got it. Good. Traditionally the way to gain the Roll20CON badge icon on your Roll20 Profile is by entering (LAUNCH GAME) into a game table that the GM has checkmarked as participating in Roll20CON. Hint: If you have a game coming up this week, go and Checkmark it as participating in Roll20CON 2023.  In this way, all of your Players will receive the Roll20CON 2023 badge on their profile, which is a pretty awesome digital collector's item that can only be obtained in this way, during this CON. keithcurtis said: Gold said: How do we list Games as participating in Roll20CON 2023? In past years there was a checkmark and I can't find it this year beside "Schedule Games" for November 2-3-4-5, yet I have been informed that the option went live this morning. :)

As a Plus member, I was hoping to upgrade during this Roll20Con, but was a little surprised to see it only being an offer for new subscribers. I was wondering where that decision came from. I would've loved to upgrade to Pro and I'm sure I'm not the only Plus subscriber who had the same idea. Would Plus subs upgrading to Pro subscriptions not be lucrative enough? All the best, a bird

Good afternoon! I am a PRO user (and pro-DM) and have an inordinate amount of both personal and marketplace assets on my account. I have also taken on converting other content creator's titles for Roll20 & DM's Guild...so I have a LOT of assets to manage. To that end, my question focuses on the storage and asset management. Where on the checklist is overhauling the asset management system (understanding that converting a database is a *chore*.) to make it more intuitive (like File Explorer or other GUI), accessible (I can manage assets outside of a game), & scalable (ie: if I need more space, I can pay for it and get it)? If these aren't on the schedule, why not?  If they are, could you speak to changes that are underway, timelines and current vision for the end result? Thank you in advance, and keep up the great work! The page folders were a godsend! (Building Masks of Nyarlathotep and am already at 100 pages and counting! :D) DM Charlie

I've been a pro user for a while, and I'm a content creator. how do I get customer character sheets made? Is there a service roll20 provides that I can pay for?

Firstly, I appreciate the AMA. Company transparency is always a good thing. Will the roll20 5e mobile app ever be "completed"? In other words, any idea on if/when it's functionality will be expanded so it's more on par with other platforms (desktop, tablet, etc)? I haven't seen any change since 13 April 2022 in app or change log, but the Product Board still denotes things as purportedly in the works. Will we ever be able to use Dungeon Scribe as a tool that's completely accessible within the roll20 VTT? If so, when? For clarity, I'm not referring to the awkward map import method described in publicity videos. It would be fantastic to not have to jump between webtools/accts and simply work within the roll20 VTT from cradle-to-grave.

Q: Character Sheet Development -  I've heard rumors of a new sheet development system... (e.g Marvel Multiverse RPG) Will the community sheet authors have access to the new sheet development system/environment as well, and can anyone elaborate on how the new system differs from the current system?

I thought Product Portal was discontinued. Thus I would not be surprised if it does not get updated any more... DLB said: Firstly, I appreciate the AMA. Company transparency is always a good thing. Will the roll20 5e mobile app ever be "completed"? In other words, any idea on if/when it's functionality will be expanded so it's more on par with other platforms (desktop, tablet, etc)? I haven't seen any change since 13 April 2022 in app or change log, but the Product Board still denotes things as purportedly in the works. Will we ever be able to use Dungeon Scribe as a tool that's completely accessible within the roll20 VTT? If so, when? For clarity, I'm not referring to the awkward map import method described in publicity videos. It would be fantastic to not have to jump between webtools/accts and simply work within the roll20 VTT from cradle-to-grave.

Sorry for promotion  Go Pro for Less! Plus Subscription: $59.99 $39.99 Pro Subscription: $109.99 $89.99 is only for new sub ? i am old sub and want to get discount too but is  $ 99.99 for me i hope for animation battlelmap come soon other platform really do very well ahead of your guy and hope your guy ctach them up soon i can wait i want to stick with roll20 platform that i know well how to use them

*sshy dm slowly rasing hand for a question*  Um lets say you want to spice up your campaign with things like ,a mirror realm, a bone army slowly coming from said realm and a grumpy petty bone king in said realm. What in the store should i get to make it awesome?

Where can I go to submit a suggestion?

As a Pathfinder 2e player, I feel like we have been waiting for better sheet drag-and-drop since Pathfinder 2e came out almost 4 years ago. I appreciate the Level 1 drag-and-drop charactermancer but so many books are still left to be added to drag-and-drop and I still have to manually put a lot into my sheets. We still don't have NPC with condition support. I never know what Pathfinder modules and Adventure Paths products you plan to support till it is out. What plans does Roll20 have to support Pathfinder 2e? Will there be an effort to fill the back catalog of Paizo products? Will we get a updated Pathfinder 2e Character Sheet now the Remaster is out or will you just improve the existing one?

