Today the Firing Squad puts Nolan T Jones of Roll20 up against the wall, in a slightly-belated but much anticipated (at least by me) continuation of the Virtual TableTop topic for the RPGBA Blog Carnival. We'll be discussing the ideal features of VTTs, where Roll20's strengths and weaknesses lie, support for major and minor games, and what's currently enabled and what lies in the future.
Unlike the usual process, we're uploading the video immediately, with the audio file and transcript to be made available as soon as possible.
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Text Transcript
Douglas Cole (Gaming Ballistic): Good evening and welcome to Gaming Ballistic’s Firing Squad. Today we are joined by Nolan Jones from Roll20.
Very excited to have Nolan with us today, as I believe Roll20 is the largest virtual tabletop on the market. If not it certainly seems to be the best known. Nolan, thanks for joining us today.
Nolan Jones (Content Creator Roll20): Thanks for having me.
Doug: So am I right? Is Roll20 the biggest, best kid on the block.
Nolan: By everything we know, it is. There is no way to know that for sure, but looking at Google Traffic, we are actually coming to the assumption that now, if you added up all virtual tabletops over time together, we are bigger than all of them, by what we’ve seen just in terms of Google Traffic. We’ll hit a half million users in about a month and a half, if things keep on pace, and that’s way more than anybody else has had.
Doug: That is a ton of geek in one spot. I approve.
Nolan: That is a ton of geek. We were looking at . . . Tabletop Day is tomorrow. International Tabletop Day. We were looking at the numbers last year and we said “That’s about every weekend on Roll20” [laughs] There is just that many games going on now.
Doug: That’s cool.
Nolan: It’s a heck of a ride. To think it started off with me and two of my college roommates saying “Hey, I really wish we could play long-distance.” And going…here we are now, almost half a million people (almost) later.
Doug: That’s pretty cool. Backing up to that just a tiny bit. How did you get into roleplaying, what games did you play? I have a feeling I know, given the d20 on there.
Nolan:That’s one of those things . . . it ends up being the silliest mistake in some ways.
We were all actually big World of Warcraft players and somebody, a friend of ours said “You need to try this other stuff, because it’s a lot more fun than World of Warcraft.”
We were late, because we got into it in college, but after we were into it, 4th edition is where I started, Dungeons and Dragons.
I had no idea by naming the program Roll20 it would be thought that was the only thing we could handle. Very early on the decision was made that every time we came to a fork in the road, design-wise it was “What makes us more like a table?”
We did all sorts of houserules and other stuff like that, and we didn’t want to lock into anything, and that I think has been the appeal of Roll20 in so many ways is that every design decision was “Let’s not bake in the rules or automate it that makes you play a particular game” and the benefits of that has been we’ve been able to play things like Settlers of Catan and stuff like that that is just absolutely nothing like a 4th edition game.
Things like Savage Worlds, Shadowrun, all these different game types that I’ve gotten to play now that I had never played previously as a result of Roll20.
Doug: Do you do a lot of…I imagine that given your status in the market, if there was a game system “Hey, I’d like to drop by and see how that works on Roll20” people would be like “Yes, please do come in.”
Nolan: I’ve wanted to do that so badly and there hasn’t been time.
Roll20 had finally became…I was the last one on the dev-team to jump off, because I was funding so many comics – I write comics as well and artist need pay so they can do it all day. I finally quit my day job within the last month, and this is my fulltime as well, and I’m going to start doing some of that
We did a Will it Play series for about half a year where we went through and jumped through a bunch of systems.
A great benefit and how Roll20 all started is that I started playing a live game out here in Las Vegas. We were all originally from Kansas, and parted, and the guy who does my live games is really interested in all sorts of systems so he…now we’re playing a FAE game, but we’ve done all sorts of little…Dungeon World and other things along those lines or even just dice games we’ve started playing. Hunters of Ark Fall, we call it Bunko for geeks, a game we’ve gotten into recently.
