Roll20 | Notion

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Basic Requirements		Good Aspects (Higher is Better)		Bad Aspects (Lower is Better)
Platform:	‣ ‣	Game Support:	‣ ‣ ‣ ‣	Complexity:	🔴🔴🔴⚪⚪
Up Front Cost:	Free to 💰	Community:	🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢	Tedium:	🔴🔴🔴⚪⚪
Ongoing Cost:	Free to 💰💰💰	Features:	🟢🟢🟢🟢⚪
Cost of Books:	N/A to 💰💰💰	User Interface:	🟢🟢🟢⚪⚪	‣ for this chart

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Intro

Roll20 is by far the most popular virtual tabletop on the market today, and for good reason. It is the absolute easiest way to find a cohesive group for many different TTRPGs including the most popular ones with D&D and Pathfinder support. While its featureset is lacking and its price is high, that ease of getting people into your games cannot be denied as that’s generally the biggest meme about tabletop games in general. Getting people to sit down. Its also easy to get into as most people’s first experience with a VTT is by playing in other people’s games. It never costs money to play and there are two optional subscription tiers just for game masters. Everybody has heard of it because it was the first browser-based VTT to compete against Fantasy Grounds, so help is easy to find.

However, even though Roll20 has a lot of features, it also a lot of flaws. While its interface is simple, it’s not very intuitive, and core features can sometimes be very slow or downright buggy. The developers rarely implement fixes or changes, and the community of Pro subscribers pay to create most new or innovative features. Corporate Roll20 has displayed that it does not respect the community or small RPG companies. They have tried to turn around this stigma, but the platform still doesn’t innovate at anywhere near the pace as their competitors.

Cost

Base	💰 Plus	💰💰Pro
Free / Players	$5.99/mo , $49.99/year	$9.99/mo $99.99/year
100 MB Upload Storage	3 GB Upload Storage	8 GB Upload Storage
Compendium Sharing 1 Game / 5 Players	Compendium Sharing 3 Games / 10 Players	Compendium Sharing 5 Game / 15 Players
Look for Group 2 Listings	Look for Group Unlimited Listings	Look for Group Highlighted Listings
	Dynamic Lighting	Dynamic Lighting
	No Loadscreen Ads	No Loadscreen Ads
	Shared Table Features	Shared Table Features
	All Access Character Vault	All Access Character Vault
		Transmogrifier
		Roll20 Reserve Reward
		Custom Character Sheets
		Mod (API) Access
		Early Access

Features

Battlemaps
- ✅ Shared battlemaps with player- and GM-controlled tokens
- ✅ Basic drawing capability that can do shapes, polygons, lines, or freehand
- 😕 Map-making tools — assets can be searched for (and bought from the marketplace) and dropped onto the grid like any other image or token, though maps made from many assets are very slow
- ✅ Ruler with ability to change angle (to measure distance around corners for instance)
- ✅ Simple Fog of War
- 💙💰 Dynamic Lighting — including Advanced Fog of War, which allows players to see where they have been. In the past this was very slow, but as of just a couple days ago it is apparently New & Improved.
Chat & Dice
- 💙 Advanced chat with roll commands & extensive macros, as well as speaking in and out of character, whispering, emotes, etc.
- ✅ Die rolls from character sheets
- ✅ Visual (non-chat) dice rolling interface
- 💙 3D dice (not the most convincing in the world but nice to have)
Character Sheets
- 💙 Character sheets for NUMEROUS games
- ✅ 💰 Character Vault — move characters between games
- 😕 💰💰 Custom character sheets can be created using HTML and CSS (not something everyone knows how to do)
Compendium
- ✅ the SRDs of several games are searchable in-game, including D&D and Pathfinder
- 😕 Some content from the compendium is drag-n-drop-able onto character sheets
- 😕 Some purchases from the Marketplace are added to your compendium (for instance the Player’s Handbook)
- ✅ 💰 Compendium Sharing — Share paid compendium additions (such as from D&D and Pathfinder) with your whole table. Free accounts can share with 1 game/5 players, Plus can share with 3 games/10 players, and Pro can share with 5 games/15 players.
Handouts, Etc
- 😕 Journal — GM can store, show, and give players selective access to handouts and notes, which can be rich text or images. The text editor can be very buggy, though.
- ✅ Playing cards, custom card decks, and custom random tables
- 💰 Storage — free accounts get only 100mb of upload space, while Plus gets 3 GB and Pro gets 6 GB.
Automation
- 😕 Turn Tracker — no frills, it gets the job done. It can be a pain to add tokens one-by-one.
- 😕 Some character sheets allow players to click to roll, including the official Dungeons & Dragons sheet
- 💙 Players and GM can save macros to a quick bar or a token bar for easy access — these can be very simple, or be incredibly complex, even using dropdowns and hooking into multiple character sheets
- ✅ 💰💰 API Scripts — there are tons of community scripts on the forum, mostly for D&D
Music & Video Streaming
- ✅ Integrated voice and video calls via the google hangouts API - As of 2023 this has now been integrated into Roll20 proper
- 😕 Jukebox — GM can upload music and play it simultaneously on all players computers, though it is buggy and putting music into playlists is weirdly complicated
Extras
- 😕💰 Tablet support — it can be buggy to use in the tablet browser with touch interaction, and the tablet app only does chat and character sheet. No phone support.
- ✅ Forum and Help Center for tips, instructions, and assistance
- 💙 Marketplace where game material, tokens, map assets, and more are available for purchase. Wizards of the Coast has partnered with Roll20 to provide the majority of D&D adventures and books on the platform, some of which hook into the Compendium and character sheets.
- 💙 Join a Game — board for advertising and joining games from all over the world
- 💰💰 Access to Dev Server

Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
• Ease of entry and low learning curve— only a browser and perhaps a webcam is required. Roll20’s interface is fairly intuitive and you don’t need to be highly tech-savvy to use it. The basic functionality is easy to use and get running in minutes.
• A completely functional game of almost any RPG can be run completely for free. Subscription pricing is very reasonable.
• There are community-made character sheets available for tons of different games, even indie ones. If you want to create a character sheet for your niche RPG, you can do it with a web coding knowledge.
• WOTC and Paizo partnerships mean popular RPG adventures and books are available to drop into games, usually with literally all the work (including dynamic lighting setup) done for you.
• Roll20 is extensible — advanced functionality can be created with macros and scripts made by the community. If you know how to code, you can use the API to make scripts of your own.
• Most problems are experienced by advanced users (dynamic lighting, scripts, etc.) The core functionality works pretty solidly.	• There are a lot of features, but Roll20 is definitely the jack of all trades, master of none. Many cool features are barely usable, such as the jukebox upload, advanced dynamic lighting, compendium drag-n-drop, etc., or at best extremely clunky like the drawing tool.
• The subscription model means that if you use premium features, you never truly "own" your games.
• Dynamic lighting/advanced dynamic lighting, large maps, and maps with many assets are slow and may freeze the computers of your players if they're playing on a Chromebook or something.
• Corporate is seemingly unresponsive to RPG companies who are not WOTC or Paizo. There was also a lot of drama with corporate silencing criticism on Reddit and the forum, though the subreddit and discord are under new management.
• Development is very slow, unresponsive to requests that have been made for years, and often barely perceptible. Roll20 seems content to sit back and do the bare minimum to rake in the cash. Most improvements are made by the community via custom scripts by people who paid to have access to the API in the first place. Then, when roll20 does make changes, they break everything.

Intro

Cost

Features

Pros & Cons

Recommendations