Firstly, thanks for all the amazing improvements to the VTT over the last year. :) Can you speak to Roll20's strategy to stay competitive vs WotC's upcoming VTT? 

Awesome suggestions from the marketplace for skeletal and I will also say to GM Christina that I'm happy to recommend Marketplace Packs that I have tested/reviewed, anytime, and my starting question is to ask if you prefer Top-Down tokens, Pog (circle) tokens, Isometric standing tokens, and do you use Animated tokens?  Steve W. said: Well Christina, you are in luck because.... <plug> Now is a great time to support Roll20 creators during the Roll20 Con marketplace sale! </plug> I am a big fan of mirror realms. Some suggestions that might help you: Happy Roll20CON 2023 everyone. My group played our first CON game last night, and we got the BADGE on our user profiles. Click my name on forum to see the badge live. 

vÍnce said: Q: Character Sheet Development -  I've heard rumors of a new sheet development system... (e.g Marvel Multiverse RPG) Will the community sheet authors have access to the new sheet development system/environment as well, and can anyone elaborate on how the new system differs from the current system? Heck yeah we will!  The goal is to get Beacon (what we're calling the framework) out to everyone.  We wanted to get a few sheets using this system under our belts first so we can find issues and really understand what it needs to be a good developer experience and we're now either done with or in progress on a couple of big ones!   The new system has sped up our sheet development by 2-4x with much more beautiful, powerful and immersive sheets.    Next year we will begin rolling this toolkit out to community sheet developers  and we hope the community sees the same gains with access to these tools . The new sheet development system is really targeted at people with existing web development skills and meant to unblock them from exercising the full power of their favorite frontend frameworks.  You'll pull in a library which exposes API like access to save real-time synced data and to interact with VTT features (like the turn tracker, dice roller or token settings).  It gives you the ability to interact with the VTT a lot more than the old system did and also has completely unlocked CSS and almost completely unlocked Javascript.  If you know how to build a great web app, you know how to make a great sheet on Beacon. Internally we are using VueJS to build our sheets, but you can bring whatever tool you like best (React, Angular, plain old HTML and Javascript, its up to you).  But we are also hoping to share some of our VueJS tools to make sheet and character builder programming a bit easier! If you're a non-developer looking for a simple overlay on HTML to make basic sheets, the old system will probably still be your best bet (though we have some ideas to help these users out down the road).  The new system is really meant to help empower a community of software developers to pull all of their favorite sheets into the future

Q: Are there any plans to make R20 optimized on OperaGX? Most of the people whom I play with use that as the default browser me included

Adrian A. said: I've been a pro user for a while, and I'm a content creator. how do I get customer character sheets made? Is there a service roll20 provides that I can pay for? Hello Adrian! Unfortunately the Roll20 sheet dev team has a really stacked up schedule and we aren't taking on sheets for hire.  We do have some resources to help you connect with someone who can, though! We have a lot of helpful links from our  Partner landing page  and  Publisher Help Center  .  We also maintain a list of vetted 3rd party contractors who can help with this kind of work, and folks on our  Roll20 | Drivethru Partner Discord  can point you in the right direction.  Our  Character Sheets Forum  is also a great place to post to get help.  If all else fails, we have  documentation available for building your own  sheet that you can use or share with a web developer you know. This is one of the experiences we're really hoping to improve with the release of our new Beacon character sheet toolkit (see  this response  for more about that).  As we make that more available we also want to do a better job of fostering a development community and to also make it easier for creators like you to connect with awesome community sheet developers.

