Roll20, Demiplane, and Daggerheart

Oh, hey, are you still here? Lots of cobwebs I need to clear out of here. I should dust more often. But hey, as long as you’re here, why don’t we talk about something RPG related? Have you heard about this Daggerheart thing? I’ve got lots of other stuff to say, but why don’t we get a little specific? Let’s talk about how Roll20’s Demiplane implementation is going to work for Daggerheart.

Roll20/Demiplane Implementation

If you haven’t heard, Roll20 and Demiplane are integrating character sheets from Roll20’s character builder, instead of using a character sheet specifically built for the Roll20 platform. Daggerheart is an interesting game to look at, because, unlike some of the other games on Roll20, Daggerheart doesn’t have a native Roll20 character sheet. The game is basically jumping in on the deep end.

So what does this look like? Let’s start up a new game and look. We may not be seeing free character sheets, at least not created by the publisher, because it’s looking for a connection to Demiplane. You can make a character without connecting it to Demiplane, but “character sheet” in this case means uploading a token and typing some things in the blank player notes section, and maybe your DM will put some additional notes there that only they can see.

Adding Characters

Once you add “Demiplane” as your character sheet, the +Character button will also have a drop down connected to an existing character. As usual, you can make characters visible to all players, so if you’re the GM, you could make pregenerated characters that others can use. Once you link the character sheet, it works very much like any other character sheet on Roll20.

Rollable buttons and links on the character sheet come through in the chat log on in the chat tab of the VTT. Anything that is supported on the character sheet as rollable comes through in the chat log, so if the Demiplane character sheet gives you the option to add bonuses or re-roll checks, when you click on those buttons, it comes through in the chat log. 

This isn’t common for Roll20 character sheets, but to clarify, you can’t target a character and have a roll react to the statistics of that character sheet. You can highlight a token, roll a check on a different character sheet, and have the difficulty or modifications to the roll applied to the roll. The main reason I mention this is that even though it isn’t a common implementation on a Roll20 character sheet, some character sheets, like The One Ring 2e, have this functionality, and some VTTs have implemented this kind of functionality.

That said, there is a damage calculator on the character sheet, so once you know how much damage your character has taken, you can add the damage number you have taken, and toggle resistance or armor slots. 

The other reason I bring this up is that Demiplane is planning on releasing GM tools for Daggerheart on the site, which would allow you to, among other things, create and modify adversaries. Will you be able to pull those individual adversaries into Demiplane so the GM has their custom made adversaries available in the VTT? It’s hard to say until we see the tools, but given that Demiplane is asymmetrical, i.e. the GM rules for adversaries are not the same as the character building rules for player characters.

The portrait you pick for your character will come through as a token if you pull it to the map in the VTT, but you still have the same option, on the same detail page that appears for all character sheets in Roll20, where you can add a separate image for a token beyond your portrait. If you use the image from your Daggerheart character sheet, it comes in as a perfect 1 x 1 square on the grid. 

What’s Integrated and What Isn’t

About the only thing I wish the character sheet would do that it doesn’t currently do would be to let you add your experiences on a roll, may be indicated by turning on or off check boxes next to them. There is an option to click on + or – buttons when you get ready to make a roll as indicated on the character sheet, so it’s pretty easy to add two or three to the roll when you can apply your experiences, but I would still like to see a way to toggle those on other checks from the character sheet.

I mentioned that all the rolls on the character sheet will come through. Here are all the buttons that are available on the Daggerheart character sheet:

• Directly rolling Traits
• Primary attack roll
• Attack damage
• Spellcast rolls for individual abilities
• Re-roll button for each of these rolls
• Weapon proficiency override (which changes the number of dice rolled for attack damage

There are also several dynamic tracking elements to the character sheet, which don’t specifically come through in the chat log, but are available for tracking individual variable elements on the character sheet. These include:

• Proficiency override (see above)
• Hope
• Hit Points (Update Hit Points using the damage calculator)
• Stress
• Spending Hope for your Hope Feature
• Tracking numbers or uses of unique ability based on character options
• Stress spends from various abilities that are triggered by spending stress

Is there anything that will still be an issue that the character sheet can’t track? Maybe. There are a few abilities that change the d12 you roll for your duality dice. For example, there might be an ability that makes this more desperate for the players that change their Hope die to a d10, or there may be an ability that bolsters a character that changes the Hope die to a d20. You can still use the Roll20 dice roller to roll dice outside of the character sheet buttons, but it’s a function I’d like to see.

