Tips for creating and running D&D5E games on Roll20

You don’t have to spend hours on end preparing each game session.

Realistically, you should probably expect to spend a few hours preparing your first one and then maybe you could cut back to about 1 hour technical prep for a 4-hr game session. You should do a bit of practice with the Monsters, Maps, Dice rolling and Tokens before you start playing the game for real. To be absolutely honest, I have spent a lot longer than this preparing for my D&D 5E games but since Roll20 introduced the Compendium and the ability to drag monster info from the compendium, it has got a lot quicker.

Creating the Campaign From the “Start New Game” option…

 Enter the name for your Campaign
 Choose the Character Sheet called “5th Edition ( OGL by Roll20 )”
 Click “I’m Ready, Create Game”

As soon as you have clicked “I’m Ready, Create Game”, you will Join the Game as the GM. You are taken to an empty page. Before you do anything else, it is worth exiting the game and then going to the “Game Settings” page to set up some default settings.

 Click the Cog Icon on the far right to get to the “My Settings” section
 Click the “Exit Game” button at the top of the “My Settings” section.

This takes you to the “Thank you for playing….” Screen. There’s no need to fill anything in there yet, so just hover over “Games” to see a list of your recent games and click on the image for the one you just created (in my case this was “Demo 5E”)

From the main Game page, choose the “Settings” option and then choose “Game Settings".

The Game Settings page has lots of useful info on it – here are my recommendations for a D&D5E game...

This page works a bit strangely, so my advice is to Expand the “Game Default Settings” by clicking on it and this opens up a lot more defaults…

 Some people like to set the “Page Defaults-->Background” to some pale colour other than white, as bright white screens are meant to be bad for our eyes.
 In the Player Permissions…
   Name = Tick the “See” option
   Bar 1 = Tick the “See” option
 CLICK “Save Defaults”

After it saves the “Game Default Settings” it will close that section. Now, after saving the “Game Default Settings”, you can change the other settings on the page. If you change other settings before saving the “Game Default Settings” section, it seems to reset the other settings!

 Allow Public Access to this game = NO
 Allow players to import their own Characters = YES
 Access Compendium In-Game = Determined by Character Sheet (Default)
 Character Sheet Template = 5th Edition ( OGL by Roll20 )
 In the Default sheet Settings…
   NPC = Ticked
   ROLL QUERIES = Always Roll Advantage
   WHISPER ROLLS TO GM = Never Whisper Rolls
   If you think you will want to make a lot of rolls in secret, it is OK to set this to “Query Whisper Rolls” instead. 
   You might get fed up with this option, but if you want to roll Initiative for monsters the PCs can’t see yet, it can be useful. 
   If you choose the “Query Whisper” option, each time you make an attack roll from a Monster character sheet, it will ask if you want it to be public. 
   You can just hit return for most of them, but when you want a secret roll, just toggle the value to “Whisper” instead.
   I prefer to “Never Whisper Rolls” and might write a macro (or even roll a physical dice) for something that I don’t want the players to see). 
   I’ll cover creating a Whispered Macro for Initiative later.
 AUTO DAMAGE ROLL = Auto Roll Damage & Crit
 ADD CHARACTER NAME TO TEMPLATES = On
 INVENTORY = Compendium Compatible
 ENCUMBERANCE = Off
 AMMO TRACKING = Off

Click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the screen.

Now you are ready to “Join the Game” again. This time, head to the Cog Icon and set a few things in the “My Settings” section. These settings will be remembered next time you Join the Game so you shouldn’t have to change them again.

I very much recommend ticking the “Use advanced keyboard shortcuts”. I recommend not ticking the “Use window popouts for characters”. This is purely because of using the earlier option about “Query Whisper Rolls” or if you later write Macros that ask you to choose or fill-in something. If you use Window Popouts, then the focus isn’t on the main Roll20 Window and the dialog that asks whether to make this a public or whispered roll will appear behind the character sheet and won’t automatically have focus so you can just hit return. I recommend not ticking the Enable Advanced Dice. I recommend not ticking the Enable 3D Dice. While some people like to see “real” dice being thrown, it does seem to slow the game slightly and can cause confusion when a D20 shows a 20 but you were rolling with disadvantage and can’t see where the other D20 landed. I recommend not ticking the Automatically roll 3D Dice.

Adding Monsters The Roll20 Compendium for D&D5E has made a big difference to the amount of work a DM has to do to put monsters into their game - with all their Stats and with clickable Attacks and Saves and Initiative. However, to get the best out of it (make it quick to use during the game), you do have to do a little bit of work for each Monster.

Getting a Monster from the Compendium to appear as a “Character” in your game’s Journal. 1. Go to the (i) symbol in the side bar, this opens the Compendium.

2. Type in the word orc – this will list all compendium items having orc in the title.

3. Click and hold on the name of the monster and drag it onto the main page and let go.

4. This will open the Monster’s character sheet, showing the “Bio & Info” page.

5. Click on the “Character Sheet” tab.

6. Hover over the red name “Orc” and a small cog will appear to the right. You can click this in order to open the “NPC Options” for editing.

7. Replace the name Orc with

@{selected|token_name}  

There are no spaces, the line after the word “selected” is a “pipe” character, there is an underscore between “token” and “name” and the brackets are the curly ones. You’ll see exactly why we are doing this later. It’s to enable multiple tokens to use the same NPC character sheet, but to show the Token’s name rather than just the word “orc” when you make dice rolls for them.

8. Click on the small cog again to close the NPC Options.

9. Close the character sheet for the Orc.

10. Click on the Journal Icon in the sidebar to switch to your Journal section, you will see that your copy of the Orc has appeared in your Journal.

I ALWAYS use a Token for monsters and never use a monster without a Token. The trick described above for getting the Token’s Name to appear in the chat with any Rolls, means the rolls won’t work if there is no Token Selected. If you do need to use a monster without a Token, just open it direct from the compendium again rather than using the one you have created in your Journal.