There is a lot of different explore, but I haven’t gotten to do enough of that “Hey, I made Roll20, I’d love to drop in on your game and see how it plays,” yet. It definitely is in the plans if I can ever get caught up with everything.
That’s the other thing, this has been my full time job for about a month now, not that it wasn't a full time job anyways before that, but I finally cut other ties, and man oh man, just the amount of stuff I’m still catching up on. we’re all headed to PAXEast next week and I’ve got other windows open now because it’s like “Oh, we forgot to order buttons” and “Oh, we forgot to order this and that.” Man oh man.
Doug:Keeping track of all the details of almost anything, one of my day job things is ordering and overseeing the build of multimillion dollar vacuum process equipment (not like Hoovers and stuff). It’s amazing the things that “Oh yeah, we got this great tool and it all works technically. Do we have a Mylar overlay that will allow us to install it in a tight space? No. We don’t. Okay. That’s a problem.”
Nolan: [laughs] We just had a development meeting about 10 minutes ago and we were talking about PAX preparation stuff and one of the things that we realized is we got a ad running throughout the show, it’s supposed to have a landing page for PAX. The landing page isn't up yet. [laughs] We haven’t made the PAX landing page, so there is this website URL on all these printed materials that doesn’t actually go anywhere. Yeah. We need to do that [laughs].
Doug: Solid call. Put that at the top of the list.
So you started playing World of Warcraft, you got into tabletop games a little bit . . . so what led you to take the next step and say “Okay, now we’re going to start coding a virtual tabletop, and then eventually to feed it into Google.”
Nolan:That’s all Riley in so…we had like I said moved apart after college. It’s funny because both Richard…it’s Richard, Riley, and myself.
Richard and I both have wives who are in the law, they’re lawyers and they moved for law school to opposite ends of the country. Me out here to Las Vegas, him to Washington, DC. I started playing a live game out here in Vegas and started bragging to Riley and Richard “I’m having a great time, bet you guys miss this. Ha ha ha.”
And Riley said “Well I got this image-sharing program that I’m working on right now that allows….” It’s really basic for putting one thing atop another. It was really for a learning disabled community that he was doing things where the kids needed to be able to say what they wanted for lunch without saying it.
Looking at image-sharing and what I’ve done before is I could make a image-sharing program cause what is it other than a map with a token on the top of it? He did that. We played on it for like a month and then said should we take this to Kickstarter, should we look and see if this is something other people would be interested in?
It was funny, because Riley was really uncertain at all if it would be successful. His comment was I want it to be a short campaign in case it completely flops, that way we can just forget about it and move on.
We’ve done a lot of projects together previously. We pitched a animated series, and done some other weird things in the past. So we put it on Kickstarter and in 18 days raised $39,000 dollars and went "no, this is real" and we needed to do something here.
The initial use was entirely self-motivated in that we wanted something for ourselves to use. And then kind of went “We should check and see if other people have this problem too…”
Doug: Right. Honestly, the funny thing is I used to have a fairly extensive gaming group locally, here in Minneapolis, and that borrowed people from my Martial Arts group and they graduated from college and went all kinds of places. My more adult friends had the audacity to start getting married and having children and stuff. My wife gamed with us and we have a daughter, a four-year old, now, and so its like all of a sudden, the time that I can game is after bed time, when people aren't working. And actually enough friction in getting up, and getting your stuff, and getting your books, whether they are PDFs or hardcopy and getting ot someone’s house and “Oh, I’m sorry my daughter’s head started to spin around like exorcist baby with projectile vomit or whatever.” I can’t open the house to you today.
It became, first, I just didn't game, then it was I could do this online thing, and within the last month or so I’ve played with people all over the country. I’ve played with people from Australia and it’s just been a great outlet and if I want to game at 9 o’clock at night, then it’s 5 o’clock for somebody else and a perfect gaming time for others. It really broadens the ability to engage in the hobby.
Nolan: It’s been really interesting to see just how this spreads, because it is so social. The thing is, we don’t do much in the terms of actual advertising – it’s all word of mouth “Hey, I’m playing. Do you want to play?”