It’s a minor thing, but for my screen size, the default size of the sidebar in Roll20 where Chat/Art/Journal/Compendium/Jukebox/Collections/Settings appear is slightly too narrow to display the entire box that shows the roll result details from the character sheet. That’s pretty minor, and it’s easy enough to left click and drag that sidebar to make it wide enough to read.

Speaking of the Compendium, when you click on the Compendium in a game with Daggerheart character sheets, the compendium opens up in Demiplane. It opens up in a separate tab on the browser. I like the compendium displayed in the sidebar when it appears in Roll20, but the compendium that pops up looks much nicer than the internal compendium that Roll20 normally shows for a game.

Exploring Other Demiplanes

As I get the opportunity, I’m really interested in exploring more of the implemented character sheets. I’m especially interested in the Marvel Multiverse RPG, especially, because GM characters and player characters are built in the same way. It is going to be significantly easier to build and change characters for the GM to use in Roll20. I’m also really curious to see what the GM tools look like for Daggerheart, and if and how it lets you import adversaries and environments, maybe even campaign frames.

#CriticalRole #Daggerheart #Demiplane #DemiplaneNexus #Nexus #RoleplayingGame #Roll20 #rpg #TabletopRoleplaying #ttrpg #VirtualTabletop

Tales of the Valiant, Roll20, and Shard Tabletop

You may or may not have heard that Roll20 had determined that they aren’t going to develop a character sheet for Tales of the Valiant. This may not seem like a big deal, but that means they aren’t going to support Tales of the Valiant in their character builder, and they aren’t going to create the new stat blocks to show up in a character sheet for the new monster stat blocks.

Effectively, nothing fully Tales of the Valiant will be coming to the platform. Yes, this would be disappointing if you want to use Roll20, but can’t you just adapt? First, if you’re like me, you’ve got seven products you backed on Kickstarter with Roll20 add-ons.

Now, that may sound back, but one of those Kickstarters is still in the process of being produced, so that’s only five products behind. All of that is pretty aggravating. But there are a few mitigating factors, which don’t have anything to do with Roll20.

Mitigating Factor Number 1

Shard Tabletop and KoboldPress offer a subscription service for access to Kobold Press’ library on the VTT. For someone like me, who is extremely invested in the Roll20 version of these products, this is a major thing, as we’ll get to in a moment.

• Kobold Press: Player’s Subscription
• Kobold Press” Game Master Subscription

Mitigating Factor Number 2

Kobold Press is allowing people to reassign their VTT options, translate their VTT add-ons to store credit or request a refund. None of this is Kobold Press’s fault, so please don’t take any of this frustration as being directed at them.

Roll20 and Implementations

It feels to me like Roll20 announced this quietly on their Discord, and then left it to Kobold Press to break the news to everyone, which sucks since Kobold Press wasn’t the entity that dropped the ball.

Roll20 has been slowly dropping the ball on many “near 5e” conversions over the last few years. They’ve failed to set up a separate compendium and specialized character sheet for Esper Genesis. They’ve failed to implement a sheet for multiple Essence20 games (G.I. Joe, Transformers) properly.They also wholly fumbled the rollout of the Everyday Heroes line of products. Yes, I know; in the meantime, the owner of that particular product line has set fire to as much goodwill as they could . . . however . . . that has nothing to do with the fact that Roll20 couldn’t deliver.

Roll20 recently announced their plans for Demiplane integration, which includes sharing content for some companies across what you own on Demiplane and what you own on Roll20, as well as creating a “crosswalk” that will allow users to use the character sheet from Demiplane on Roll20.

Demiplane’s character builder was designed to be more modular and agile when dealing with implementing various game elements. One of the games they’ve mentioned trying to work this crosswalk with is Marvel Multiverse RPG.

That’s good because the Demiplane version of the character sheet for Marvel Multiverse RPG is much better than the Roll20 version. The character builder is miles ahead, because it’s hard to understand why you have to make decisions on the Roll20 sheet, and it’s harder to modify existing sheets.

I say all of this not because I’m not highly annoyed at Roll20, but because I want to be fair and point out that they have a lot of irons in the fire. All that said, anything 5e adjacent would be sacrificed on the altar of getting the 2024 character sheet to work.

Personal Axes to Grind

It’s not the first time I’ve had something I backed get either nuked or delayed for multiple years because it was more important to chase big money than to fulfill a promise by an RPG-related company, and I guess that’s “normal” in capitalism, but its never fun to know you aren’t the priority.

Especially when you did spend a not insignificant amount of money on a project that may not make the company as much money as another project, but still cost you the same amount regardless of their return on investment. But I’m letting a wee bit of my annoyance at another situation to bleed in.

