 Howdy how's it going? My name's Daffy Shappie, and you know what? The isolation that we have all had to endure because of coronavirus sucks. And I've had a bunch of people asking me how to run games of D&D on the internet, and I personally use Roll20. And whenever I say that, people are all like, Roll20? Daffy, what's that? And now it's my time to tell you. So for those of you interested in how Roll20 works, here's a crash course on the ins and outs of this admittedly sort of lacking system, but it's the best that you're gonna get for free. So first things first, if you want to do Roll20, you're gonna have to sign in. You need an account to play it, whether you're a DM or a player. Now, this isn't my main account, this is a free account I'm using because I'm assuming that you aren't going to be paying for a subscription. Technically, if you want to get a subscription, here's the different things that you get. Free is perfectly usable. I used free for a very, very, very long time. Plus is practically unneeded because it doesn't give you all the features that you want, and it's not free. So you're either gonna stay free or you're gonna go to the full pro one, which does give a lot of cool stuff. And I might do another video talking about the pro stuff, but it's unnecessary to talk about it right now. So once you're in the main menu, when you want to make a game, you click Create New Game. You don't really need to worry about tags because that's if you're looking for a group. And before you click I'm Ready, Create Game, you're gonna want to go down and choose a character sheet. Roll20 has a character sheet for pretty much every role-playing system that has existed or will exist under the sun. But if you don't put in a character sheet and you just make a game, then you're not gonna have a character sheet at all, you're just gonna have a blank nonsense. So in this case, let's go with 5e. 5e by Roll20 seems pretty easy, but even if you don't want to use 5e by Roll20, you've got a lot of different choices. You've got a darker dungeons version. You've got a scroll version, which is really new player friendly, but also really limiting. You have a 5e Adventures in Middle Earth version. Pretty much every version of 5e that you could want is in this character sheet generator. Mutants and masterminds, Pathfinder, everything's in here. But I'm gonna go with Roll20 just because it's the one that's most basic. After that, you create your game and then you just click Launch Game. Roll20 tutorial, get the fuck out of here. I'm the one teaching this thing. But now that you've got your campaign technically made, what do you gotta do to make it a whole fanciful thing? Well, first of all, you're gonna want to add your players to the game. You'll find that if you just use the URL at the top of the screen, that's not gonna help you at all. It'll lengthen to Roll20 and it won't work at all. I don't know why they do it like that, but it's just how it is. The link you're gonna want to use to give to your players is right over here. It's always hidden in case you're streaming so that random people can't just type in the link manually and then get into your game without you wanting them to. But if you're just playing a private game, it doesn't matter. You just hover over the link, copy the link address, and boom! You send it to whoever you want and they'll be able to join the game through you. Once you've got your players in, you're gonna want to give them a character sheet. So, you go to this journal tab right up here, click Add, and click Character. Boom! Look at that! And then you're gonna want to click this tab and as long as they've joined your game, you'll have the option to give the sheet to them and them alone. If you give the sheet to all players, then everyone will have access to it. They'll be able to see it, but they won't be able to edit it as long as you don't give them the can be edited and controlled by. So, in this case, let's assume that I'm the new player, I would give it to me so that I could see it, and then I would give it to me so that I can actually edit and control my own character sheet. So, what I would generally do is, in the player's journal, you might want to actually set it to all players if you want them to be able to see everybody's sheets, but all they'll be able to see is the bio and info. They won't be able to see the character sheet or the attributes and abilities. But whoever can edit the sheet will be able to see the character sheet. Boom! Character sheet. Now, Roll20 asks you if you want to use the character mansor, create an NPC, or edit the sheet directly. Now, you're not going to want to create an NPC, unless you're actually trying to create an NPC, but the character mansor is the biggest steaming pile of dumb I have ever seen. Never use the character mansor unless you have already bought all the books from the Roll20 marketplace because it's stupid and useless and you don't need it. So, I'm going to click edit sheet directly and fantastic. From here, you just edit the sheet like you would a normal 5E D&D sheet. You can add in your stats, you can add in whether you're proficient or not proficient, and because it's an automated sheet, let's say that my intelligence is a big ol' 20 because I am the smartest boy in the world. Boom! You can see Arcana now has a 5, Investigation now has a 5, Nature now has a 5, and I can select on and off whether I'm proficient with it, and it'll add my proficiency bonus to the thing. It's amazing, especially for new players who might have a hard time calculating all that stuff on their own. The sheet does it for you. And then I can just click the word nature and boom! I rolled a 9. Now, technically it rolls twice by default, it just assumes that you want to roll 2 dice. What you can do to fix that is you can go to options and then you can do roll query, always roll with advantage. You can have it be an advantage toggle and that'll add this for you so that you can either give it advantage, give it disadvantage, or keep it normal and then from there, boop! Now you'll see that the rolls are just one at a time. It'll get rid of the confusion of this. I generally don't force my players to do the advantage disadvantage normal toggle because it's a little confusing. I just take whatever's on the left or you can have it be whatever's on the right, your choice. You just want to establish it right away so that people don't get confused. So when you're making a character, there's a couple things that you're going to want to know. The armor class is calculated manually because there are some modifiers that could change your armor class, so they just don't fuck with that. Your maximum hit points is this tiny thing up here and your current hit points is right here because you can have it be a slider up and down and that's really cool. Your death