Using Roll20 in a 25-person class

Hi there. I am a professor at a small liberal arts college, and I will be teaching a course on tabletop roleplaying games in April. I have taught the course before, but the vagaries of COVID-19 mean that this time I will have to teach it remotely. I would like to use Roll20 to run the adventures, and I am wondering how I should set this up. Info: We will have 25 students plus two instructors. We will likely have 5 adventuring groups of 5 students.  Questions: Do I need 25 different paid accounts? If I purchase items, how can I share them among the members of my class? I really appreciate any and all help/advice you can give me on how to pull of a successful class.

You only need paid accounts if you wish to use the dynamic lightning (which is awesome), need more storage space (I sure did), or use API scripts (which are also awesome).  Even then, only the DM account needs it.  It is entirely possible to run a game without any paid accounts, I did for my first session before I was sure I would like being a DM. The character options or pregenerated quests you can always grab from online wikis and copy paste into your roll20 characters, but buying the items does make it quicker and easier. At most you would need 1 per simultaneous game you are looking to run.

No, no accounts need to be paid, though it becomes much easier if the game creator accounts are paid, since you can then share materials with more players. The number of games and players doesn't matter, but the compendium sharing limitations does limit the number of players that have access to non-SRD character options: More classes, races, spells, feats, backgrounds, etc. The Compendium Sharing page in the help center can give you an overview of the limitations. A Pro account for each instructor should cover 25 students. If you are willing to have students manually input expanded options on their character sheets, you can ignore compendium sharing altogether and just run modules, which come with all the monsters, maps and content needed to run an adventure. That's a very general overview. If you have specific questions I, and likely many others, would be happy to answer.

5 groups of 5 students should be fine. If you ever try to get all 25 students online at the same time (like a Classroom Zoom), that might work but might run into various problems, quirks, and slowdowns.  Not recommended.  I've ran games on here with 17-18 participants.  It worked, with some problems. Get PRO on the Creator account (my advice), get each Student a free account on here.

Thank you JC R., keithcurtis, and Gold for your help and advise! I plan to purchase a Pro account and share content with students. If I am the Pro account creator, can I create 5 games with five different parties that run simultaneously (i.e. during class time)?

Yes, with the following complications: You would likely need to assign one person in each game as a GM. I can't imagine you would want to do otherwise, but just for clarity's sake... The limit on Compendium sharing is still 15 players. I don't know if that is 15 simultaneous (in which case staggered log-ins might work) or 15 total (in which case, a second account might be necessary.) I'll see if I can find a team member to answer definitively.

In my experience, without reservation, yes you can pre-create 5 different GAMES (tables) in Roll20, which are opened at overlapping times & being played simultaneously by varying groups of people.  That isn't one of the metrics that your account is limited on. Creating unlimited games is a free feature here. Multiple games created by your account, which happen to run at the same time or different times as each other, that works fine on Roll20's end. The Wampa said: can I create 5 games with five different parties that run simultaneously (i.e. during class time)?

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Gold is absolutely right. My concern was about Compendium Sharing, not number of games simultaneously open.

Compendium Sharing, like keith said, that could be something to check into if the game will be D&D 5E and if the game will use/depend on Compendium sharing.  Entirely possible to play without the Compendium feature at all.  Of course you're right keith, if that feature is needed, then we should explore if there's an applicable limitation. I thought of something today to explain WHY you CAN do the 5 games running at the same time "on your account". It's not like a Playstation / gaming console that can only run one game-disc at a time, and can only show 1-game on the TV at a time. This is more like Books you Wrote, or Webpages you Posted..... Lots of different people around the world can look at your books or webpages at the same time, they don't all need to be on the same book, same page, and they don't have to take turns and wait for the others to stop looking at it.

keithcurtis said: The limit on Compendium sharing is still 15 players. I don't know if that is 15 simultaneous (in which case staggered log-ins might work) or 15 total (in which case, a second account might be necessary.) I'll see if I can find a team member to answer definitively. That's 15 people with access to the game.  If you add a 16th, the compendium is not available for anyone in the game, even if there's only 1 person logged in at that point.

Thank you all again so much. This discussion has been incredibly helpful to me in imagining how I can get my crew rolling those nat 20s when April comes along. I do want to use Compendium sharing, as I plan to purchase the DM starter bundles (I used the Essentials Kit last year to get my class going with DnD, and that worked so well--everyone really enjoyed the campaign). Drespar, I did receive a helpful message from support.