The last thing I wanted to touch on is my current investment. A few years back, I looked at Shard Tabletop, and even though I didn’t do a deep dive until recently, even back then, I was convinced a dedicated 5e SRD site was much better for running the game than an “everything” site.

Decision Points

From the time I looked at it then, to now, Shard has only gotten better at implementing how 5e games should run. I don’t expect that they will work for everyone, but for how my brain works and for how I play and run games, I’m much happier with how Shard works.

However, when I was ramping up to move my games online, one of the considerations I had to make was how all the material I wanted to use would interact. Despite liking the interface on Shard better, I opted for Roll20, because I couldn’t get official WotC material on Shard.

I could get more of my 5e 3rd party material to work natively with WotC D&D material, so I felt like, ultimately, I wanted to go with the less ideal interface for greater flexibility. So, even though I was tempted to go with Shard for my Kobold Press purchases, I didn’t.

My current campaign is a 2014 5e game set in Kobold Press’s Midgard setting, where most of the players have options from extended 3e WotC products, so it’s not like I haven’t benefited from having all of that working together on one site.

But, if Tales of the Valiant, despite being similar and compatible, is going to be a system that is only fully supported on another site, I want access to everything I can currently use with 5e. Thankfully, the Shard Tabletop Kobold Press subscription allows this.

On Digital “Ownership”

I would much rather “own” everything I “own” on the site where I use the material. I can’t count on Kobold Press or Shard infinitely offering the subscription model, and once it’s gone, that’s a lot of material that I don’t have access to anymore.

Insert [the risk of any particular digital platform closing and you loosing access to things you’ve purchased], I know, I know. But a subscription being discontinued feels like a more immediate concern than an entire site disappearing. The thing that crystallized my frustration at this situation was putting everything from Kobold Press that I own in Roll20 into a spreadsheet and seeing what it would cost me actually to own all of that material on Shard. That comes to almost $900. Ouch.

I know it’s a risk you take in the modern era, with so much content that exists “virtually” or as a service. I’m happy that Shard Tabletop and Kobold Press do offer the subscriptions they offer, so I can run games on the site with all of the things I’m used to using.

But wow, do I wish I could go back to me a few years ago, starting to ramp up my online game materials and tell past me, “no, you can’t keep everything on one platform, so you may as well go with the platform you enjoy using rather than the one with more options.”

#5eSRD #BlackFlagReferenceDocument #Demiplane #dnd #DungeonsDragons #DungeonsDragons2024 #gaming #KoboldPress #Roll20 #rpg #rpgs #ShardTabletop #TalesOfTheValiant #ttrpg #ttrpgs #VTTs

Roll20+Demiplane Alpha 2/25:
• Cross-Platform Sync = cross-platform assets
• Roll20 Plus and Pro = unlimited Demiplane characters
• Starfinder character sheet integration

https://blog.roll20.net/posts/demiplane-roll20-integration-1/

#ttrpgs #vtt #roll20 #demiplane @roll20app @demiplanerpg

I originally posted these in some threads on social media, but I wanted to put these thoughts all in one place, and hopefully a place that doesn’t get washed away too quickly. If you’ve already seen this, thanks for checking in, again.

Just as a head’s up, I hadn’t found the infographic for the rollout yet, so the fact that you can’t update characters from the 2014 sheet to the 2024 sheet is actually a planned, phased rollout issue, and not a problem with how the sheet functions.

Playing around with the D&D Beta character sheet in Roll20, with the idea that I might try it for a session. It’s not really in a shape that I could run a session of an existing game using the sheet, and in its current state, it might be rough to use it for a new one-shot.

Hands-On Observations

So far, every existing NPC that I open requires the character to be rebuilt. Every player character that I opened needed to be rebuilt. Not insurmountable, but it’s not going to be useful outside of building new characters or rebuilding existing characters.

The “build a character” option when you create a new character has a similar function to the Marvel Multiverse RPG where you can build a new character or pick an existing premade character, and you still have the option to directly edit the character sheet.

Unfortunately, when I tried to use the premade character, the interface wouldn’t allow me to drag the character onto the map. I tried it with multiple premade characters, and for some reason, none could be dragged onto the map. Could I be missing something? Maybe?

An Aside

If you build a player character, from what I could see, things are working . . . for any options that are working to begin with. For example, the Witch and the Theurge from Kobold Press just don’t work if you try to make a character, but that’s true in the regular character sheet as well.

You can set the Theurge’s spells per level manually, and drag spells onto the sheet in the regular character sheet. I saw a place to manually add how many spell slots a Theurge has per level on the new sheet, but not the “use the full caster” option from the old sheet.

