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”)