saves are right here. You can actually roll your death saves and then mark them for yourself. Your inventory is down here and don't worry about not having enough inventory space because if you ever run out of it, then the actual equipment tab will start to stretch out further and further and further until it is big, bloated, and you have all of the items you could ever possibly want. And if you have features and traits, whether it be from a class, a race, or a background, or even a feat, you can put it right here. You have to type all of this stuff manually, but if you want, you can just look online and copy paste it right into here and then you'll be perfectly fine. Boom! Now, one of the more complicated things that you can do with Roll20 is you can actually set up a macro for your weapons. You can actually set up a thing so that when you click on your weapon's name, it'll roll for it. So let's go with a hand axe. Hand axe. Boom. There we go. It'll ask for the attack. In this case, it's strength. It'll ask you if you're proficient with it or not. The range is like 20 to 60. If it has any magic bonus, you would put it here. The crit range is how high you have to roll to get a crit. The damage is whatever you set it as, so in this case, 1v6. Plus strength type is, I think, a hand axe is slashing. And the crit dice is what it'll roll if you actually get a crit. And that's a macro. Might seem like a lot. Might seem pretty daunting, but it's actually pretty simple. You're really just regurgitating what you see in the book. After that, you close the wheel and boom! You got a hand axe. Attack plus 2 because that's my proficiency mod. And it does 1v6 slashing. I can click that button. Wabam! I rolled a 20. Good job, me. Now you'll notice that all it did is it rolled the attack. And the reason it does that is because it wants to see whether or not you hit. So if you want to see what your damage is going to be, go right down below that roll and you click hand axe. Boom! And then it did 3 slashing because I'm terrible and I have no strength. If I change my strength at any point, I don't have to mess with the macro of the hand axe. Like, let's say I made my strength 14. I'll roll a hand axe again. And now it does 6 slashing. It's really that easy. And like I said, the sheet itself is mostly automated. So a lot of the stuff it'll just do for you, which again is really good if you're new. Now the last really important thing that I want to tell you about is your spells. Spells are the worst. These things are just really complicated and dumb, but I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible for you so that you can get a good understanding. Now if you want to do a spell, let's start with Firebolt. Firebolt's really easy. It's really easy to remember. So you're going to want to click plus and there you go. Name Firebolt. The school is evocation. You can set it to be a ritual or not. It'll add a little thing right there because it wants to quickly show you what the components are for your spell in case that's what you're looking for. You can set the components to be different. Like if I get rid of the V, the V is gone up there. If I get rid of the S, the S is gone up there. If I get rid of the material, it's that's gone as well. So you've got your name, your school, your casting time, which is one action, your range, which if I remember Firebolt, it's 100 feet, maybe 120 feet, let's say 120 feet. God, I'm going to get roasted in the comments for this. The target is one creature. The components, there's no material component, but I do think it's verbal and somatic. If there's material components, you can actually write down what the material components are, which is pretty cool. And you can see whether or not it's concentration. Firebolt is definitely not concentration, but if it were, boom, it would show up right there just like ritual. Spell casting ability, let's say charisma because I'm a bard. If it's an innate ability, like if you were a drow and you could cast darkness, then you could do this. Then you can put in the description of Firebolt, throw fire. Now, if you're paying attention, then you'll notice that Firebolt didn't actually ask you anything that an attack spell would ask you, like how an attack spell would ask you, Oh, what's your damage? What's your type? And that's because right now we have the output set to spell card because a lot of spells just have effects that go off and they aren't attacks by any means. Normally, if your spell doesn't have an attack or have an ability that wants somebody to roll anything, then you're good here. Boom, Firebolt, it'll do its thing. It'll just tell you what the spell is. It'll give you all the information and you won't have to worry about it anymore. Pretty nice. But if your spell is an attack, then you're going to have to do a little bit more. You go from output spell card to output attack and suddenly, whoa, look at all of that cool stuff. Look at this, look at those. And you're just going to go through the same process that you did to do Handaxe. And once that's done, you can just keep your output set to attack, close your thing and click Firebolt. Boop, hey, look at that. I rolled a 12. That's enough to almost hit a goblin. And just like with an attack, you can click Firebolt and it'll roll the actual damage for you after you roll the attack. And even cooler is if you click core afterwards, you'll notice after going to your attacks and spell casting, it already sets Firebolt here for you for quick casting. So if you're a person that uses both Marshall and magic weapons, then here you go. It has it all for you so that you never really have to worry about it. Now magic is pretty complicated, but there is a little bit of a gimmick. So roll 20 has the added advantage of if you're using SRD legal things, which is the system reference document, you can go to the compendium, which is this circular eye thing up here and you might be able to find your spell in the compendium. So I could type in chill touch, boom. Chill touch is a spell that does that. Scroll it in, throw it in. Now you got chill touch and I can just click chill touch and boom. Hey, a natural 20. Now if you're trying to find a spell that isn't in the system reference document, then you're gonna have to type it all out manually and I know that sucks, but once it's typed in, you'll never need to do it again and you'll just have it for easy listing right here. And yeah, that's how you make a character in roll 20. I hope this helped you out. If you liked this video, then feel free to shop it around. Because if it does well, then I might make another video talking about how to actually do this from a DM's perspective, like make maps and stuff. But for those of you who just want to hop into roll 20 and be a player, this is all you're gonna need to know. But yeah, Davi out.