Roll20

• 1. Introduction

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  Roll20 was built by three roommates who wanted an excuse to keep playing Dungeons & Dragons after college scattered them to different cities. Riley Dutton, Nolan Jones, and Richard Zayas turned their personal project into a Kickstarter in the spring of 2012. Their initial ask was just $5,000. Backers gave them almost $40,000. Within months the browser tool the three friends built for themselves was live to the public. Strangers could now roll dice together from opposite ends of a screen. That workaround did not stay small. How did a homemade tool grow into a platform millions of players return to? How did it survive an internal moderation scandal and a breach of its own user data? And how did it end up merging with the very companies whose games it hosts?

• 2. Licensed and Growing

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  After a short beta test, Roll20 opened to the public in September 2012, following the close of its Kickstarter campaign. The site reported reaching 1 million users by July 2015. It counted 2 million users by January 2017.

  Academic Evan Torner examined that growth in his 2021 book, Watch Us Roll: Essays on Actual Play and Performance in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. He wrote that Roll20 allows players to seamlessly control information in a shared "tabletop" era, broadcasting the action to the wider audience watching it play. Torner added that the platform "would impact the play of millions at mass scale." It would also let players "document and broadcast their actual play experiences for others to consume."

  In July 2016, Roll20 announced it had licensed official Dungeons & Dragons material from Wizards of the Coast. The company released Lost Mine of Phandelver, the first official module for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition, on the Roll20 Marketplace, with other releases following. In February 2018, Paizo's Pathfinder and Starfinder became officially supported on the platform.

  That same community goodwill would be tested within months, when one of Roll20's own co-founders became the center of a moderation dispute.

• 3. A Moderation Reckoning

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  In September 2018, Nolan T. Jones, a Roll20 co-founder acting as head moderator of the Reddit Roll20 subreddit, banned a user named ApostleO. Jones mistook the account for another user he believed was evading an earlier ban. ApostleO could not get the ban clarified or corrected, so he deleted his Roll20 account and posted an account of the exchange to Reddit.

  Many users criticized the ban, Jones' handling of it, and the fact that Roll20 staff moderated the subreddit at all. Roll20 apologized publicly and turned moderation of the subreddit over to the community.

  In February 2019, TechCrunch reported that Roll20's databases had been breached alongside those of 8 other companies. Information belonging to more than 4 million Roll20 users turned up for sale on a dark web marketplace.

  The breach landed just over a year before a global health crisis would send far larger numbers of players to the platform.

• 4. The Pandemic Surge

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  When COVID-19 shut down in-person gatherings in 2020, many gaming groups moved their tables onto Roll20 to keep playing. Liz Schuh, head of publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons, said virtual play rose 86% that year, "aided by online platforms such as Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds."

  Erik Mona, speaking for Paizo, said tools like Roll20 and Discord "played a huge role in keeping the Pathfinder and Starfinder communities together." He noted that they helped the annual PaizoCon, originally planned as an in-person event in Seattle, go fully digital in 2020.

  In July 2021, Roll20 raised subscription prices for the first time. Its annual Plus tier rose from $49.99 to $59.99, and its annual Pro tier rose from $99.99 to $109.99, with monthly pricing increasing too.

  In February 2022, Ankit Lal, a veteran of Google, became Roll20's chief executive. Polygon reported that since March 2020 the company had tripled in size, growing from 20 or 25 employees to nearly 60. Lal said he now oversaw two separate groups of staff, one focused on users and another on publishers.

  Dicebreaker reported, citing Roll20's public relations team, that the platform's user base had doubled in almost two years. It rose from 5 million users to more than 10 million.

  That doubling in users set the stage for a wave of corporate consolidation just months later.

• 5. Joining Forces

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  In June 2022, Roll20 announced a new partnership with OneBookShelf, letting content creators on the Dungeon Masters Guild sell modules and add-ons integrated directly with Roll20's virtual tabletop system.

  The following month, Roll20 and OneBookShelf announced a full merger of the two companies. The deal combined both companies' content libraries and made OneBookShelf's PDF libraries accessible within Roll20. Ankit Lal became chief executive of the combined company, while Steve Wieck, OneBookShelf's CEO, became president and joined Roll20's board of directors. The merged company kept the Roll20 name, registered under the legal name Roll20, LLC.

  In June 2024, Roll20 announced it had acquired the digital tabletop role-playing toolset company Demiplane. Lal said, "We want to make it as easy as possible for you to build your first character, to get into your first game, to try out playing TTRPGs." He added that pairing Roll20's virtual tabletop with Demiplane's character sheet ecosystem would achieve that goal.

  Christian Hoffer of ComicBook.com reported the acquisition "won't have any immediate impact on users of either platform." Demiplane's chief executive, Peter Romenesko, said the merged companies would move quickly to close the gap between the two platforms. J. R. Zambrano, writing for Bell of Lost Souls, called it a sign of industry consolidation. He wrote that "an era of consolidation is on the way as players like WotC and Roll20 move to consolidate their powerbases."

