Using Roll20 - Revisited!

In early 2020 when the Pandemic hit I really got into online roleplaying, specifically 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons and more importantly for this article I started using Roll20. Roll20 allowed me and my friends to keep playing games despite the fact we weren’t allowed to meet up in person anymore.

I found Roll20 was a pretty powerful tool but the documentation for beginners was pretty lacking. But I had plenty of time to figure it out and I decided to share what I had learnt in a blog on this site.

It is now 3 years later and I have almost 4000 hours clocked on Roll20. In that time I have run several long running 5e campaigns and a number of one-shots, I have run games of Tales from the Loop, The Expanse RPG and have even used Roll20 to test my own game system. I have learnt a lot since I wrote those first articles and think it’s time to revisit them.

Roll20 Character Sheets

One thing I didn’t realise in those early days was how powerful the Character Sheets are that Roll20 provide! These aren’t just a place where you can see your stats and equipment - they are fully interactive sheets with clickable fields. Want to roll a Quarterstaff attack? Just click on the Quarterstaff entry in the “Attacks and Spellcasting” box. Want to make an Initiative Roll? Click on the Initiative Box. Want to make a Strength Saving Throw? Just click on Strength in the Saving Throws box!

I can’t believe I didn’t know about this! I spent weeks looking into Macros, learning how to code Roll20 and writing convoluted equations in an attempt to roll a simple attack dice. Nowadays I don’t use Macros hardly at all.

There are character sheets for most of the big games but I’ll talk about the 5e D&D ones mostly here.

Creating a Character

As the GM you need to create a Character Sheet for each of your players. This is as simple as going into the Journal Tab and clicking on the Add button. Choose Character.

Here you can give the character a name and add some character art. This can be all changed at a later date so if I’m giving someone a blank character sheet I tend to just fill out the player’s name. If they already have a Roll20 account and have been invited to the game then you can give them access to the sheet in their own Journal and can give them permission to edit and control the character sheet. If they haven’t joined the game yet you can do this later once they have joined.

Once the character sheet has been created you can now start populating it. There are 3 ways of doing this. The first is by using the “Charactermancer” and is hugely powerful. It allows you or your player to create a character step-by-step. If you have a free account without any paid-for content (such as The Players Handbook) you will be limited to the character options that are part of the SRD - the D&D license that allows 3rd parties to use their content. So for example when choosing the character’s Background you are limited to the Acolyte background. If you purchase the Players Handbook you get a lot more content. If you think you’ll be playing a lot in Roll20 I would recommend it.

Another option is to create an NPC. This is a cutdown version of a character sheet suitable for NPCs controlled by the GM. There is a great trick here which is that after you have created the NPC sheet you can drag a monster from the Compendium onto the sheet and it populates it for you.

Finally you can fill out everything manually. This might be useful if you’ve already created your character on paper or if you have created a character using home-brew rules or don’t have the content within Roll20.

There is so much to the Character Sheet that I’ll talk about in the future however next time I think I’ll talk about tokens and the great free website Token Stamp 2.