This article contains affiliate links. If you’d like to support us, feel free to use these links 🛒 to buy books, dice, or similar products. Thank you 🙂
Many pen & paper groups play online and use Virtual Tabletop (VTT) programs for this. The most used VTT is the free and browser-based Roll20.net. Here you have an interface where you can show your players battle maps and world maps and they can move their characters as tokens. This extremely helpful tool is not entirely intuitive to use, so here’s a Roll20 tutorial with the basics for you!
Creating a New Campaign
After you have your account, you can create a new campaign under the “Games” tab. There are a few settings you should pay attention to. The most important one is selecting the Character Sheet that should be available to your players afterwards. This selection is important to use many of Roll20’s automatic functions. I would recommend choosing the character sheets with “… by Roll20” as these work better, but there are also many other options you can try out.
If you’re willing to spend money and there’s interest, you can also select modules here. These then already have maps and information available afterwards.
After you’ve created the game, you’ll come to an overview where you can manage your campaign. The probably most important option here is “Looking for Players”. Through this you can set whether and how people can find your game through the search function. If you don’t have a group yet, you can find players here and then invite them. Remember to include a good description and some nice images.
Bonus Tip: Searching for players/games on Roll20 is sometimes a bit cumbersome. One method to make the whole thing more organized is, once you’ve created the listing, to publish a post where players can apply. There, information such as age, gaming experience and playstyle preferences is usually also requested.
Now let’s get into the game!
Roll20 Interface Tutorial
As soon as you open the game, you see the user interface as shown in the image (without the markings). The elements marked here are:
- List of Tools (red)
- Tab selection (light green)
- Current tab (dark green)
- Map (yellow)
- Page Toolbar (blue)
Roll20 Tools Tutorial
Here you’ll find the tools that you (and also your players) will be using all the time. A brief explanation of the different functions:
| Box (DM only) | Selection of the edited layer through mouseover. Players cannot see things on the “GM Info Overlay” layer. The Map-Layer should be used for the background, while the Token-Layer is used for everything that moves or changes during the session. |
| Brush | Options for painting and creating shapes. Often helpful for quick illustrations or markings. |
| Magnifying glass | Changing the zoom. |
| Ruler | Measuring distances by holding the left mouse button. The distance per square can be changed in the Page Toolbar. |
| Cloud (DM only) | Editing the “Fog of War” which can be activated in the Page Toolbar. |
| Clock (DM only) | Turn Order Tracker. Very helpful tool to clearly show the order in combat. Only tokens can have a turn and are only visible when they’re on the Token Layer. |
| D20 | Mouseover for quick roll menu |
| Question mark | Additional help |
Tab Selection
This selection is very important and you’ll use it a lot. Here you can choose between these different pages:
- Chat
- Art Library
- Journal
- Compendium
- Jukebox
- Collection
- Settings
Roll20 Chat Functions
Here you can talk about the game or enter special code to roll dice. Here are the most important chat functions:
| Rolling dice | "/roll 1d20" |
If you want to roll specific dice that aren’t found in the tools or want to directly add bonuses, you can do it this way. |
| Roll dice only for the GM | "/gmroll 1d20" |
With this command, only the GM sees what you roll. |
| Inline rolls | "I deal [[1d12+5]] damage with my sword!" |
This way only the result is shown and can be used well in a description. |
| Write only with a specific person | "/w Paul what's your plan?" |
This way only the person whose name you mention sees your message. After /w a dropdown menu with a player list should also open. |
There are many other chat functions with which you can change or edit your messages even more. You can find these here, but they’re not necessary for playing.
Art Library
Here you’ll find tokens and maps that you can then drag onto your map. If you don’t have a subscription, the assets are quite uninteresting in my opinion, as they are usually very limited and there’s generally little selection available.
However, you can also upload your own images of maps or characters that you’ve created yourself or found on the internet. These assets are then accessible in all your campaigns. If you’d like to create your own maps but don’t really know where to start, you can learn more about it here. For characters, I can also recommend this site, with which you can quickly and easily create tokens.
Bonus Tip: If you plan to upload many of your own assets, you should start creating folders early. Also, there’s a storage space limit (per account) so it’s recommended to compress particularly large maps a bit.
Journal
The Journal is the central storage for all your information and also the player characters. Here you can create, edit and then share handouts for individual or all characters. Additionally, you can create the previously selected Character Sheets for your players here and allow them to edit them.
When you create Character Sheets, you’ll be asked if you want to use the “Charactermancer”. If you haven’t bought any of the books on Roll20, you’ll only have very limited character creation options here. I would therefore recommend choosing the option “Edit sheet directly” and entering the values manually.
Once you’ve entered values, you should be able to roll directly in chat by simply clicking. There are also many options for automatic rolling that you can find in the Character Sheet. Sometimes it’s necessary to click on a token and only then roll in the Character Sheet so that Roll20 knows which token the initiative is meant for, for example.
Bonus Tip: If you use D&D Beyond, you might alternatively consider using the Beyond 20 browser extension to connect the two platforms. You can find more about this here.
Roll20 Compendium
How helpful the Compendium is also depends heavily on whether you’ve bought books on Roll20. I personally only own a few books and therefore use this tab rather rarely. But if you have more options, you can quickly find items and monsters here and simply drag & drop them into the Journal. This saves you especially a lot of work when manually creating monsters, as these already have functioning NPC sheets here.
Jukebox
Here you can play music for the players as a GM. There are some songs to choose from and also the option to upload your own songs. You can then set these sounds to play when a specific map is loaded to create a bit more atmosphere there.
I used this tool a lot at the beginning, but find it rather tedious and therefore now use Discord bots or other tools for music in my sessions instead. Since the topic doesn’t really fit into the Roll20 tutorial, I’ve also written about it in more detail here.
Collection
This tab is probably uninteresting for most beginners at first. Here you can create Macros and Rollable Tables. These are often helpful as they can make random encounters easier, for example. Additionally, there’s the option to create buttons for you or your players that can make particularly frequent dice rolls faster.
If you’ve bought a module, there are often already some ready-made options here that you can use. This often helps make the game flow more pleasant, as you don’t have to search long for the results of Rollable Tables, but they’re simply displayed in the chat. But remember to set who can see the results!
Map
The main reason to use a VTT at all is the ability to show players maps and images. Here you can present battle maps and world maps by drag & drop from the Art Library. You should make sure you’re on the correct layer. You can change this in the list of tools on the left side of the screen.
The Map layer should only be used for static backgrounds. As soon as you want to move part of the map (e.g. a ship or a wagon), these should be on the Token layer. This is also where you should have the tokens for the player characters. If you want to prepare something that players should only see during the session (e.g. an assassin), you can place these on the GM layer.
Once you have tokens, you can call up some options with right-click. You can also change dimensions or copy your token using keyboard shortcuts like in an image editing program.
With double-left-click you can open Token Settings. If you’re using Character Sheets you can create here that a token represents a specific character and also link values like HP with the character. Once you do this, you can then set this token as the “Default Token” in the Character Sheet. This way you always have a completely linked token with simple drag & drop on every map.
If you’ve linked a token with a Character Sheet, you can open the sheet directly with Shift + double-left-click. This helps especially in fights with many different enemies to keep track.
If you want to use more than one map, you can switch between them via the Page Toolbar.