From a business standpoint its awesome, but from a social standpoint its so cool. This thing that we worked on is growing organically in this way, people are really talking about it and using it. It puts a lot of pressure on us to work on it and improve on it but man oh man is it cool.
Doug: so what would you say are the most and least desirable features of virtual tabletops in general, and in a way this is a total softball, because obviously the stuff that was required to play was what you implemented first.
Nolan: The dice rolling engine was important, but at the same time the next update that we’re doing, the “data delve” is changing our dice rolling some, in the way that we’re approaching randomization. We’re using this formula that's the way that a light particle splits to do the randomization. IT’s almost overkill, because honestly our random number generator is pretty good as it is, but it’s something that people are so interested in…and it’s a fun place to play around in and explore.
Doug: I’m actually going to ask you to repeat that because my video froze for a little bit. I got to “light particle” and then we went into a quantum place and now we came back.
Nolan:Quantum roll is what we are calling it, we’re taking a random number generation system and we’re using this formula for splitting a light particle to do the randomization.
And our random number generator from the beginning has been very good. We went through a bunch of testing to make sure it was…computers can’t be random. They don’t know how to do it. We got as random as we could get at the time, and now we are looking for an even more random…but things have always been . . . looking at the totality of data very random.
In this next update the “data delve” in addition to this “quantum roll” will even more randomize it. We’re also going to publicize how random the numbers are, so there is going to be a running chart so you can see, we’re not just saying this, you’ll be able to see the results regularly instead of the once every six months blog post where we’ve been showing how random things are.
But in that regard in as far as desirable features that is something that people very much care about. Honestly though it’s putting one thing on top of another is the most important part and the flipside of that the least desirable the thing that made us make Roll20 is that it’s got to be easy to use.
Something that is difficult to use that you got to download, that you got to organize everybody…port forwarding, you got to spend half a hour getting everyone on the same…Roll20 is a link. As long as you’re using Chrome or Firefox - an HTML5 compatible browser, you send somebody a link and they’re in the game.
The least desirable feature is the opposite of that, where you are dealing with the headache of people…don’t want to download stuff from random RPG sites. They just don’t want to get into that, especially when you got people new to the hobby, and don’t have any enthusiasm for this and they're not out there searching for it. It needed to be something the opposite of all of it. That is by far the least desirable feature for me. That is why we’ve done all this. We wanted it to be quick and easy.
Doug: Right. And my personal experience has always been on…so I am a user of Roll20. I play in games using Roll20. I’ve never gamemastered a game using Roll20, but I’m absolutely right there with you on the ease of use.
But from a GM perspective, what steps should people take if they’re going to approach it to run a game as opposed to play a game.
Nolan:Honestly, I think that the biggest approach…and I know I was just talking about ease of use, but take some time and play. Fiddle with it in a way that you’re going to . . . you'll find that we’ve made it as much like a table as possible in terms of you can do a lot of different things.
Figure out a way that you want to theatricality present to your players, things that you will set up to make it easiest for them to jump in and play a game. The thing like when we were doing the Will it Play series, we played 13th age which is a great RPG that plays very much like a stripped-down 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, and one of the best features is that they got this escalation die so everybody hits harder so you never end up where it’s the end of the fight and everybody is whiffing and everybody is getting bored with it. It just gets bloodier and more awful as it goes, but we set up this escalation die for this table that was tied into the macros for all the sets, so as the turns came you just turn the die on the table and it affected everybody’s abilities, and scaled them up to the next level as it went.
And by taking the time to make that ahead of time it wasn't a long drawn out here’s what everybody’s going to have to do with the next round, taking the time from the GMs stand point to figure it out made everybody go “Oh! This is what’s cool about 13th Age. This is why it works.”
In some ways it is almost easier in that regard than at the table, telling a bunch of people “Hey, you got to add this in every time.” But that took time from the gamemaster up front setting that up, looking how to do it, and getting it there.
