Roll20 Interface Design

GM view for Curse of Strahd

I’ve been running Curse of Strahd with the Roll20 VTT for the last 58 sessions, and apparently spent over 330 hours working with the interface for that game alone. The hour count is so height, despite the sessions usually being two and half to three hours because of the time I’ve spent doing preparation within the game set up. It is, by far, my most used VTT.

The platform has been getting steadily better as time has gone on, and changes have been much more apparent over the last 12 months. I think that the creators have realised that other VTTs such as Foundry are a serious threat so they’ve raised their game.

The main challenge I find with the game is the need for a huge amount of screen area to run effectively. Even on a 3000x2000 (ish) MacBook display, it feels cramped. This is because the elements within the game - the turn order, scenario parts, characters, images and more all display within the tabletop window. You can pop them out, but that has its own challenges.

I’m usually using a second screen now - I have a full HD portable monitor that I plug in and often pop out the chat window and the music player, and sometimes even monsters and NPCs. The challenge with this is that you can’t actually collapse these back into the main window or recover them if you manage to close them without reloading the page. You may wonder why someone may do this; it’s usually a double click when you mean a single click and an accidental closure. I can’t tell you exactly why, but I still do it. 

I’ve found myself opening a second browser - Safari - on the second screen and using D&D Beyond’s version of Curse of Strahd for reference rather than the same references in Roll20. This is because the structure of the hyperlinked text is much easier to navigate in Beyond than Roll20. The downside is that I then have to scramble to the Roll20 element if there’s a linked item like a handout or NPC that I want to display quickly.

I have been impressed with how user-friendly some of the elements of the platform have become; dynamic lighting was a nightmare when we started and now is a really slick system which is pretty intuitive to work. The screenshot above shows a GM’s overview so all the light is visible; players would be seeing much less. The design of barriers to light is very simple, and something that I’ve done several times when I’ve added in extra battle maps into the game.

On balance, I like Roll20, and I’d happily run more with it. This is particularly the case with D&D 5e, as I have invested into the core books on it and overall it’s pretty decently done. I’ve also used it for Alien, Vaesen and City of Mist, all of which have worked well. I’m currently slowly building Castle Xyntillan into Roll20 to run as a drop-in Old-School Essentials game.That said, I don’t love the way Roll20 works the way I love Role. I suspect that my feelings for Role have developed that way because it resembles a slightly better version of the Google Hangouts games that I’ve played for years with the Gumshoe group.

The answer to these niggles isn’t Foundry; I’ve had similar frustrations on that platform for different aspects. I’m conscious that Foundry has improved since the last time that I used it, but I’m reluctant to add a third VTT to my arsenal as a GM, especially for games that I’ve bought material for.

What’s your experience of Roll20? What do you like and what could be better?

9 December 2022