Demiplane Joins the Roll20 Family!

ComicBook Exclusive: Roll20 Announces Purchase of Demiplane (Exclusive)


We’re excited to announce that Roll20 has acquired Demiplane, the best-in-class digital character management solution! Demiplane joins a growing suite of system-agnostic TTRPG offerings that include Roll20, DriveThruRPG, and Dungeon Scrawl. This move furthers our mission of connecting gamers and providing them with cutting-edge tools to bring their campaigns to life, both in-person and online.

Combining Roll20’s resources and reach with Demiplane’s technology dramatically expands the offerings for the over 15 million players, game masters, and game publishers across the combined platforms. Known for its rapid rise as the ‘D&D Beyond for every other game system’, this acquisition enables Demiplane to become a universal character management solution for the tabletop roleplaying industry.

Demiplane’s adapted sourcebooks will serve as a perfect complement to DriveThruRPG’s massive library of tabletop roleplaying rulebooks, adventures, player guides, and more. In the long term, this acquisition paves the way for integrating Demiplane’s platform directly into Roll20’s virtual tabletop, bringing further depth and flexibility to in-person and online play.

Nothing is changing about how these platforms work today. Demiplane and Roll20 will remain separate tools, even as the companies combine. But we’re evaluating many integration possibilities, and would love your input! if you’d like to help shape the future of how these platforms integrate, please complete this short survey.

“Demiplane’s streamlined yet powerful character builder and easily searchable compendium are deeply complementary to Roll20’s ecosystem. We’re excited to get Demiplane’s technology into more hands by and adding support for new systems. However you play – in-person, online, or a little of both – we have you covered!”

— Ankit Lal, CEO, Roll20

We’ll be having a special Office Hours in the Demiplane Discord [link] this afternoon at 3pm CT with Demiplane’s CEO and Founder Peter Romanesko all about the joining of Roll20 and Demiplane. You can also find the answers to many of your burning questions below:

Roll20 + Demiplane F.A.Q.

Questions about changes to the Roll20 / Demiplane experience.

  • Are there plans for a joint Roll20 + Demiplane subscription?
  • Does this affect my content sharing limits under my Demiplane or Roll20 subscription?
  • Does this affect my Characters limit on Demiplane?
  • Can I transfer characters between Demiplane and Roll20?
  • Can I use Demiplane’s character sheets or compendium within the Roll20 Tabletop?
  • Can I transfer my Demiplane Groups to Roll20 and vice versa?

Nothing is changing about how this works today – Demiplane and Roll20 will remain separate tools, even as the companies combine. But we’re evaluating many integration possibilities, and would love your input! If you would like to vote for this or any other capabilities, click here! (survey)

I already bought sourcebooks for my system of choice as a PDF or on the VTT. Does this mean I’ll have to repurchase to play on Demiplane (or vice versa)?

If you own any Paizo, Darrington Press, Paradox Interactive (Vampire: the Masquerade and Hunter: the Reckoning) or Kobold Press VTT content that has a Demiplane equivalent, those publishers have given us permission to grant you the Demiplane version for free, and are in talks with other publishers who serve both platforms. This means that if you own Pathfinder Player Core on Roll20, you will get it for free on Demiplane – and vice versa! We are working out the right mechanism to unlock the cross-platform access, and we’ll announce more details once we’re closer to making this unlock a reality.

I play {Marvel Multiverse RPG, Alien: the Roleplaying Game, Vampire: the Masquerade, etc} do I have to buy the book again?

Outside of the above noted publishers, we’ll have news soon for how your previous content purchases on Roll20 can transfer over to Demiplane and vice-versa. Our friends at these incredible companies are working hard to reach the best possible solutions for players across all of Demiplane and Roll20.

Will I need a new account to access both Demiplane and Roll20?

No, your accounts will remain separate for the time being. We will inform all affected users well in advance of any account merger.

