What Do I Know?<p><span><em>I originally posted these in some threads on social media, but I wanted to put these thoughts all in one place, and hopefully a place that doesn’t get washed away too quickly. If you’ve already seen this, thanks for checking in, again.</em></span></p><p><span><em>Just as a head’s up, I hadn’t found the infographic for the rollout yet, so the fact that you can’t update characters from the 2014 sheet to the 2024 sheet is actually a planned, phased rollout issue, and not a problem with how the sheet functions.</em></span></p><p>Playing around with the D&D Beta character sheet in Roll20, with the idea that I might try it for a session. It’s not really in a shape that I could run a session of an existing game using the sheet, and in its current state, it might be rough to use it for a new one-shot.</p><p><strong><span><strong>Hands-On Observations</strong></span></strong></p><p><del>So far, every existing NPC that I open requires the character to be rebuilt. Every player character that I opened needed to be rebuilt. Not insurmountable, but it’s not going to be useful outside of building new characters or rebuilding existing characters.</del></p><p>The “build a character” option when you create a new character has a similar function to the Marvel Multiverse RPG where you can build a new character or pick an existing premade character, and you still have the option to directly edit the character sheet.</p><p>Unfortunately, when I tried to use the premade character, the interface wouldn’t allow me to drag the character onto the map. I tried it with multiple premade characters, and for some reason, none could be dragged onto the map. Could I be missing something? Maybe?</p><p><strong><span><strong>An Aside</strong></span></strong></p><p>If you build a player character, from what I could see, things are working . . . for any options that are working to begin with. For example, the Witch and the Theurge from Kobold Press just don’t work if you try to make a character, but that’s true in the regular character sheet as well.</p><p>You can set the Theurge’s spells per level manually, and drag spells onto the sheet in the regular character sheet. I saw a place to manually add how many spell slots a Theurge has per level on the new sheet, but not the “use the full caster” option from the old sheet.</p><p>For what it’s worth, this is more of a Roll20 issue in general, because I did some quick character building for some of the Adventures in Rokugan and the MCDM Illrigger class, and those appear to present what you need to actually build the character.</p><p>This is just that the Roll20 version of Deep Magic Volume 1 & 2 are an incomplete implementation that haven’t been marked as such. But it’s broken enough that it’s hard to even just manually bypass some of the things the character sheet doesn’t do automatically.</p><p><strong><span><strong>Disconnected Bits</strong></span></strong></p><p>Back to stuff that’s actually an issue with the character sheet, this doesn’t really limit the ability to run a game, and it’s probably something on the horizon, somewhere, I hope, but any species that has set ABIs automatically get those, and there isn’t a toggle to use the Tasha’s option.</p><p>I say, “I hope,” because this probably wasn’t on the list of things to worry about because D&D 2024 is already built to add ability score bonuses elsewhere, and won’t require a workaround, but to use older content, it would be nice to still have that ability.</p><p>One of the big impediments to using this sheet right now is that if you have an NPC character sheet, and you click on, for example, an attack, the character sheet will display a formula that makes sense, i.e. “Claws, 1d20+5,” but when you click on the attack, it only rolls a 1d20.</p><p>If you roll on the PC version of the character sheet, the bonuses are applied to the roll. It’s just the NPC/Monster sheets that don’t seem to do it. And both versions of the sheet roll damage properly as expressed on the sheet.</p><p>You can add the bonus in your head, but it’s really inconvenient. It’s something I don’t mind doing if an NPC does something unexpected that isn’t set up, for example, and I know I do this kind of thing when I’m running offline, but I’d rather this worked before I test drive it.</p><p>I seem to remember that the Alpha version of the sheet had a hit point adjustment section where you could type in damage and either add or subtract it by clicking on a red or green option. Maybe I’m imagining it? But that’s not in the beta version of the character sheet.</p><p><strong><span><strong>Project Scope</strong></span></strong></p><p>None of this is meant to say this project is anything that it isn’t. It’s a beta test, and I’ll be submitting all of the things I ran into. I just wanted to share this for anyone else that might be wondering if they want to fire up a game to play with this themselves.</p><p>Although . . . I will say that I’m not really happy that Roll20 listings for Deep Magic volumes 1 & 2 indicate access to the Witch and the Theurge, without mentioning that these classes don’t work. There should be a note that these sources are only partially implemented.</p><p>There are actually a few games I’ve run into with these issues. I don’t know if it’s been addressed, but a lot of the rules in the Everyday Heroes Roll20 implementation were missing text and I had to do some tweaking to make characters that weren’t using anything outside of the core book.</p><p>This worries me a little bit. I feel like Roll20 may be stretching themselves thin. They’re buying multiple companies and trying to integrate them into the platform, but some games or game products remain partially implemented, along with some long running issues with quality-of-life issues.</p><p><strong><span><strong>Priorities</strong></span></strong></p><p>I know D&D 2024 is the primary concern, but I have no idea when my Roll20 Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter will be available, and I’m worried that when it is active, it’s going to be a separate, incompatible compendium that walls off my 2014 based material. That concern is based on history.</p><p>Both the G.I. Joe and Transformers RPGs were up for preorder on Roll20, and the Power Rangers RPG was actively being sold, but over a year after both of those RPGs came out, they still weren’t on the horizon, and they were just pulled from the marketplace and Renegade them to Fantasy Grounds.</p><p>That makes me concerned about the amount of resources that will be brought to bear on mechanically robust systems. I’m also concerned that it may take longer to figure out how to map Demiplane interfaces into Roll20 than it would take to build things from scratch.</p><p><strong><span><strong>Looking Forward</strong></span></strong></p><p>I don’t want to end on a note that’s too negative. I would love to get a roadmap for other projects beyond the 2024 D&D character sheet. I think that would do a lot to assuage my concerns. The language around the 2024 sheet implies there is a single team and progress is on one game at a time.</p><p>It looks like Roll20 is going the same route as Demiplane, and making character sheets that are “building blocks” that can be plugged into one another in multiple ways, which means some of the work on the 2024 character sheet is work on other games. My assumption on this is based on seeing some of the newer character sheets and their similar structures. If that’s true, maybe once the 2024 sheet is out of beta, it will clear a logjam.</p><p><a href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/08/02/looking-at-roll20s-new-dd-character-sheet-beta/" class="" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/08/02/looking-at-roll20s-new-dd-character-sheet-beta/</a></p><p><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/800080/" target="_blank">#800080</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/character-sheet/" target="_blank">#CharacterSheet</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/dd-2014/" target="_blank">#DD2014</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/dd-2024/" target="_blank">#DD2024</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/demiplane/" target="_blank">#Demiplane</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/dnd/" target="_blank">#dnd</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/dnd5e/" target="_blank">#DnD5e</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/dungeons-dragons/" target="_blank">#DungeonsDragons</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/roll20/" target="_blank">#Roll20</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://whatdoiknowjr.com/tag/vtts/" target="_blank">#VTTs</a></p>