Somebody has to invest time somewhere. Every time I talk to somebody about doing a module it’s “Wow, that would be a lot of work,” We’ll you’re saving time for every GM downloading that module from then on out. Time is a very very precious commodity. That is what you’re going to need to do.
Doug: I actually think that that’s the hidden currency in gaming, because whenever you hear about how did this game go or that game go, people like to make fun of whatever game, and it does seem to be that way. You have people who sing praises and those who are throwing knives.
One of the hacks at this game or how it was played is “Oh, the gamemaster spent half the game looking up rules.” Is it a good game? Yeah, it may be a good game when you read it back, but in play it’s a problem.
And I think it’s the same philosophy with a virtual tabletop, you may have to invest some time up front, but it’s better to be front-loaded and then the game plays smoothly. As long as the net time between the GM and the player is still smaller than passing out note cards.
Nolan: It’s one of those things that if you put in prep ahead of time it just makes such a difference.
Like you said even with a live game, it can make such a difference in the way everybody feels about the experience and how smooth it goes, so it…there is absolutely something to be said for the net when it’s all said and done, but there is also something…I don’t think you want to be over prepared, sometimes that can be a dizzying spiral [laughs] of you're out of control as your prepping for a game. Getting enough so you can be fast on your feet is definitely a great place to be.
Doug: In terms of that game prep, is it mostly graphical manipulation of objects, and fairly simple stuff of any graphical user interface would do, or do you have to get in and write code?
Nolan: You don’t have to write code at any point. All the basic elements to the program are made in a way that you would never…I don’t actually code. Riley codes. I’ve done some HTML [laughs],
But we do have the option to use a API – or Application Programming Interface, if you wanted to get some…and that’s more of the “Bakes-in Rules Type Stuff” so we kind of outsourced that, so if you really want that in your game you can do it.
At the same time that’s so easy because there is such a big community of people doing it…so Richard doesn't really code and there have been games where he has been gamemastering and gone to the API forums and went “Oh, I’d like to be able to do this in a game.” Taken the API code that somebody has put at there for somebody to use and pasted it in with no actual programming experience himself and been able to get that working.
In terms of just a regular game there is no need to program. It’s put down your map, put down your token, if you want to put the stats on your token, you can do that. If you want to put the ability to roll already prepped, you can, but you don’t have to.
When we started this we were playing off of paper, because we like holding paper. So I would have a few rolls like ready, if you roll once there is a option to use a previous roll essentially, so I’d roll and do that instead of setting up the macros. The macros aren't any programming language other than “Slash, roll 1d20 plus 3.” That’s not programming, that’s what you would have to do on a sheet anyway.
It really is meant to be used in the simplest, around the table way, If you want to take it in that other direction, that option exists for you.
Even in things like dynamic lighting, which is one of the great things about something like Roll20. I don’t think live games are ever going to be replaced, that’s the way to play. Something like dynamic lighting where we can set up different visions for characters, is one of the few places where it’s a actual advantage over what you can do at a table. You’re not asking for a suspension of disbelief, you can really put somebody in the dark.
Doug: I’ve played a couple of games with dynamic lighting, Roll20 being one of them and it’s really neat because “This is what your character sees.” GURPS, I’m a GURPS gamer, GURPS is very facing-dependent and so you’ve got the area in front that you can see and you’ve got the area in the side that you can sort of see and you’ve got the area in the back that you can’t. So you have this 60 degree wedge behind you, that you are blind to unless you take the movement to turn around and look.
And that has caused no small amount of angst and a couple of character deaths [Nolan laughs]. We had a thief in our Dungeon Fantasy game that literally got ninja’ed to the back, because he didn’t check six or didn’t have time or the ninja made his backstabbing…I don’t think it was his fault.
That was when we came up with the concept that the most important piece of armor in Dungeon Fantasy is the piece of metal that goes on your spine and your kidneys [Nolan laughs]. The only time we really got killed was being ganked from behind.
