Hey everyone, it’s Lavi & Fran again! In April, we announced the upcoming View as Player feature. Since then, we’ve been heads-down refining the project’s direction and incorporating additional input from the community. 

Today, we’re sharing our progress and walking through some early designs of the feature and a new View Control menu! 

Unlocking More GM Power

Our goal with this feature is straightforward: enable GMs to verify a player experience by giving them a way to see exactly what their players see side by side with their GM screen (without using workarounds or registering separate test accounts). 

As we dug deeper into what our goal actually meant in practice, three clear needs arose:

1. Real-time preview of player experience. GMs need to know exactly what each specific player will see in-game while they’re preparing. This includes exact permissions, character sheet/handout access, map view, and more.
2. Fix issues without losing the room. GMs need to be able to step into a player's view mid-session to quickly diagnose and resolve issues without breaking the flow of the game.
3. Learn faster by seeing both sides of the table. One of the fastest ways to truly understand how Roll20 works is to see the difference in GM and player views side by side.

 

And, if you’re thinking, “Doesn’t Ctrl+L” already do this? - not quite. That shortcut shows token line of sight, but doesn’t show a player’s view or hide GM-only elements. “Rejoin as Player” is also incomplete: the GM is still themselves, not their player, so visibility, token access, and sheet controls won’t reflect what the player will actually see based on their permissions.

Nailing the View as Player feature opens the door to even more exciting developments down the road, such as Spectator Mode to support game observation and streaming, and Broadcasting to external monitors or TVs, which can be used for in-person play.  

An Early Look at What We’re Building

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Here's where we are with designs, keeping in mind that things can still shift as we move into development:

• A player select menu lets GMs choose a specific player to view the game as or approximate a generic player view if your game doesn't have players assigned yet.
• A secondary tab opens as that player, reflecting their exact view of the Tabletop, chat, and journal, while the GM screen stays exactly as it was.
• A clear indicator in the secondary tab showing which player view is being previewed.

The existing Ctrl+L functionality is going to stay as a complementary tool for line-of-sight checks, and we’re going to be very clear on the difference between the two, so you all will know which tool to use and when.

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Update: New View Controls menu

Alongside this project, we’re enhancing the VTT toolbar to make tools easier to find and use. We're introducing a new View Control menu which will group all features that affect a player or GM’s view of the VTT, including the incoming View as Player feature. 

The View Control menu will also relocate some of the menu options previously found in the GM Hamburger menu to make them more discoverable: 

• Opacity sliders 
• the Foreground toggle
• Dark/Light Mode
• Ctrl + L

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What's Next?

Research: Expanding GM/Player Controls

In addition to expanding GM visibility, we're researching whether taking actions on a player's behalf might be possible in the future. (Example: creating player macros without the player needing to be present. Think of it like when a tech support professional takes control of a user’s machine to troubleshoot or solve a problem, instead of merely trying to describe over the phone how to do it themselves.) 

This functionality, although not directly requested, is one potential solution to address frustration reported when GMs can’t fully set up and verify a player’s full experience ahead of game time. We believe it could make an already useful feature genuinely delightful, so we're digging into whether we can make it happen. More to come!

Development

We're moving into active development now and will be back on the blog soon with more updates. In the meantime, our team continues to review the Roll20 forums, social, and community channels. We’re looking forward to continuing to build with the community, for the community.  

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Hey everyone! Lavi and Fran here, from Product and Design on Roll20's Virtual Tabletop team. We're lucky to work alongside an incredible group of Engineers, and over the last year, we were heads-down building features that expand what's possible on the VTT (Map Pins and Foreground Layer being a few of the big highlights). For the next 6–12 months, our focus is shifting to reducing friction in GM and player workflows by making the tools they already rely on easier to find, learn, and use during onboarding, game prep, and play.

Continuing our approach to community-focused development, we've been conducting extensive research and working closely with both new and experienced GMs. It’s obvious, based on the analysis of interviews, forum threads, and testing sessions, that GMs care deeply about their players' experience… building campaigns for their table. To that end, the need to test what the player experience will be ahead of time is of the utmost importance.

In their own words:

• "I wish I could toggle between my perspective and the player's perspective."
• "I want to understand what the feel is for the player."

GMs put serious work into building experiences, and we want to remove friction in their workflows wherever we can. That way, they can spend less time fussing with workarounds or feeling frustrated, and more time getting excited about playing. This is exactly what inspired our next feature, View as Player.

Current Options

Roll20 currently provides a few ways for GMs to approximate a player's view, although each has some limitations in execution:

• Ctrl+L displays line of sight, but strips away player-specific elements while continuing to expose GM-only controls
• Rejoining the game as a player gives player-level permissions. However, the GM is still themselves (not their player), so visibility, token access, and character sheet controls may not match what the player will actually see based on permissions.
• Creating a new account for testing works relatively well, but managing a second login and running simultaneous accounts in a test game can be cumbersome. Additionally, it still doesn’t replicate a specific player's exact experience.