For what it’s worth, this is more of a Roll20 issue in general, because I did some quick character building for some of the Adventures in Rokugan and the MCDM Illrigger class, and those appear to present what you need to actually build the character.

This is just that the Roll20 version of Deep Magic Volume 1 & 2 are an incomplete implementation that haven’t been marked as such. But it’s broken enough that it’s hard to even just manually bypass some of the things the character sheet doesn’t do automatically.

Disconnected Bits

Back to stuff that’s actually an issue with the character sheet, this doesn’t really limit the ability to run a game, and it’s probably something on the horizon, somewhere, I hope, but any species that has set ABIs automatically get those, and there isn’t a toggle to use the Tasha’s option.

I say, “I hope,” because this probably wasn’t on the list of things to worry about because D&D 2024 is already built to add ability score bonuses elsewhere, and won’t require a workaround, but to use older content, it would be nice to still have that ability.

One of the big impediments to using this sheet right now is that if you have an NPC character sheet, and you click on, for example, an attack, the character sheet will display a formula that makes sense, i.e. “Claws, 1d20+5,” but when you click on the attack, it only rolls a 1d20.

If you roll on the PC version of the character sheet, the bonuses are applied to the roll. It’s just the NPC/Monster sheets that don’t seem to do it. And both versions of the sheet roll damage properly as expressed on the sheet.

You can add the bonus in your head, but it’s really inconvenient. It’s something I don’t mind doing if an NPC does something unexpected that isn’t set up, for example, and I know I do this kind of thing when I’m running offline, but I’d rather this worked before I test drive it.

I seem to remember that the Alpha version of the sheet had a hit point adjustment section where you could type in damage and either add or subtract it by clicking on a red or green option. Maybe I’m imagining it? But that’s not in the beta version of the character sheet.

Project Scope

None of this is meant to say this project is anything that it isn’t. It’s a beta test, and I’ll be submitting all of the things I ran into. I just wanted to share this for anyone else that might be wondering if they want to fire up a game to play with this themselves.

Although . . . I will say that I’m not really happy that Roll20 listings for Deep Magic volumes 1 & 2 indicate access to the Witch and the Theurge, without mentioning that these classes don’t work. There should be a note that these sources are only partially implemented.

There are actually a few games I’ve run into with these issues. I don’t know if it’s been addressed, but a lot of the rules in the Everyday Heroes Roll20 implementation were missing text and I had to do some tweaking to make characters that weren’t using anything outside of the core book.

This worries me a little bit. I feel like Roll20 may be stretching themselves thin. They’re buying multiple companies and trying to integrate them into the platform, but some games or game products remain partially implemented, along with some long running issues with quality-of-life issues.

Priorities

I know D&D 2024 is the primary concern, but I have no idea when my Roll20 Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter will be available, and I’m worried that when it is active, it’s going to be a separate, incompatible compendium that walls off my 2014 based material. That concern is based on history.

Both the G.I. Joe and Transformers RPGs were up for preorder on Roll20, and the Power Rangers RPG was actively being sold, but over a year after both of those RPGs came out, they still weren’t on the horizon, and they were just pulled from the marketplace and Renegade them to Fantasy Grounds.

That makes me concerned about the amount of resources that will be brought to bear on mechanically robust systems. I’m also concerned that it may take longer to figure out how to map Demiplane interfaces into Roll20 than it would take to build things from scratch.

Looking Forward

I don’t want to end on a note that’s too negative. I would love to get a roadmap for other projects beyond the 2024 D&D character sheet. I think that would do a lot to assuage my concerns. The language around the 2024 sheet implies there is a single team and progress is on one game at a time.

It looks like Roll20 is going the same route as Demiplane, and making character sheets that are “building blocks” that can be plugged into one another in multiple ways, which means some of the work on the 2024 character sheet is work on other games. My assumption on this is based on seeing some of the newer character sheets and their similar structures. If that’s true, maybe once the 2024 sheet is out of beta, it will clear a logjam.

https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/08/02/looking-at-roll20s-new-dd-character-sheet-beta/

#800080 #CharacterSheet #DD2014 #DD2024 #Demiplane #dnd #DnD5e #DungeonsDragons #Roll20 #VTTs

#Roll20 buys #Demiplane.

https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/roll20-announces-purchase-of-demiplane/

Roll20 has been so slow to make improvements.

I'm skeptical this will help #TTRPG folks.

https://app.demiplane.com/dops

Demiplane now offers a Digital "Deck of Player Safety"

#rpg #TTRPG #demiplane