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D&D Homebrew Character Builder Is Here

[ Original Blog ] You have a moment of inspiration, the outline of the perfect character you want to bring to life. But as those sparks of creativity crash into the logistics of rulebooks and paper, the inspiration flickers and fades.&nbsp; We’re here to spray some enchanted hairspray +1&nbsp; on your flame! The D&amp;D 2024 Homebrew Builder guides you through those logistical barriers, and gets you a fully playable character quickly! Here’s how: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P72tOSOeWhA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P72tOSOeWhA</a> Create Custom Everything The Homebrew Builder allows for custom classes, subclasses, species, and backgrounds. You can also create level specific features, modifiers, abilities and resources! Ever dreamed of a class that uses Constitution for Spellcasting and spells from across other classes’ lists? You can make that a reality! The Builder has dropdowns and choices that guide you the entire way. All level specific features you create now will show up when you reach those levels in-game, just like official content! Plan For Retirement Not only can you create features and modifiers that unlock at specific levels, you can also pre-build your entire character to max level! In the builder, level up as far as you need. Then choose all the feats, spells, and options you want. Finally, level back down. Every selection will be saved so when you level up in-game, your previous selections are unlocked without any additional time or effort! And if your ideas change along your journey, you can easily adjust! Bring Content From Your Physical Books Into Roll20 You don’t need to buy anything on Roll20 if you don’t want to. If you own a book physically, but not on Roll20, you can recreate those characters in the Builder by just typing it in and adding every feature manually. It’s even easier if you own PDFs from DMsGuild or your favorite creators, and just want to copy and paste! Add Features and Modifiers That Result in Real Automation With our Feature and Modifier Builder, you can create nearly endless options. Give your character new abilities, create custom resources, activate defenses and resistances, query advantage and disadvantage, and more. You can even set modifiers that, when the sheet is in Query Mode, will ask you if you want to apply this modifier to the selected roll, checking to see if the situation matches! Use Purchased Roll20 Content Alongside Your Homebrew If you’ve purchased books on Roll20, every character option in that book is available instantly in the Builder. You can mix and match official content and homebrew content with ease, or just reference your official content right in the builder to create your own custom offshoot! Create Homebrew Templates! One cool trick is that you can also turn your creations into reusable templates! Build a full custom character in the Builder, stop just before finalizing, then right-click the entry in your VTT Journal and duplicate it.&nbsp; Each duplicate becomes a fresh Builder-ready template you can hand to players, use for NPCs, or iterate on separately. Duplicating before finalizing opens every copy straight to the Builder, saving time for players. Automate Your Characters Once your character is built, don’t forget to add all their most regularly used actions to their token actions bar! This way you can stay in the story and combat without ever getting lost in your sheet. Learn more about that here. <a href="https://blog.roll20.net/posts/dd-2024-automations-are-here/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.roll20.net/posts/dd-2024-automations-are-here/</a>&nbsp; Try It Now These options are live and available for free to everyone! Jump into the D&amp;D 2024 Builder on Roll20 and start creating.&nbsp; Custom Spellcasting for Subclasses is coming soon! See what else is coming in our D&amp;D 2024 Public Roadmap !
This is very cool, but the thing I'd want, which I don't believe this provides, is a way for me as a DM to create a custom species (or whatever) for my campaign, pre-populate the builder, and let my players build and level-up characters based on it. This seems to be limited to an individual pre-populating info for their own use.
Ken S. said: This is very cool, but the thing I'd want, which I don't believe this provides, is a way for me as a DM to create a custom species (or whatever) for my campaign, pre-populate the builder, and let my players build and level-up characters based on it. This seems to be limited to an individual pre-populating info for their own use. It does provide it after a fashion. As a DM you can create a sheet with the custom species (or whatever else) and then duplicate it for whatever player wants to use it. Unfortunately it makes it harder if you have multiple custom species and custom classes, because there's not a way to have multiple custom species and classes (backgrounds etc etc) on a single sheet. So yeah if you are ONLY doing custom species, or ONLY doing custom classes you could just have a base sheet for each of your species and then if a player wants to use that species you can duplicate the sheet and have them build their character out from that. Anyways it's not perfect but at least it's a start.
Aikepah said: Ken S. said: This is very cool, but the thing I'd want, which I don't believe this provides, is a way for me as a DM to create a custom species (or whatever) for my campaign, pre-populate the builder, and let my players build and level-up characters based on it. This seems to be limited to an individual pre-populating info for their own use. It does provide it after a fashion. As a DM you can create a sheet with the custom species (or whatever else) and then duplicate it Exactly this :D And if you duplicate it before clicking the Build Character button, when you assign it to a player it will open up directly to the builder. That will have all your custom options and they can tweak build choices as they'd like. You can endlessly duplicate your template. As stated, not perfect, but it is a start, and we're discussing features that could alleviate this pain point further.&nbsp;
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It looks like this mostly takes the functionality that is available after the sheet is built and inserts it into the builder itself. That is a good first step. A few things that are still missing from the character sheet that I would use in my campaign. Custom Subspecies. Two of my adventure product lines have custom subspecies of elf. Custom Feats. The ability to add a custom feat of at least text (additionally with a single ASI for general feats) would simplify character creation. Currently, we choose the ASI feat and then modify it later for the custom feats. Slightly outside the scope of this thread, there are other things which are missing from the sheet in general&nbsp; (and thus this upgrade to the builder) : Access resources from attacks. If I can do a special attack PB number of times, the tick boxes for the resource should show up in the entry for the attack. Add spells to custom feats. Modify spells granted by feats, species, items, etc. There is not a way to, for instance, change the spell granted by the High Elf at level 5.
Thanks for the clarifications!
Dean said: Aikepah said: Ken S. said: This is very cool, but the thing I'd want, which I don't believe this provides, is a way for me as a DM to create a custom species (or whatever) for my campaign, pre-populate the builder, and let my players build and level-up characters based on it. This seems to be limited to an individual pre-populating info for their own use. It does provide it after a fashion. As a DM you can create a sheet with the custom species (or whatever else) and then duplicate it Exactly this :D And if you duplicate it before clicking the Build Character button, when you assign it to a player it will open up directly to the builder. That will have all your custom options and they can tweak build choices as they'd like. You can endlessly duplicate your template. As stated, not perfect, but it is a start, and we're discussing features that could alleviate this pain point further.&nbsp; I obviously don't know the code base for this page, but it sounds like a realistic way to handle this would be a section to specifically manage these pieces (classes, subclasses, species, feats, etc), and these are just saved in-game as json.&nbsp; On load of the charactermancer, it loads all roll20 provided data and then appends it with what is in-game. Unless the code base is messy (this is a new charactermancer, hopefully it has nicely isolated logic already), this should be pretty easy to implement.&nbsp; It is a shame that the only portion of roll20 that is open source is the scripting, I'd be interested in helping it along.
How would you build a class that uses non-traditional spell progression like a Warlock? Specifically looking at an Apothecary from Drakkenheim, which works similar to a Warlock, although gains additional spell slots slightly faster.