I have my information (i.e. email, credit card, etc) stored with Demiplane, will it remain with Demiplane or will Roll20 now have it?

The two sites will remain operationally separate, and your private information remains protected by the separate Terms of Service and Privacy Policies governing each site.

What will happen to Demiplane’s 5e Nexus that’s in early access?

We don’t plan on making any changes to the ongoing development of 5e Nexus on Demiplane at this time! Additionally, players who are looking for robust support for D&D 2024 can find it in Roll20’s exciting suite of tools including our new sheet, builder, revamped compendium etc and can read more here.

I have a question that isn’t covered here!

Let us know! We’re more than happy to provide all the answers we can. You can share them here, in the official Demiplane Discord, or across our social media.

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PLEASE PLEASE tell us that you’ll be keeping the Demiplane branding, and perhaps helping to improve the extremely bland Roll20 look and feel? :slight_smile:

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We currently have no plans to change our branding. :blue_heart:

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Honestly, disappointing.

Roll20 has been dropping the ball in keeping their platform competitive on a technical level. Losing on many fronts to FoundryVTT. Demiplane still not supporting export to ie. FoundryVTT has been thorn it’s side and an actual blocking issue in regards to user adoption within my groups and for me as a DM.

Demiplane felt like a fresh breath of air in the occasional stale ecoystem of digital tools and Demiplane tying it self to Roll20 severely dampens my enthusiasm for the future.

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Sadly I have to agree. Foundry is just a much better experience overall, for users and GMs. I would have been happier if Demiplane partnered with Foundry and offered character integration like Pathbuilder/Pathmuncher does now. Maybe this will lead to more technical developments and we can finally get a standalone app instead of continuing to use a web browser.

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I also have to agree, as much as I hate to admit it. I personally love the D&D Beyond toolset, regardless of how cool it is to hate on it. Encounter Builder and the Maps feature are great for our group. Foundry is a bit overkill for my group, and what D&D offers built in is kind of perfect for my group being we only use maps for combat.

I was looking forward to using Demiplane for character sheets and voice chat paired with Owlbear Rodeo, mostly just waiting for some kind of campaign management. Stuff like shared rolls from the character sheet, easy access to said characters in a campaign.

Those are features that Wanderer’s Guide has in its legacy version, and is soon coming to the updated version. And given my current campaign will end after WG has those updated features finished, I likely won’t use the books I just spent $100 on during the paizocon sale. Buyer’s remorse is sneaking in a little bit, but it is what it is.

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I completely respect your skepticism and disappointment, folks. I only hope that with your appreciation for our platform that you’ll give us a chance to show you the great things that we’ll continue to do, and the new amazing things this partnership will allow us to do. Our team has lots of incredibly exciting things in progress, and we can’t wait to share it. I firmly believe that through that work we’ll make it clear that Demiplane is still the platform that delivers what you’re looking for!

In addition, I want to say that we haven’t closed the door on an agnostic API/export system. The conversations and work are ongoing. We’ll share more as things firm up further, but your feedback is incredibly important to those conversations, so please know that we intend to keep the dialogue open and hear you out!

Thanks for sharing your reactions and feelings about the acquisition, I appreciate you taking the time. :blue_heart:

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Excited to share that Paradox Interactive has been added to the list of partners who are included in the ability to get content you have on one platform on the other. I’ll update as we hear more. :tada:

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My “pie in the sky” dream for this acquisition is something that mentioned by R20 and DTRPG when that acquisition passed, but never quite happened the way everyone hoped.

We (the user base) were led to believe that PDFs we’d purchased on DTRPG would be useable inside a game Roll20, regardless of if the Compendium existed or if we’d purchased the Compendium. That never happened. Yes, Roll20 has PDF upload support, but it isn’t very usable in game.

Now, with this acquisition, we’re told again that books bought one place (at least some instances) will be available both places. (CAVEAT: The book needs to exist in both places and the Publishers needs to allow it.)