DLB said: Will the roll20 5e mobile app ever be "completed"? In other words, any idea on if/when it's functionality will be expanded so it's more on par with other platforms (desktop, tablet, etc)? I haven't seen any change since 13 April 2022 in app or change log, but the Product Board still denotes things as purportedly in the works. The mobile app is not dead, but it definitely has been on pause!  Let me explain a bit why we slowed down and then I can talk a bit about what is to come. We love our 5e sheet, its really powerful and has lots of great interaction with Compendium data.  Its one of our most powerful older sheets.  But its really not very good on small devices like mobile phones.  The mobile app went into work long before we were far enough on building our Beacon sheet development kit to use it, and so we built a completely custom 5e sheet just for mobile using our old sheet system.  It took a lot of hard work and none of the improvements could be brought to desktop and Virtual Tabletop users.  It became pretty obvious that this path was not going to get us to a great app on timelines that would work for users, especially for players of other games. In a few weeks you're going to start seeing a lot of changes to how we do Characters on Roll20.  You may have already seen on the  Character Vault  that we have added the ability to view and edit character sheets from outside of the Virtual Tabletop (look out for a blog post from Andrew soon with more on this!).  Soon we'll be overhauling that section both to modernize the interface, and to create something that works well in the mobile browser.  That, combined with upcoming sheets in our new Beacon toolkit, will get us a great collection of character management tools and character creation / editing tools that work in a mobile browser. In the meantime, we've done some work behind the scenes to make it possible for us to easily port user interfaces from our website into the mobile app.  Once we have a great mobile browser experience, we want to pick the app back up and bring all that power there. So if you care about the Roll20 mobile characters experience, look out for Andrew's blog post and be sure to give us lots of feedback on new character sheets and the Roll20 Characters feature as we start to roll it out!  

Are there any plans to enable dms to add entries to their compendium? I don’t mean to sell or distribute but to make available to players in my own games. For example it would be great if I could create a custom spell or background or subclass that would show up in the charactermancer when my players levelled up or a custom magic item.  

Niceeee

Steve W. said: Tom said: 1. Will Roll20 have the "newish" D & D 5th Ed that comes out in 2024? Yes. Wizards of the Coast has publicly committed to including partners like Roll20 in the 50th anniversary of D&D next year and in the updated rulebook releases for D&D coming next year. We've been joining in the public playtesting ourselves and are enjoying the new goodies (Bastions!) and general improvements that we might see next year. Thanks Steve, not my main system I use but good to know and finally know this new edition (sort of) will not be in their "Closed garden" VTT as rumor after rumor has always said after the OGL and other disasters that happened from Hasbro. Tom

Nick O. said: Firstly, thanks for all the amazing improvements to the VTT over the last year. :) Can you speak to Roll20's strategy to stay competitive vs WotC's upcoming VTT?  "Roll20 started based off of the need of a group of friends to play online together. At the time we were playing D&D 4th Edition, but since then we've played many, many games (including 5E of course). Since then, the platform has grown to more than 12 million players across the globe, but the mission has remained the same: to provide great tools for groups of friends to gather around a virtual tabletop and play any tabletop RPG. Although there are always other competing products coming out the door, I think our unique blend of being easy to use, web-based, and free to get started will always have a role to play in the market, and we're focused on delivering what folks are asking us to do (like you all in this forum post!) -- if we do that we're confident our adventuring party will continue to grow." - Riley Dutton So we plan to keep working hard and doubling down on those things that we think we do well.  We have a big engine project going on right now that will maximize performance for users on a wide variety of machines.  We're continually working on making our user interface more and more easy to use and intuitive ( see Brittany's blog post for more ).  Some examples of that kind of work are the new Toolbar,  Measure Tools  and  Page Folders .  We're revamping character sheets to help make  character creation  and gameplay more accessible to new players.  We know a lot of GMs want to run their own campaigns and adventures set in commercially made settings and in their own worlds.  We think our marketplace, with enhanced search tools will help connect GMs with awesome artwork to bring those worlds to life, and  Dungeon Scrawl integration  will help them fill in the gaps and improvise like we do in person! We also want to double down on being a platform that serves players of all kinds of games big and small.  The average Roll20 user plays two or more game systems and we want to build features to serve a larger variety of gameplay styles, from grid based tactical combat, to theater of the mind, online or in-person, at home, at your local game store or on stream.  We serve 10s of thousands of publishers, we have thousands of character sheets, and we're committed to continuing to serve the entire industry.

Answering one from social media:  @Sepulcher67: Are you finally fixing Cleric/Druid spells Short answer:  yes.  :)

