Can Roll20 handle very long campaigns with a lot of materials?

Hello! I'm currently preparing a campaign that I'll be running for my friends. I expect this campaign will run for 1-2 years in an expansive world. I'm a little bit concerned that I'm going to get halfway through and discover that suddenly I can't upload more maps / music / tokens / handouts / whatever else. I have a pro subscription, which says I get 6gb of storage. But...I have no idea how far that will take me in practice. Does anyone have experience managing a long-term resource-heavy campaign on Roll20? As the DM, am I going to have to constantly remove and reupload assets? Also, somewhat unrelated, but bonus points if anyone has great ideas for managing/organizing campaign information (outside of Roll20)...info about places, characters, factions, etc.

Well, if you're smart with your asset sizes, your data allotment will carry you for several years and many campaign's. Keith or another image expert will have better details than I, but here's the things I think about for images: Anything over 140px per expected square is beyond overkill for resolution. Really 70px per square is more than enough Maps and other "solid" images should always be jpegs. Save pngs for tokens and other images that need transparency Hipe that helps. As for the bonus question, I recommend World Anvil.

Awesome, thanks Scott. As I've been collecting maps, I've been keeping them to jpeg format and avoiding the high res ones...and mp3s for music. That's encouraging to hear. Maybe I won't need to worry about this as much as I thought. Thanks for the World Anvil rec too, I'll check that out tonight!

Ditto what Scott said. I play in a Thursday night game that's been using the same campaign for going on 7 years, I think we've only missed 4 sessions in that time. I personally have about 20 characters just from the different story arcs. Large campaigns are totally doable.  Personally, I use Scrivener for organizing things. YMMV

Great, thanks Aaron. I'm happy to investigate as many options as I can before I start committing material to paper, so to speak, so I'll check out Scrivener too. Much appreciated!

I've run a fairly involved campaign for three years straight, I keep the game size small by transmogrifying materials I don't need at the moment into a library campaign . I also manage file sizes very carefully, not just to keep my library under control, but to keep game size manageable. I keep a lot of campaign reference material in Google docs and sheets, shared with the players. My account size is only 300MB out of 6000MB, so about 5% full. A huge ongoing campaign is entirely doable. This page has great advice for file management.

Very helpful, thanks Keith!

I’ve been running my 13th Age campaign since 2014 and haven’t had any trouble with it. Especially since I started using a “vault” game to keep my monsters in and using the Transmogrifier to populate my campaign game with just the monsters I need for the PC’s level. 

Thanks for the advice all! I definitely like the idea of using a vault game for general organizational purposes.

I run about a half terabyte of images, handouts and videos like others have said the trick is to work around the #$%^ restrictions that roll20 places on you and come up with creative and clever ways to sidestep their incessant roadblocks. There are a number of ways to put assets into the game without storing them on the Roll20 servers. 

Arkangel said: I run about a half terabyte of images, handouts and videos like others have said the trick is to work around the #$%^ restrictions that roll20 places on you and come up with creative and clever ways to sidestep their incessant roadblocks. There are a number of ways to put assets into the game without storing them on the Roll20 servers.  I'd love to hear more! Using a "vault" game as suggested above would still use my Roll20 limit, I assume. How can I add assets stored locally without manually juggling them in/out? Is that possible?

Joe P. said: Arkangel said: I run about a half terabyte of images, handouts and videos like others have said the trick is to work around the #$%^ restrictions that roll20 places on you and come up with creative and clever ways to sidestep their incessant roadblocks. There are a number of ways to put assets into the game without storing them on the Roll20 servers.  I'd love to hear more! Using a "vault" game as suggested above would still use my Roll20 limit, I assume. How can I add assets stored locally without manually juggling them in/out? Is that possible? I'll point out that if you feel you need half a terabyte of files in your Roll20 library, you most likely need to reexamine what resolution/data/file options you've selected for your uploaded assets. With 500gb of images/sound I think I'd be able to run several completely unique campaign's a day for several years.

Joe P. said: I'd love to hear more! Using a "vault" game as suggested above would still use my Roll20 limit, I assume. How can I add assets stored locally without manually juggling them in/out? Is that possible? Items in your art library and My Audio contribute to your storage quota. Virtually nothing deployed in a game does. I.e. if you have a graphic on the table that is 1 MB in size, that graphic needs to be in your art library. It doesn't matter how many times it is placed in your game, how many games it is placed in , or even if it is placed anywhere at all. That's 1 MB off your quota. Using a Library Campaign just lets you control your game size. There is no official Roll20 limit on game size. Merely a practicial limit imposed by what your individual browser (and to a lesser extent, your players' browsers) can handle. If you have that 1 MB graphic on three different pages or 3 times on a map in your game, that will alter how much memory your game takes up when it is loaded. (I am assuming it won't matter much for the MB it takes to store your game on the Roll20 servers). The more things there are actually deployed in your game, the more browser memory it takes to run, and the greater the chance that you will run into slowdowns. One area in which you actually can reference external assets is by using image codes in chat: [img](image_url) will display in chat whatever image is referenced by the URL. It doesn't contribute to your storage quota. It might contribute to your browser load size if you have not recently cleared your chat log or scrolled beyond it (not certain on this part).

Awesome, thanks all for the explanations, this has been very helpful. I think with the strategies here, it shouldn't be a problem to manage this.