Consistently we’ve seen a rush of new players coming to Roll20 at the start of each year– getting into tabletop gaming seems to be a resolution for more people every winter.
Anticipating this influx of new folks, we laid a lot of groundwork in the latter half of 2018 to be able to make the Roll20 Virtual Tabletop its all-time best. In addition to our typical measures of prepping for increased server loads, we’ve done more update planning than any other year thus far to help kick off a new season of gaming.
This is our most in-depth roadmap release ever– LOTS of information ahead, so put your reading glasses on...
First on the resolutions list: Charactermancer Levels Up will deploy next week on January 8 to our live servers. The first version of this enhancement will be seen via our Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition sheet, allowing players to level up your characters, guiding you through all the possible skills, spells, feats, and even multiclass options.
If only all New Year’s goal-tracking was so easy. :) Reminder that Pro Users can test these features right now on the Development Server.
Soon after Charactermancer Levels Up, we’re going to release the long-awaited Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, a D&D Compendium that will be fully compatible with Charactermancer. It has over twenty-five new subclasses for you to try out, along with traps, magic items, and more to up the danger level in your campaign.
Please also note that we’re additionally working towards opening the creation tools of the Charactermancer for community submissions. Sheet creators, please keep an eye out on the Character Sheets & Compendium forum.
Speaking of the forums, we’re moving ahead with several improvements to our forums in the month of January. In addition to measures that should yield both faster response times and better information, we have a new system we’ll be unveiling soon that will help clarify both the community and development team’s voices on the Suggestions & Ideas Forum. Stay tuned for this, and the announcement of the next Community Roundtable later in the month.
On the subject specifically of Suggestions, many requests over the past two years have been related to improving graphics in Roll20. Last year we kicked off the process of improving our tabletop rendering with “A Measured Update.” This year we’ll be launching the Get a New Look update, which will significantly improve Advanced Fog of War and add moving images such as gifs. Portions of this update are already on the Development Server for testing, and we expect the full update to ship to the live production server at the end of January. Get a New Look sets up an additional storm of possibilities we’ll be unveiling later in Q1.
From sights to sounds, in early February we’ll be launching Bring Your Own Beat, an audio-focused update that will allow you to upload your own music directly to Roll20, alongside improvements to the audio dashboard. We also anticipate an update to our Voice & Video WebRTC services, making for improved chat in games. Again, much of this is already on the Development Server for testing
That’s the big-picture preview of how we’re kicking off the year! We’ve done a lot to prepare all of this, and are really excited to start sharing.