Steve W. said: Tom said: 2. What's the road map for Pathfinder 2nd Ed, and as well will you be more forthcoming on what will and will not be released for this system in a timely manor (IE we can only guess 80% of the time on Paizo Product street date here on Roll20....) Will we ever see Pf II NPC sheets have the conditions check boxs like the PC sheets? Mark said: As a Pathfinder 2e player, I feel like we have been waiting for better sheet drag-and-drop since Pathfinder 2e came out almost 4 years ago. I appreciate the Level 1 drag-and-drop charactermancer but so many books are still left to be added to drag-and-drop and I still have to manually put a lot into my sheets. We still don't have NPC with condition support. I never know what Pathfinder modules and Adventure Paths products you plan to support till it is out. What plans does Roll20 have to support Pathfinder 2e? Will there be an effort to fill the back catalog of Paizo products? Will we get a updated Pathfinder 2e Character Sheet now the Remaster is out or will you just improve the existing one? Earlier this year we publicly  renewed our support for Pathfinder , and since then we have rolled out a continuous stream of  updates  and  improvements  to the Pathfinder 2 character sheet experience. We continue to stand by our commitment to continuous improvement on this until we have a full character builder experience for Pathfinder 2. Two big things affect our road map for that: Pathfinder Remastered Core and our new Character Sheet system at Roll20: 1. You know about Pathfinder Core releasing soon and hopefully you've read about our  support for that release . 2. Meanwhile, you may or may not have had a chance to test out Roll20's new character sheet system by giving the Marvel Multiverse RPG character sheet and character builder a  test drive . The Marvel character sheet is one of the first that we've implemented with our all new code ecosystem for character sheets and character builders, an ecosystem we call Beacon. We are pleased to announce that work has already begun on an all new Pathfinder 2 Character Sheet and Character Builder in Beacon, and we'd love to give you a screenclip recording  first sneak peek at the new design . (That design is very much a work-in-progress. Some things have already changed since that was recently recorded and the design has not yet been through accessibility screening and other tests.) Alas there is a lot of work to do between design and having a fully featured new sheet and builder in front of you to use. For now, we will support the release of Pathfinder Core with the current character sheet updated to accept remastered content. We hope to have an initial, not-yet-fully-featured version of the new character sheet in front of you to try before the end of this year. We plan to iterate and develop the new sheet and then the new character builder and new NPC sheet with your feedback to our team dedicated to the project. We are committed to having this team remain dedicated to the new Pathfinder sheets (PC and NPC) and builder until we have something that delights the Roll20 community of Pathfinder players. As to our support for Paizo's new Pathfinder releases, we expect to support every book that Paizo releases for the main Pathfinder Core product line. I do need to give us a little wiggle room on that promise because if Paizo releases maybe a Goblin Holiday Cook Book or something which we don't feel is applicable to Roll20 use then we may skip such a title. And we may not support every Pathfinder Society Scenario release (though our support for those should increase). Roll20's velocity has never been higher, both on delivering feature improvements and on getting official releases ready for Roll20 use. Pathfinder players will see a lot more coming their way in the months ahead. VERY good to hear this finally and a lot of my players as well as I are happy to see what the road map is. One thing though, does the "Core product line" INCLUDE all the Adventure Paths, as some of the books released here don't have the AP they support, like The Lost Omens Highhelm you have but not the 3 part Dwarf Adventure Skykings Tomb. And of late no Season of the Ghost and next year there will be 2 Lore books for that AP,  Thanks Tom

Steve W. said: Tom said: 3. Starfinder 2nd Ed, will you have the Playtest here on Roll20 this upcoming 2024 GENCON and have FULL support of it when it is officially launched in 2025 GENCON?  For Starfinder 1st Ed will you have The Scoured Stars and Mechageddon Adventure Paths?  And finally why did you not have the Expand book out as it has many key changes and expanded classes and mechanics?   We're waiting to see Starfinder 2 before we determine how to support it on our engineering roadmaps. For those specific Starfinder 1 titles, I need to speak to our content conversion manager Todd who is on vacation. Right now I don't have the answer for that. This has me a bit more worried as having the Playtest on here like you did for the Pf II playtest will really help.  And ya I hear ya how the official SF II will wind up, BUT as it will be run with the same nasic system as PF II I would think that would make things a lot easier for sheets and other basics. For the SF I last 2 Adventure Paths, please do and if you could you can PM me or something, 1st one is a SF society comp book rewritten into one long adventure then Mechageddon is going to be pretty big with the first Mech AP that is not just an Adventure.  Abs also Expand book, uderstand that might be hard to justify a soon to be dea system but there is so much they redid and fixed for the last year of SF I it would be a shame to miss out on it. again thanks for the reply Steve!! Tom

Andrew A. said: Q: Are there any plans to make R20 optimized on OperaGX? Most of the people whom I play with use that as the default browser me included As I mentioned in my reply to Nick O. we are in progress on a big engine project that is mostly focused on performance.  However, the frameworks we are using do support Opera 15+ so we will very likely see improvements there.  When that engine project is complete we may consider updating and expanding our list of officially supported browsers.  In the meantime, can you tell us a bit about what issues you are experiencing on OperaGX?