  Following the Demiplane purchase, Roll20 began supporting cross-platform access, so content unlocked on one platform automatically unlocked on the other. Paizo, Darrington Press, Kobold Press, and Renegade Game Studio each granted permission for their products to work across both platforms.

  None of those partnerships would matter much to a player, though, without the tools built into Roll20 itself.

• 6. Behind the Screen

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  Roll20 organizes every game into individual sessions, each bundling dynamic character sheets, automated dice rolling, and shared maps with character and enemy tokens. Sessions also include triggered sound effects and a character creation tool for certain licensed systems. Built-in text chat, voice chat, and video chat sit alongside integration with Google Hangouts.

  A separate marketplace inside Roll20 sells art assets and complete game modules, alongside a reference compendium for several game systems. Compendiums and modules bought through the marketplace only work on Roll20, though some art assets can be transferred elsewhere or downloaded for physical tabletop sessions. Paying subscribers unlock extra features, including dynamic lighting and fog of war for maps.

  Beyond its main browser version, Roll20 also runs as iPad and Android apps. These mobile versions focus on the player experience and carry fewer features than the full site. The platform is available in English, with moderate support for 17 other languages through community-contributed translations using Crowdin.

  Roll20 supports systems including various editions of Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Dungeon World, Gamma World, Traveller, Numenera, and 13th Age. For lesser-known systems, an open source repository lets the community contribute its own character sheet templates.

  Those same tools would soon carry Roll20 well past ordinary game night. The platform would host its own convention and its own game, built entirely for it.

• 7. Beyond the Table

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  Every year since 2016, Roll20 has hosted an online gaming convention called Roll20CON, an organized series of games streamed on Twitch alongside other events. In 2016, the convention partnered with the Cybersmile Foundation, which supports victims of cyberbullying. In 2019, it partnered with Take This, a group focused on mental health in the gaming community.

  In July 2020, Roll20 released its own science fantasy role-playing game, Burn Bryte, with James Introcaso as lead designer. The game had first been announced at Gen Con 2018, built from the ground up for Roll20's virtual tabletop. A playtest opened to Roll20's Pro subscribers in August 2018, expanding to Plus subscribers that November. Its eventual launch spawned multiple Actual Play campaigns on Twitch.

  Whether any of that convinced outsiders that Roll20 was worth the subscription price was a separate question, one critics would spend years answering.

• 8. Critics and Accolades

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  Jacob Brogan, reviewing Lost Mine of Phandelver on Roll20 for Slate in 2016, admitted the experience "wasn't always seamless at first." He wrote that the data load "crashed my browser outright on at least one occasion." He still found the module "so well implemented" that it captured "what it's like to delve into dungeons." That was better, he said, than any other virtual system he had tried.

  Ryan Hiller, writing for GeekDad in 2017, called Roll20 "an industry leading web and tablet based virtual-tabletop application." He named it one of his "must have digital tools for roleplaying." He singled out the fog-of-war and dynamic lighting features. Players seeing only what their characters could see, he noted, made "the rogue" suddenly "much more interesting."

  Tyler Wilde, for PC Gamer in 2017, compared Roll20 to Tabletop Simulator for playing Dungeons & Dragons. He called Roll20 "the cheaper, more practical solution for remote D&D," citing its clean mapping interface and built-in video chat. Leif Johnson updated that comparison for PC Gamer in 2020. He praised Roll20's "dizzying range of customization" and called its line-of-sight lighting system "fantastic." Johnson also noted the free tier capped uploads at 100 MB. Getting 1GB of storage and full lighting access cost $4.99 a month, or $49 a year. Dynamic lighting required a subscription, though a basic fog of war option remained free.

  Ari Szporn, for CBR in 2020, praised Roll20's integrated audio and video chat. Szporn also highlighted its "Looking For Group" feature, which helps players and dungeon masters find new people to play with. Szporn considered the free tier the best option for new players. But he said it was not recommended for dungeon masters because of its limited access to advanced features. Fellow CBR writer Luc Tran praised Roll20's design tools for maps, dungeons, and towns. Tran noted that Roll20 is not licensed by Wizards of the Coast. That leaves it short on official Dungeons & Dragons content, so players must recreate items or find substitutes.

  Academics Daniel Lawson and Justin Wigard examined Roll20 in their 2021 book, Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age. They focused on accessibility barriers, including the digital divide and disability. They wrote that "Roll20 indelibly connects functionality to money," since higher subscription tiers unlock more of the platform's accessibility features.

  Roll20 won the Gold Winner title in the "Best Software" category of the ENnie Awards in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. That was several years before the platform had licensed official Dungeons & Dragons material or joined forces with any other company.