New Roll20 CEO promises improvements for fans of D&D and other RPGs

Roll20, the industry-leading virtual tabletop software suite Roll20 has been restructured. Polygon is pleased to announce that Ankit Lal, a Google veteran, has been appointed CEO. Ankit Lal spoke in an exclusive interview about the difficulties his company has faced over the two-year period of ongoing pandemics worldwide and the plans he has for the future.

Roll20 began in 2012 as a crowdfunding campaign with a novel goal — to enable tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons to be played online. Today it’s a full-featured set of tools, one that allows game masters to spool up a homebrew campaign or a professionally designed module in minutes. Clicking a link on the web allows players to join. The platform is home to over 250,000 campaigns with at least one week of cumulative playtime.

The platform was a rescue boat for groups that wanted to play safely in the pandemic. But that influx of new users — more than 5 million of them, according to Lal — put major upgrades to the suite’s core functionality on hold. Since then, the company has tripled its size. It now employs nearly 60 people instead of just twenty or 25. Lal said that now he has two distinct groups of employees: one for users, and the other for publishers. He will be more agile in 2022 because of this flexibility.

“While I can’t speak to the details of the past,” Lal told Polygon in an interview earlier this month, “I have worked with and run product teams before, and what I think you’re going to see out of me is a very deep focus on our users and publishers.”

Lal stated that his main goal in terms of user recruitment is to assist Roll20 with the onboarding of two types new users. “The pandemic brought across two key personas that we haven’t seen historically, and in a much faster velocity than I think anyone predicted,” Lal said.

A group of people who have played TTRPGs online previously is the first persona. This group is a great place to use video tutorials or in-app tools.

“The second group is what I call the TTRPG curious,” Lal said. “[They’d say] ‘I’ve heard of Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve heard it’s cool. But I haven’t literally played before.’ […] You can’t just drop them into a blank canvas anymore. You need more onboarding, you need more tools, you need more intuitive tooling, and you need better tutorials and how-to guides.”

Roll20 is continuing to produce tutorials for YouTube at a steady pace in the past months. The core functionality of the suite will be improved by other members of his team. First up on the roadmap for 2022, Lal said, is the addition of “image placement logic tools,” which will allow game masters to more easily drag and drop images or maps onto the virtual tabletop.

The platform will continue to grow and add diverse rulesets.

“We’re not just building for Dungeons & Dragons,” Lal said, “but we’re trying to build out for the entire tabletop RPG industry. There are hundreds of games available on our platform, which people love to play. We have about 800 character sheets. There are over 10,000 products on our market. And so while Dungeon & Dragons is the biggest, there is more to it than just D&D.”

Roll20 publishes The Orr Group Industry Report every month. This report details the types of games that users play on Roll20. Since 2019, 5th edition D&D has continued to dominate, rising from 51.87% of ongoing campaigns to 53.7% of ongoing campaigns in 2022. Pathfinder’s decline has been steady (from 6.6% to 3.2%), but Call of Cthulhu is up from 9.48% and 11.9% of all campaigns. This setting is very popular in Japan and makes up a growing number of Roll20 users.

It’s the “all others” and “uncategorized” games, Lal says, that continue to be an important sector for the continued growth of the Roll20 platform.

“Nine years ago, eight years ago, we used to onboard one title a quarter to Roll20,” Lal said. “This past year, in order to support publishers, we onboarded more than 100 titles. And if you can imagine how much we scaled just in the last two years in terms of our ability to support onboarding, it’s been tremendous — multitudes bigger. However, some of it was done by brute force and others were automated. [With] our roadmap for 2022, there’s a lot of exciting stuff that’s going to help publishers onboard a lot faster, with a lot more [and] slicker features.”