Nolan:Having that ability to make that, to have that set up that the GM can see everything, and keep the players and that suspended…not a suspension of disbelief, but actual disbelief, because they have no idea what’s going on.
That's a great thing, and doing that in Roll20 it’s not a program it’s a “Go draw a line” and figure out what you want the barriers to be and how you’re going to box people in. It really works and it makes for some really interesting scenarios.
Doug: Does the lighting and vision hang on a token?
Nolan: You can put it on a token, there is a couple of different ways you can do it, and it’s one of those things that taking some time to fiddle with it beforehand, but also looking at the documentation. So everything we try to keep up to date in terms of a wiki, luckily we also have users who…dynamic lightning…
Doug: If you’d like to do screen share, that’s been very successful in previous interviews. So if you're like "here's an example I want to show you," that works quite well.
Nolan: I don’t know if I got anything right up to do.
Doug: In case you have something that you want to do we can…
Nolan: How you add it, and where it goes, and what permissions do you want to give it. There are a couple of different ways to approach it. Because you can add light to areas, and things like that.
At the same time to all of us can interact as far as you want it to using fog of war, which is another way to approach the lightning scenario, which is basically you going to areas and making them visible. There are several different ways to skin the cat and I think that’s a good thing, that there is a lot of different games that use it in a lot of different ways. Like you were talking about, range of vision is so important for GURPS – whereas so many games just say…there is a circle around my character this is all I need.
Whereas in other games, you have this is a torch on the wall and you should only be able to see in that area.
Doug: So speaking as a GURPS guy, I’ve played with…the times that I played with the Roll20 engine have largely been – except for one cool playtest that Peter Dell’Orto and I did where we were just using tokens on a map and nothing else mattered because we were trying a rules set that we were writing. But what I’ve done in gaming, you roll your d20 add whatever and the gamemaster is in charge of the damage class so he’ll tell you whether or not he succeeds. In GURPS, you’re rolling against mostly your own skill. Is there a straightforward way to do a 3d6 roll under type mechanic?
Nolan: As far as the macros, and this is straight from the wiki. Somebody has gone and set up a full page on GURPS 4th edition and what the macros would be if you wanted to use that. Roll 3d6 and what is the mechanic, the modifier here…it’s a…
Doug: You roll 3d6 and modify your skill and if you roll under your modified skill you succeed.
Nolan:And here's the vs. the modified skill, and somebody even has the API scripts here if you were a mentor user and you wanted to do automated rolling of stats. It adds the backend so you’re not doing the other stuff. Somebody has even gone and done what the ability macros would be if you wanted to do it for a character sheet. They’ve put tips for condition cards and stuff like that.
Doug:Impressive.
Nolan: Yeah. That's one of those things where I’ve never played GURPS. I have no experience in it whatsoever, but somebody has got it working in Roll20 and working in the extent that they got a wiki page laid out with…additionally, they’ve got the settings for what you want the battlefield to be like. [laughs]
Doug: I guess that’s what happens when you have half-million users. A small fraction of them are hard core about it. The engine grows organically.
Nolan:That’s one of those things…looking at it, it’s not super-advanced Roll20 use happening here. But it lays it all out if you were coming to us for the first time, how do I do the specific sort of roll that's specific to the game I'm playing, it’s relevant to you in that way instead of going that other direction where it’s a pay for every single type of dice roll, you can do in Roll20, what’s the one that applies to me. But having it set up like a system like that it’s a really great benefit to get players to that particular game in and comfortable quickly.
Doug: You mentioned two things and I’m going to hit them in the, I don’t know, the order or not. But I’m going to him them anyway. You did mention a distinction between a mentor user and the rest of us freeloaders like myself. What are the benefits of mentor use vs. the more casual model.
Nolan: There are three models, mentor, supporter, and the basic free user.
Essentially, the supporter is getting the basic features like dynamic lighting, some expanded storage space, the ability to use Roll20 on a tablet, and it’s one of the things we keep behind a paywall because honestly because it takes more time and troubleshooting than a lot of other things.