I’d really love to see that next step beyond: Get the publishers to sign off on PDF download of bought Books, and make any book that is available in multiple places “pay one price”.

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Blockquote We (the user base) were led to believe that PDFs we’d purchased on DTRPG would be useable inside a game Roll20, regardless of if the Compendium existed or if we’d purchased the Compendium. That never happened.

These are the things that I’m worried about and sadly would come to expect from Roll20. I’ve cancelled my subscription for now and and hope that they provide reasons for me to return in the future.

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I could not be more disappointed. I thought I was going to be able to move away from Herolab for PF2 character building. Great move by T20 to snatch up a property with so much potential to help prop them up.

I really hope Demiplane delivers what they’ve said they will but we’ve seen things like this happen time and time again.

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The real announcement is that Adam Bradford has jumped ship again, now going to Fantasy Grounds. Shame on me for following him once. I’ll not be doing this again.

But having said that, I remember what happened to dndbeyond when he left. Hard not to assume the same will happen here.

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The real announcement is that Adam Bradford has jumped ship again, now going to Fantasy Grounds. Shame on me for following him once. I’ll not be doing this again.

Read between the lines, my friend. Bradford clearly left both times because he disagreed with the company being acquired. I highly doubt he wanted to leave.

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Sure, I agree. I also think he has made a crapton of money and then gets to bail just as things turn. I’m not really blaming him, but it is an obvious pattern. He isn’t really making things that are great for the end user. He is making money making machines that get bought out.

They say to “never read the comments,” but I want to clarify on this one since it’s completely off base and I don’t want anyone coming across the thread and jumping on the false assumptions train.

By the way, I’m still here in these forums, and you’re making false assumptions with this post. I certainly did not “jump ship” in either scenario you reference, and you wouldn’t have any of the context to make such a claim.

So, so wrong here too (although if this is the conclusion you’re going to jump to anyway as you slander me without any details about the actual situation, I wish I at least also got the crapton of money to make me feel better about it).

I spent three and a half years working with a fantastic team to make something great. That something great got sold and I moved on to another adventure. I have no doubt the Demiplane team will continue to do great things, and I look forward to seeing that!

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Well, best of luck to you.

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Thank you!

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Will there be continued support for other VTTs? Like Foundry or Fantasy Grounds? I would LOVE to be able to link my Demiplane resources to Foundry for FGU.

Please say there’s no plans to be Roll20 exclusive? Not to speak negatively about a partner of Demiplane, but Roll20 is popular because it was early, not because it’s good, unless it has changed significantly since I last used it 5 years ago.

I say this out of love: I LOVE Demiplane, and am so very excited about what Demiplane is doing.

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At this time we have not closed the door on an agnostic/neutral API. We’ll share more as those conversations and work continue. :smiling_face:

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Question: Will there be plans on going over the results of the survey? I know there has been mixed feelings about Roll20 acquiring Demiplane, but I for one can see great possibilities for the future. I use Roll20 for my D&D groups, and I have been using Demiplane for all my other games that use theater of the mind, so it’s a big question for me about being able to keep Demiplane as is for those games I run and play in. I’m just wondering if others use Demiplane more for these types of games where we are just looking for a good character builder and quick reference to the rule books. I know it’s been stated that as of now everything’s going to stay the same. I would love to see it stay this way on Demiplane’s side, and to see more of the integrations on Roll20’s site. I think the more options we all have to run and play the games we play, the better, and having these open to us all gives us these choices. Regardless of the outcome, I’m sure it’s going to work out in the end, and we will be provided with the same great quality work you all at Demiplane have given us through the years. @BadEye don’t let the comments get you down brother. A vast majority of us love you and the work you and the team have done for us. Emotions are out of control at the moment seeing you go because you and the team are so beloved to many of use in the community. We wish you the best and can’t wait to see what the future brings and the works you will continue to do. This is also true to all of the team members at Demiplane.

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