We’ve been hard at work putting together the biggest update to Role since we launched Early Access last Fall! After collecting months of feedback, and watching what our community has built on Role so far, we set out to build a whole new experience. We aim to deliver on one of our original goals: giving you the ability to create support for any TTRPG with code free, drag & drop, WYSIWYG tools. This week we launched a completely redesigned & overhauled way to create templates for your favorite games. We also updated character sheets at your table to be more intuitive & flexible for both veteran and new players alike. Let’s dive into what we’ve changed and some of the new features we added!

But First: New Team Growth!

The Role team is always growing in our mission to provide the best possible experience and community for TTRPG play. To that end, we’re extremely excited to welcome our new Head of Brand, Bebo, to our team! 

Bebo grew up in a small town with big dreams of moving to the city and while she had spent most of her life gaming with her grandma, she didn’t discover competitive gaming until into her 20’s. This set her ablaze for tabletop gaming and before long she was working in the board game industry full time. Having done nearly every job you could imagine in the marketing department, Bebo has worked with hundreds of tabletop gaming publishers over the last 10 years and looks forward to building even more connections in the tabletop role playing sphere after spending so long working in the board game sphere. She has been making up her own role playing games and board games with her best friend since she was 12, but these days spends most of her free time listening to her son tell her about his Original Characters he writes for his RPGS he writes with his friends.

Bebo will be working to help define and evolve what Role means to our players, creators, and the TTRPG world at large. As the Role brand continues to evolve, we strive to be a voice for positivity, inclusion, and ease of play for all. We’re so glad to have her on the team!

Now, about those Sheets & Templates…

The All New Template Creator

At the core of any roleplaying game is a way to track your character sheets, NPCs, monsters, and more. One of our goals with Role has always been to be the best place for creators, game masters, and players to be able to put together sheets for any game they want, in whatever format they want, without the need to learn how to code. Up until now, we had a fairly robust system for people to build templates to fit their play styles. With this release, we are delivering on our promise to create a completely code-free, WYSIWYG, template building experience that we hope will unlock a whole new level of customization on Role. Based on feedback from the community we put together a list of quality of life improvements and new features to level up our template creation suite.

Rethinking the Layout of a Template

We looked at the various parts that make up a Template, and with the feedback we’ve received from our early access creators, we saw room for improvement on how we can simplify what goes into building a template. In our first iteration we had 3 concepts: Sections, Blocks, and Inputs. Together, these 3 things create a template, however we had some arbitrary restrictions on what could go into a Block and we even had different types of Blocks for different use cases, which ultimately didn’t make a whole lot of sense! We’ve done away with Blocks altogether and have simplified what makes up a template to Sections and Elements.

Elements (previously called Inputs) are common pieces of information or functionality that we have identified fit into 90% of tabletop roleplaying games today. Examples of some elements are Text Fields, Buffs, and Dice Pools. With this release, we wanted to give each of our elements a more distinct look from each other as well as add some new elements that have been commonly requested.

We’ve added an Element Library to our Template Creator where you will find the 14 different elements we currently support. Some new ones you will find: Clocks, Dropdowns, and Images. Over time as we identify other common needs for TTRPGs we’ll expand our library and add new elements.

Groups

As mentioned above, we have removed the notion of Blocks. So how can you organize elements with a section? With our new special element we call Groups. Groups offer a similar experience to Blocks, however we have removed any restrictions on which elements can go into the same group. You can now put any element in a group, and even mix and match elements of different widths within a group. This will enable creators to put together more intuitive templates where the right information can always be found together. Groups carry over the same advanced functionality as Blocks, such as being able to duplicate them and add automatic numbering.

Drag & Drop

Our Template Creator now supports drag and drop! Now you can add new Elements to your Template by dragging them from the Element Library. You can also drag to reorder and organize Elements within Sections and Groups. This has been highly requested and a feature we had always envisioned when we initially conceptualized the Template Creator. This has already immensely improved our ability to update the templates we create, and we hope it will do the same for you!

Improved Sheets

While we worked on overhauling our Template Creator that inherently meant taking a look at our Sheets. Once again we looked at all the feedback we have received so far during our Early Access and identified some key improvements to make sheets more intuitive for both Game Master and Players.