Then the mentor side of things are that plus…we have exclusive tokens that they get access to. Anybody could buy those tokens, but they are on essentially a rental plan so they have access to everything that falls into that category.
The biggest benefit for a mentor is access to the development server. For example, with the data delve update that’s coming out we will have a version of character sheets that’ll go live with next week. Even though it’ll be buggy and there will be problems they’ll get the opportunity to say “Hey, could you maybe approach this new feature like that.” We do listen to that feedback.
Mentors are overall people who are interested in that bleeding edge, really really big power users, whereas supporters are people who probably are playing a every other week game and you want some extra umph for what you’re able to do.
Doug: There we go, and you mentioned exactly … a perfect segue way into my next question: Character sheet support and how is it that
…it snowed six or seven inches on fricking April 4th here over the last six hours and now the sun has the audacity to come out and is blinding my camera…so….I really thought we were done with. Many are cold, but few are frozen, but Elsa needs to get the hell out of the state.
Anyways, so what are we doing here. Character sheets, right, that’s one of the things where. especially in the game…GURPS is particularly interesting that way because you could have a couple of dozen skills and advantages, more the skills than the advantages. Pathfinder, my rogue has 10 or 12 or 15 skills and you have other games that are skill-centric, and one of the things that I think is useful is the ability to export/import character sheets, so how are you guys approaching that at the moment.
Nolan: It's not entirely decided.
Right now it’s a very basic put in what abilities and modifiers you want and attach it to a token. What we’re going to do next, as far as how it’s going to be shared, we are not entirely certain. We’re looking at a half dozen different options and fiddling with it and trying to figure out, we’ve been pretty successful at so far is steering clear of copyright issues.
One place where companies really take a stand in the RPG industry is leveling up, and things like that in terms of the character sheet. That is one of the things they really stick to as proprietary.
So I don’t know exactly what our solutions are going ot be there, but we’re going to have…the biggest benefit of what we’re doing with character sheets is we’re doing a more graphical interface that looks like what you are holding rather than our very basic layout. In terms of how all that’s going to be shared…I think we’re looking at another week and a half, two weeks, considering PAXEast coming up, before we can say definitively here’s how we’re going to be sharing sheets. We just haven’t come into the point yet where we have ot make a firm decision on that.
The first thing is what is a sheet? We are just now…today is literally the first day that anybody has seen how the programming for that . . . not programming. Actually, in this case, you’ll have to pick up some form of sheet from somebody that has done some HTML or CSS appearance. That’s one of those things again you don’t have to be a programmer yourself to use that, because you can just grab it from someone else, but how that grabbing process from someone else is going to work we haven’t decided yet.
Doug: Are you going to enable things like the perception ability or skill in Pathfinder and you double-click on Perception and it rolls with your bonus, or does that get into the rules/copyright issues?
Nolan: Some of that you can already do with the system as it is, you can go in, and whatever you’ve got for your character data you click and it’ll roll off of it.
It’ll be the same in that regard in the future, it’s just a matter of what all we’re actually touching and what all the community is doing in terms of sharing and how that line goes out. We’re probably never going to put out a Pathfinder sheet unless Piazo and us are talking on that level.
With that regard, I do expect there to be Pathfinder sheets that are out there in the community that people have made, and there is some format to give those and trade, but as for how that’s going to work…it’s not entirely decided yet.
Very soon it will be decided, but we’re just not at the point where I can say “Here is what the list is going to look like, and this is what the approval process is going to be like” and that sort of thing.
Doug: Sure. Do you think that in terms of features as you scroll through say the initiative tracker would it bring up the characters so its right there so you don’t have to go hunting for it? Or is that something a user will go tie that together.
Nolan:That's something that people already do with the API scripts and the like, but we have not approached that yet that it would bring that up, which might be interesting for a gamemaster would do something along those lines, but…right now everything is very token based in terms of how it’s all connected. And so it’s more you click the token to bring in what it is in character data. Technically it’s a character sheet right now even, it’s so basic looking.
