What a busy whirlwind of a week it's been! Before we retire to our bright pink caves to slumber until Monday, we wanted to collect all the happy news in one centralized space for your browsing convenience. This is community corner, and who better to kick things off than our Roll20 Lead Developer, Steve: Developer Spotlight Hi Rollers, Steve K here. If you haven't yet, check out our 3 Million User Update . Over the next few weeks I wanted to take time to unpack some of our design decisions for this update and answers questions we've gotten. This week let's talk Compendium and design. Looking back to early 2015 when the Compendium was a sticky note on my desk, the 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons SRD wouldn't exist for another year, and our development team consisted of 2 people. Back then I was full of grandiose ideas of what the Compendium could be and do and how it would integrate throughout the site. The Compendium Technical Preview started off much humbler than my imagination. But I deeply believed in the power of the tool and since then the Compendium has packed on more features that just about any other part of the site. Just like three years ago, my design decisions are inspired by my experience using Roll20. I play several regular repeating games each week, one of which I try and keep reserved for a game I find through our LFG with a group of strangers who have no idea I'm associated with Roll20. If there's a pain point that I'm regularly running into, it inspires me to invent a tool, tweak a feature, or create a solution to what's slowing down or interrupting my games. With the Compendium I saw the solution to some of the biggest time sinks that disrupted my fun; namely looking up rules, stats for effects like spells and NPCs like monsters, and the grind of putting data into Roll20 to handle my bookkeeping. Three years later we've got comprehensive rules references and drag and drop functionality into the VTT for our two most popular systems. So, what was missing? Why a major Compendium Update ? As the Compendium became more useful and I as well as the community started using it more and more, it's rough edges became apparent. One of Roll20's principal design commitments is to remain System Agnostic, meaning that we will never design Roll20 to only work for one system in particular. That means any tool we design has to be dynamic enough to work with any rules set. We met that commitment by using a flat list of attributes which work under most circumstances, but fell terribly flat under complex stat blocks like those you find under most F20 games. Our solution was to introduce dynamic customizable cards, in the same spirit of our character sheet Roll Templates , that could be uniquely designed for each category of each game. Now, every type of thing (spell, monster, magic item) can have it's own uniquely organized and styled card to display relevant information in our Compendium Lists. Another major problem of the Compendium was it's completely arcane searching. There were a series of text search commands that could get and order Compendium entries in whatever manner you chose. However, almost no one knew about them and those that did found them impossible to get the correct syntax. We solved this problem with our new list view that, much like the card view, allows the Compendium editors to determine for each category what attributes are important to be searching, filtering, and ordering by. What was worse is that none of these features were available inside the Roll20 app, and only present in the web view. We fixed that as well bringing all of the Compendium's functionality to the Roll20 side bar, where its search results can be dragged and dropped directly into your game. We're not done either, we've got big plans coming for future updates and we won't be happy until Roll20's Compendium supports every game system you want to play. If you're interested in supporting the game you care about in the Roll20 Compendium, let us know at <a href="mailto:team@roll20.net" rel="nofollow">team@roll20.net</a>. Until next week, happy rolling! 3 Million Users Update is Live! On Tuesday we released a behemoth of an update to celebrate our 3 million user milestone! You can read all about everything that was in it here . Roll20 Presents a Breakfast Cult One Shot! Tuesday also saw the twitch premiere of our Breakfast Cult One Shot, a Fate accelerated game by Paul Ettin Matijevic revolving around super powered students at an occult academy! Our lively and cast was lead by GM Ettin, the creator of the game himself, into high school shenanigans and also maybe a murder con gigantic spider monster? You can find the video here if you want to catch up before the next episode! Make sure to follow our Roll20app Twitch Channel so you never miss another episode! Community Highlights SagaBorn is a simple, story focused D20 OGL system and the community has now blessed it with a beautiful new sheet. On the Marketplace Each week, Dean - our Licensing & Marketplace Coordinator - presents some of their favorite packs submitted by our independent artist community: The Mystery of Lion Rock by Nailcoffin Media An amazingly high quality production, The Mystery of Lion Rock is exactly what I love to see in Roll20 modules - using all of the features and a clean layout to make running games a breeze Instant Mine Creator by Dan DiPietro Dan's previous Instant Dungeon Creator was an Instant hit, and for good reason. It made creating random dungeons fun, beautiful, and effortless. The followup, Instant Mine Creator , also available as a super fun card deck for true on-the-fly randomness, is equally impressive. Totes recommend. Adorable Apocalypse by DevoursBears I truly had no idea there was a community for My Little Pony / Fallout crossovers. But now that our newest addition to the Roll20 artist community, DevoursBears, has educated me, I've come to understand that we're all just beautiful ponies roaming a universal wasteland. You too can educate yourself by checking out these Adorable Apocalypse tokens. Paizo x Roll20 Collaboration You asked and we have delivered! Paizo and Roll20 have just announced their partnership , unveiling official support of Pathfinder® and Starfinder® roleplaying games on the Roll20 virtual tabletop. The official Roll20 x Pathfinder® character sheet will be available for early preview to Pro subscribers on March 6 th and will then be free for all subscribers on March 22nd! We've also opened pre-orders for the first volume for the Pathfinder War for the Crown Adventure Path, Crownfall! 1 I will now leave you to deal with the massive amount of roleplaying goodness we've just unloaded on your being, but not without this lovely quote from our co-founder Nolan: "When my friends and I started Roll20, there were only three players, and all of them were us. I'm pretty sure none of us had a million friends, so thank you to whoever keeps spreading the word." Thank you all, and happy weekend!
