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!

The settings in red below are ones I always change from the current defaults …

 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.