If you’re used to playing a particular game in person the data I’ve got for my 4th edition character that I was playing in Roll20 doesn’t look anything ike a character sheet does. It looks like a list.
Doug: Sure. A stat-block.
Nolan: To change that into what we’re doing is honestly just adding a layer of polish over the top of it. In terms of changing what the feature is right now for clicking from the initiative, probably not, just because that’s going beyond the scope of what we got to get out in this update, but you never know what’s going to…that’s one of the fun things with us being as small as we are.
We will have a very definite…here are the marks we are hitting with the update, there are times where Riley will be in there playing with the code and he’ll go “You know what, I can squeeze out this.”
A great example of that with this update, he’s doing all these things currently with the dice rolling, and while he was playing with it all he went “You know it’s about time I put out…” he’s been meaning to for over a year, a reddit-bot that uses the Roll20 dice engine.
So now, if you’re a reddit user and you’re doing a play by post or you just want to have a random roll as an example, you can actually use the Roll20 dice engine on reddit. It wasn’t planned on the outset as part of the update, but he was there, fiddling with it, “I’ve got a couple of extra hours today let's see what we can do.”
Doug: Sure. Exactly. So in terms of the…you mentioned you and Piazo getting together, to what extant do you think going forward that the virtual tabletop community, or the virtual tabletop user and content generators and gaming publishers themselves will start playing in each other’s sandboxes or do you think there's going to be a . . .
Nolan: I think one thing that’s highly unfortunate is that we are at the tail end of a era…if we’re operating under the assumption that we are bigger than all previous tabletops combined, what’s happened is all the previous tabletops have at some point had a deal with one of these companies and it hasn't worked out the way the company wanted.
So there is a large resistance to actually . . . to them trying it again with a new company because the assumption is we’re going to fall apart or this isn’t going to work out as many of those virtual tabletops have. Or simply the sales metric isn’t going to be high enough, which is really unforntuate for our user base [laughs],
My hope is eventually some independent publishers are going to pull through and get some more module type content out there. There are conversations going on with a lot of small publishers to make that happen, but at the same time we've had very close conversations and almost happen with any big name that you can think of. Some so close that it makes me sick to my stomach.
I don’t know what the holdups are on their end or what the corporate answers they've got to give at the end of their day are, but our interests are in terms of what our deal would be with any of these companies. It’s the same deal we offer with anybody on the market place, 70%, we take 30% and we handle the credit card fees. That’s what we’re looking to do. It’s publicly out there..
Doug: It’s not sneaky.
Nolan: There is no weirdness or anything going on on our ends that’s mucking up anything – its just these companies…some of them really get it. There was a large publisher who was like “You’ll be selling this on your website, right?” there was one large publisher “This needs to all go through our website”
We don’t know how that’s going to work. What they’re buying is the ability to one-click and play the game on our website, so how is that working through our website.
There have been publishers who have come to our and said “We want this to go through your website, we want this to happen through your content, we just want our modules to exist there.” And really really got it and for some reason, somebody up the ladder said “No, let’s not do it” or “we got to work on this instead right now.”
And it repeatedly hasn't happened. It’s just so incredibly frustrating, and I know its frustrating for users that are saying “Why aren't there modules?” “Why doesn’t this exist?”
There is definitely a huge opportunity our there to do something different here, and it just hasn't come together yet, but I really do think…we previously tried independent wise to go through where we had a intern by the name of Tristan Judas, who now does a RPG art site of his own, and he went and emailed every single independent board game and RPG Kickstarter, and said “Hey, would you be interested in bringing your content to Roll20.” And we couldn’t get anybody to put it…and that’s unfair to say in some ways, it’s a lot of effort, you’d absolutely have to put in the same sort of effort you’d have to put in to say, put it into print. Get the stats and everything ready to go. But man oh man if we could get somebody to make that jump.
