Roll20’s new CEO promises improvements for fans of D&D and other RPGs

Industry-leading virtual tabletop suite Roll20 is under new management. Polygon can reveal that Google veteran Ankit Lal has taken the reins as CEO since Tuesday. In an exclusive interview, he spoke about the challenges his organization has experienced over the past two years of the ongoing global pandemic and how he intends to take the company forward in 2022 and beyond.

Roll20 began as a crowdfunding campaign in 2012 with a novel goal – to enable online play of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons. Today it’s a full-featured set of tools that game masters can use to create a homegrown campaign or professionally designed module in minutes. Players can join simply by clicking on a web link. Since launch, the platform has hosted more than 250,000 campaigns, each with a cumulative online play time of a week or more.

In March 2020, the platform became a lifeboat for groups looking to continue playing safely during the pandemic. But this influx of new users — more than 5 million of them, according to Lal — has put major upgrades to the suite’s core functionality on hold. Since then, the company has tripled in size, growing from just 20 or 25 employees to almost 60. Lal says he now has two different groups of staff, one for users and one for publishers. That flexibility will help him be more nimble in 2022.

“While I can’t speak to the details of the past,” Lal said in an interview with Polygon earlier this month, “I’ve worked with and led product teams before, and what I think you’ll see from me is a very strong focus on our users and publishers.”

Speaking of users, Lal said his main goal is to onboard two new types of users that Roll20 has attracted over the past two years. “The pandemic has produced two key individuals that we haven’t seen historically, and at a much faster pace than I think anyone predicted,” Lal said.

The first persona is a cohort of users who are already familiar with TTRPGs but have never played them online before. For this group, video tutorials and in-app tools are key.

“The second group is what I call the curious TTRPG,” Lal said. “[They’d say] “I heard about Dungeons & Dragons. I heard it’s cool. But I’ve never played literally.” […] You can no longer just drop them into a blank canvas. You need more onboarding, you need more tools, you need more intuitive tools, and you need better tutorials and guides.”

Roll20 released these tutorials on Youtube at a decent pace over the last few months and will continue to do so. Other members of his team will spend time improving the core usability of the suite themselves. First on the roadmap for 2022, Lal said, is the addition of “image placement logic tools” that allow game masters to more easily drag and drop images or cards onto the virtual tabletop.

Another focus will be adding more and more diverse rule sets to the platform.

“We’re not just building for Dungeons & Dragons,” Lal said, “we’re trying to build for the entire tabletop RPG industry. We have hundreds of games played by people on our platform. I think we have 800 character sheets now. We have over 10,000 SKUs on our marketplace. And while Dungeon & Dragons is the biggest, there’s more to it than just D&D.”

Roll20 regularly publishes the Orr Group Industry Report detailing what types of games users are playing on the Roll20 platform. Since 2019, D&D Edition 5 has continued to dominate, rising from 51.87% of campaigns running to 53.7% of campaigns running in 2022. While Pathfinder continued to decline (from 6.46% to just 3.2%), Call of Cthulhu rose from 9.48% to 11.9% of all campaigns. Extremely popular in countries like Japan, this setting represents a new and growing international cohort of Roll20 users.

According to Lal, it is the “all other” and “uncategorized” games that continue to be a key sector for the continued growth of the Roll20 platform.

“Nine, eight years ago, we onboarded one title per quarter for Roll20,” Lal said. “In the past year we’ve added more than 100 titles to support publishers. And if you can imagine how much we’ve scaled in the last two years in terms of our ability to support onboarding, it’s been huge – much bigger. But unfortunately, part of it was brute force and part of it was automation. [With] Our 2022 roadmap has a lot of exciting things that will help publishers get on board much faster, and much more [and] leaner features.”