The Roll20 Team
We’re continuing our work on Rugged Reroll this week by introducing two new features which make it easier to use the context in your game to enhance gameplay, speed up combat, and make life easier for GMs with a lot of monsters to manage.
Token Actions
Token Actions are specially-designated Macros and Character Abilities which appear whenever a token is selected on the screen. They appear in a bar along the top of your screen, and the contents of the bar are context-sensitive. This means that when you choose a token, you’ll see all macros that are token actions, but only abilities that are token actions for the character (if any) that token represents.
There are several great things this adds to Roll20. For example, if you are a GM with several different types of monsters to manage, each with their own attacks, AC, buffs, etc., you can simply create a Character for each monster type (e.g. Goblin Archer, Goblin Mage, etc.). Then create as many tokens as you need linked to those Character “types”. Finally, create abilities on each Character type, and designate them as Token Actions. When you select a Goblin Archer token on-screen, you’ll get a handy bar with the archer’s abilities, and you can just click to roll them. You’ll get a completely different bar for the Goblin Mage, with its own rolls and buffs ready to go. This definitely helps keep the game flowing, so you’re not constantly flipping through the Journal tab or looking up information about rolls on paper sheets.
Another way this makes gameplay easier is for system-wide rolls, in conjunction with the “@{selected}” variables. For example, let’s assume you have a “Bluff” roll that any character can roll, where it’s always 1d20 + the character’s CHA score. Set up Characters for each PC and NPC that include the CHA attribute. Then create a single macro called “Bluff” that everyone can see, with the contents “/roll 1d20 + @{selected|CHA}”. Then, you (and your players) will be able to select any token, press the “Bluff” button that appears at the top of the screen, and get the correct roll.
We’re excited to see the different ways that token actions will really speed up gameplay and help our our GMs!
Target Variables & Abilities
For a while now, we’ve had the option to use the “@{selected}” snippet to pull in information from tokens that are selected while a roll is performed. In Rugged Reroll, we’re expanding that to include “@{target}” variables and “%{target}” abilities.
When you use these snippets in your rolls, Roll20 will ask you to choose a target from the screen. Players can choose from tokens they can’t normally select, such as enemy or monster tokens, as well.
While you can’t fully automate combat with these new snippets, they can be used to include basic information right in the roll, such as the AC of the target you are attacking, or a healing spell that automatically includes the target’s relevant healing bonus.
Getting Even Easier
In addition, we’re constantly working to improve Roll20’s UI, and in Rugged Reroll we’re re-organizing the token settings dialog into two tabs to make the most-often changed features front and center; character editor and viewer dialogs now remember the last tab they were on the last time they were opened; and Roll Queries now only ask you a value once instead of repeatedly when the same prompt is re-used in a single roll.
As always, these updates are now available on Dev for our Mentors to help test and provide feedback on – “mentoring” the Dev Team by helping us shape the final form of these features as they’ll appear for everyone in December. (Want to be part of that process? You can!)
More to come next week!