Doug: It also seems like…so I could sit down and I could create a map, and populate it with Pathfinder tokens, maybe they’re free or maybe they’re not, and if they're not free, you'd have to figure out a way to get royalties to everyone who's going to use it, which maybe isn't a big deal, and you get that out there and the danger would be something like “Okay, I just populated all kinds of stuff in there and just for fun I’m going to throw in a beholder”or something that is absolutely one of the iconic things that is not shared. I think that’s one of them. In any case, you put all this out there and your point from earlier it becomes a greenlighting process which can be very difficult. You need ot make sure all the pieces are original.
Nolan: From a legal standpoint what we do with everything on the marketplace is you’re signing that you have the rights to this work and what we are is distributors. If something came down the line the buck is going to come back to the person who submitted the content.
We absolutely take a look as much as we can to go “Did they?” but the buck stops with them, with the provider in that case. In many ways we are just a store for things like that, and so the actual content is theirs and they have ownership in a way too, that’s something time and time again to hear from people that’s so amusing that “Oh, I can sell on more than Roll20?”
Yeah, we’re not looking to push anybody out or make any…the stuff that we got that is exclusive, is stuff we've paid for just so there is additional content is the exclusive tokens is one it’s paid. Paying the artist up front, so we have the rights to do whatever so this rental thing with mentors happen.
The other side is that we do odd things there that isn't necessarily…there is not a huge market for western-themed RPGs. It’s just not there, so nobody’s taking that risk themselves to go out there and make a western-theme pack because no one's going to make their time up, money wise. Paying up front makes it exist and gives the opportunity so it can make a couple sales and be something, but at the same time, more importantly, it can be a resource for that so that it exists and can be a long term investment and say “I need this pack to sell 20 times within the next month for me to..”
Doug: …eat [both laugh].
Nolan:Yeah. That’s the reality of it.
Modules end up being a different thing because it does end up being specific to the program, but at the same time you can absolutely sell your PDF elsewhere. You can sell the tokens elsewhere and that sort of thing.
But like you were saying, if you’re somebody who is just writing adventures and you go out and make your own deal with a artist. That is what a publisher is. It’s a publisher who has a bunch a deals worked out with a artist, a writer. Be your own publisher, come to us and say “Hey, this is what I want to do.” We will absolutely carry it as long as it meets the quality standards of a eye test.
The majority of things we get are of quality, the majority of submissions are pretty high quality. Every once and a while we’ll get something that looks like it’s been done in crayon and "I just want to share this with community." Our thought is if it’s worth the uploading and the time and the hosting it’s got to be worth something, I think that has made our marketplace unique in that it’s not crap. Which I feel pretty lucky about that we got as many items there with that sort of visual caliber to get the adventures there that match that, hopefully it’s going to happen. But right now there are literally two modules that exist, we’d love to see that expand to two hundred times that.
Doug: It seems like what you’d really need is a map, and tokens, and hang the lighting if such things exist, you’d need a pre-populated fog of war, then you’d need the tokens to have stats and you’re good to go.
Nolan:Absoultely. That’s all you need. You can take it as far as you want to in terms of you can have handouts ready, you can have different options for places to go in terms of what maps there are so it can diverage in different places.
My dream scenario for the marketplace would be to do something like the dungeon delve. Which is the 4th edition book that just has a bunch of level 1-3 adventures and it goes all the way through 30 and you can just pull a section, it’s got a hook, it’s got treasure, it’s got all the little things you’d need. Pull it. Place it in. And you’ve got your adventure for the night. And having that for a variety of systems…that’d be great.
It saves that time for the gamemaster significantly. It’s just a matter of somebody stepping up and making it happen. And if anybody wants to have that conversation, we are here to have that conversation. And we've had that conversation with a lot of people.
Figuring out…somebody’s got to be familiar with our interface to do it. They don’t have to be involved at all in programming, but they got to be able to sit down and look at what Roll20 is and play with it some. We’ll see. One of these days.
Doug: That sort of segues into as we go forward, what is the role of the virtual tabletop and the future of tabletop RPGs – with Tabletop Day tomorro