Table of Contents & Collapsible Sections

Lengthy sheets have been a little unwieldy on Role for a while now. Scrolling through long sections was taking too much time, and while our original table of contents helped, the feedback was clear: it was still too difficult to get to the important information quickly. We’ve done two things to help address this and we will continue to look at ways to improve this in the future:

1. The New Table of Contents: With our new ToC design, we’ve moved from the little dots to a full slide-out menu. This way those of you that want to be able to see all sections on your sheet at once can. When a sheet is collapsed to the side, we still have the dot navigation and now when you hover over one section it will show the sections next to it as well.
2. Collapsible Sections: Sometimes you have a section you don’t need often or only sometimes applies to your sheet depending on your character. For this, we’ve added the ability to collapse any section and hide it. We’ve also added this functionality to Groups. This will allow you to hide the information you don’t need until it is relevant.

Inline Editing

A big pain point we heard many times was around confusion when an element on a sheet was editable or in edit mode. Particularly when it came to Buffs, References, and Dice Pools we could see a problem. With this release, we made locked elements (elements that the template creator has designated as immutable) more explicit by placing an icon on them so you know the value is locked. For editing, all elements can now be edited inline! For example, when you hover over a Buff you will now see a pencil icon, click that, and you can update it’s value without the need to put your whole sheet into an edit state.

The Complete List of Changes

Sheet Updates

• We redesigned our sheets and elements with the goal of making them more readable and more distinct from each other. Larger fonts, a new color scheme, and new icons!
• Redesigned Table of Contents: A sheet’s ToC is now a full slide-out menu. All sections are always visible, click on one to snap to that section.
• Table of Contents drag to reorder: Hover over an item in your ToC and you will see a drag icon. Click and hold to reorder your sections!
• Table of Contents will now show the Template name and Creator at the top of it. We want to make sure people are getting credit for their work!
• We’ve updated the way you navigate all your sheets at the table. You will now see a series of pips at the top of your sheet when at a table. Each pip represents another sheet. Hover over one to get a quick preview of its name and avatar.
• Sections are now collapsible so you can hide information when you don’t need it.
• Groups: Groups replace the functionality of Blocks. They are also now collapsible for organization. The last group in a collection can now be edited.
• Duplicated groups can now be reordered via drag and drop.
• We’ve added explicit lock icons onto elements that are not editable.
• You can now edit elements inline. Instead of having to put your sheet into “Edit Mode”, you can hover over an element and a pencil icon will appear. Click that and you can edit the element right there.

Template Creator Updates

• We redesigned the Template Creator! With a new builder experience, we added many quality of life improvements to speed up and ease the creation of templates.
• A simplified hierarchy to templates: previously we had Sections -> Blocks -> Inputs. Now we have Sections -> Elements.
• New and Updated Elements: We gave a fresh look to all of our elements as well as added some new ones. Brand new elements: Clocks and Dropdowns. We also took parts of what were previously blocks and turned them into their own elements: Text, Images, Dividers.
• Blocks removed, instead you have Groups. Groups are special elements that allow you to collect other elements into one area of your template. Groups have the same advanced functionality as blocks for automatic numbering and duplication.
• Duplicated Group numbering has been expanded to any label, description, or Text element within the group. Simply put “%N” somewhere in your duplicated group and we automatically number it for you.
• Sections and Groups allow you to place any element within them, as well as allow you to mix elements of different column widths.
• We’ve added a new side panel called the Element Library that shows you all the elements available to you broken up into two groups: General Elements and Gameplay Elements.
• Drag & Drop: you can now drag new elements from the library and drop them anywhere in a section or group. You can also reorganize elements within sections and groups with drag and drop.
• We added a chain icon to indicate when an element is linking to another element or the dice roller.
• We added showing when an element has a toggle on it.
• We streamlined some of the common advanced options so you can do them right from the element without needing to open the advanced panel. Options such as column width, text alignment, deletion, and collapsing elements when you want to create more room for building.
• We added a “clone” button so that you can set up an element and clone all of its properties without needing to recreate it.
• Definitions and explanations of all element types can be found in the Advanced Panel, for easier reference while you build.

We hope you all enjoy our new and improved Sheets and Templates. This release represents a new foundation for which we can continue to improve how you track information in your sessions and build support for your favorite games on Role. As always, we welcome and encourage feedback, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter, Discord, or send us an email. We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Thank you always. You can play with us.

– The Role Team <3