#quantumroll

Sound the trumpets and ring the bells, because we’re kicking off the new decade with a huge new milestone: there are now over 5 million Roll20 users in the world! To everyone out there who’s created an account, who’s invited friends to join them, who’s told us what they need and pushed us to make this platform better and better: thank you.

It seems like just yesterday that we celebrated 3 million users… but actually that was 2 years ago (almost to the day)! 2 million users in two years? We’re flattered, and we’re doing our best to keep up with the lot of you by adding new features, new products, and new systems throughout 2020. In fact, we’ve got some news for you to celebrate this 5 million milestone…

Many of you have waited patiently for updates on our new Dynamic Lighting system. Today we can confirm that the new, updated Dynamic Lighting will become available for Pro subscribers to try out on the Dev Server NEXT WEEK. We weren’t planning to announce that yet, but what can we say? 5 million users deserve a little treat. The new Dynamic Lighting will integrate all lighting controls in one system and run faster to boot! We’ll have more information about what this update means for all subscribers next week.

We’re also thrilled to see that so many of you enjoyed the new Custom Token Markers feature released last month. In just the first week, you all created 5,452 unique sets. This feature was a popular request from the Suggestions Forum, so keep those votes coming!

You’re playing more systems than ever, as the most recent Orr Report shows. Over the last year, we’ve increased the number of official Roll20 sheets by 30%, often adding Charactermancer support along the way, while our community (that’s you!) continues to make great games possible with over 700 community sheets in hundreds of systems. In just the last year, we’ve added support for the following systems:

Pathfinder Second Edition

Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition

FATE (Core + Accelerated)

Cypher System (+ Numenéra + The Strange)

Kids on Bikes

Roll20 has certainly come a long way since that day in April 2012 when three college friends launched a Kickstarter for “virtual tabletop gaming that tells a story.” From the very first day, the enthusiasm and generosity of this community blew us away. Even now, we’re humbled and grateful for the kindness, passion, and creativity that you all have brought to the (virtual) table.

We’re thrilled to continue making great stories with you, and we asked QuantumRoll to show our appreciation by giving you more successes in your dice this year.

Charactermancer

Today’s update to Roll20 makes it easier than ever to join tabletop games thanks to our brand new, built-it character creation and modification tool. Meet the Charactermancer! As shown in this video, it will guide you through the rules of your chosen system to create and edit your character in minutes. And since it integrates with our fully-featured virtual tabletop, you’ll be ready to start your adventure as soon as you’re done!

The Charactermancer walks you through how to build a character!

Roll20 remains committed to providing you with a system agnostic platform for your tabletop games, and the Charactermancer is no exception. It is powerful enough and flexible enough to support any system, and we will soon be adding more. In fact, here’s a sneak preview of a certain system that is in the works...

Sneak Preview! Official support for this system (and more) will be added Soon™.

Starting right away today, however, you can use the Charactermancer in your own games to make a first level Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition character! The SRD rules have already been integrated and will continue to be available to all users for free, as always. Additional features (like the ability to level up your characters) are also in the works!

If you want more than the SRD, you can also purchase supplemental rules through the Roll20 Marketplace. We will be adding future support for Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, and the Charactermancer already supports the entire D&D Player’s Handbook. Oh, hang on: did we not mention that yet?

THE DUNGEONS & DRAGONS PLAYER’S HANDBOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE ON ROLL20!

We had a lot to say, so we made a separate blog post about that. We recommend you read it! The Player’s Handbook is available at a special launch price of $19.99 USD until July 5 at 10 A.M. PDT, after which it will return to its regular $29.99 USD forever so… act fast. ;)

Compendium Sharing

Want to share your rulebooks around the virtual table here on Roll20? Well, now you can thanks to a brand new feature called Compendium Sharing! Go into your Game Settings and turn on “Share my compendium with players” to give all your players automatic access to all the rules, items, spells, and more for any Roll20 Compendium you’ve purchased in the ruleset of your choice.

Share your purchased Compendiums with other players in your games! See sharing rules below.

The number of games where you can share compendiums, and the number of players you can share with, is based on your subscription level. We want to make sure licensed content here is safe from being exploited beyond the intended personal use, so we have set the following limits:

Free Users: Free users may purchase any compendium. They may only share their purchased compendiums with one active game that contains no more than themselves plus 5 players (6 total).

Plus Subscribers: Roll20 Plus subscribers may purchase any compendium. They may share their purchased compendiums with three active games that contain no more than themselves plus 10 players each (11 total per game).

Pro Subscribers: Roll20 Pro subscribers may purchase any compendium. They may share their purchased compendiums with five active games that contain no more than themselves plus 15 players each (16 total per game).

And more!

We went under the hood and made a bunch of useability improvements for this update to make your life on Roll20 easier. We also added a new mechanic to our dice rolls, to help support more systems in this wide, wide world of tabletop design! These updates include:

Character Vault Update: Increased usability for Roll20’s Character Vault, which allows users to transfer their favorite characters easily between games.

Wiki Repaint: Updated design for the Roll20.net Wiki which helps players learn about the tools and features of Roll20.

Text Editor Improvement: Enhanced, reliable editing features for forum posts and in-game text windows such as Handouts and Character Bios. Note: See our update about the text editor here. 

New Dice Matching Mechanic: New logic for the QuantumRoll dice engine supports dice matching mechanics (explained further in our earlier blog post).