The result: GMs go into their sessions with a level of uncertainty, where avoidable surprises may interrupt the flow of their games.

Introducing: View As Player

To make it easier for GMs to see what their Players see, we're building a straightforward tool that shows exactly what specific players see, side by side with the GM view, without needing workarounds or test accounts.

Our goal is to give GMs the confidence to know:

• their scenes look right
• permissions are set correctly
• players are going to have a great session with fewer interruptions or display issues

We've already kicked off user research and are working closely with our interviewees and community champions while addressing feedback from our forum, social, and community spaces, so keep it coming! We’ll be back in a few weeks to share preliminary designs and more about what we've learned and where we’re heading.

Hi, I'm Lavi, the Product Manager for the Virtual Tabletop team. I'm here with a new Reddit account so I can say hello and share updates on what we've been working (really hard) on!

In his recent post, our CTO Mike talked about the broader initiative across the company to improve performance, and the Demiplane team also shared an update on their journey. This blog aims to share what the Virtual Tabletop team is contributing through performance work, focusing on making your games run smoother, feel more responsive, and stay reliable from start to finish.

As he mentioned in his blog, performance issues can show up in your games in different ways depending on how you play, as: 

• a slow buildup over a long session
• actions within the game are taking longer than expected
• things feel a little less snappy than they should

 

To better connect our work to what you’re actually experiencing first-hand, we’ve grouped our recent improvements into categories below based on impact.

Faster Load Times and Smoother Gameplay

Graphics Updates:

To kick off 2026, our team has been rolling out graphics updates in phases that reduce how hard your machine is working to render your game. As a result, games containing detailed maps, lots of tokens, Dynamic Lighting, and layered assets are seeing faster loading, smoother motion, and fewer slowdowns when panning, zooming, or interacting with the map. (Note: toggle on/off: VTT Settings > Graphics > Enable Performance Enhancements).

Example: We tested Tomb of Annihilation’s “Players Map of Chult” across a variety of devices, and on an average mid-range laptop (2022 Macbook Air), we saw: 

• a reduction in the amount of rendering work per frame (draw calls) by nearly 10x
• overall smoothness, improving from around 40 frames per second (FPS) to closer to 150!

 

While these improvements are working well for the vast majority of both players and GMs, there might be some people who still experience problems. We’re working with this small group of users to chase down the few lingering edge cases with this setting, especially as it relates to drawings on the Tabletop. Once we’re confident we’ve caught the weird stuff, we’ll be rolling in the remaining performance updates for “drawings” and make this the default for everyone.

Memory Leaks:

Our team found that, over time, certain actions left small traces of data in the background of campaigns without fully cleaning up after themselves, impacting performance (more formally referred to as “memory leaks”). That buildup can compound and contribute to a slowdown or a feeling of sluggishness over a game session.

We addressed two major sources of this in the last couple of weeks (and some others):

• Repeatedly opening Advanced Character Sheets (like the D&D 2024 sheet)
• Switching pages (especially between large pages with lots of tokens)

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For each, we reduced the memory used during both the first time the action was taken in-game and all subsequent times it was taken. Plugging the Advanced Sheet leak alone reduced memory usage 46%, and any subsequent time the sheet was reloaded by 77%. This chart shows some of the other improvements made:

Now, we’re actively addressing a parallel memory leak affecting our Legacy Character Sheets (like the D&D 2014 Sheet), which will reduce performance slowdowns even more across all games.

Faster, More Reliable Uploads

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Whether it’s maps, character tokens, or custom assets, uploading your own art to the Tabletop is a core part of the Roll20 experience. It’s what lets you shape your world, express your style, and run games exactly the way you want.

To keep that experience fast and responsive, our upload process generates multiple optimized versions of each image behind the scenes. This allows the VTT to use the right version at the right moment, whether you’re zoomed in on a single token or viewing an entire map. For example, when you zoom out, and there are dozens (or even hundreds) of tokens on screen, we can swap in smaller, lighter versions so everything continues to run smoothly. It’s a similar approach to how video games adjust detail at different distances, helping reduce the load on your device while keeping gameplay seamless.

Over the last month, we pushed out improvements to the upload process that have very real impacts on upload speed and success rate:

• Enhanced image upload retry logic with automatic retries at each stage of the upload process, reducing upload failures by 35%.
• Optimized the image processing pipeline to pass through original source formats (instead of converting to PNG) when an image doesn’t require resizing. On a throttled connection with a JPEG sample, this reduced upload time by 3x.
• Optimized the animation processing pipeline to pass through WebM animation files, avoiding unnecessary processing and resulting in 30-50%+ faster upload speeds (depending on the exact file size and connection speed).
• Introduced several other process improvements that together cut image upload times by several seconds:
  • reduced signing requests from one per variant to a single request for all 
  • updated image processing during upload so files are handled once instead of multiple times to create size variations
  • improved upload queues to adapt to connection quality and error conditions

In addition, we upgraded internal analytics and monitoring, which will also let us track and catch performance trends and issues over time, and help us troubleshoot issues with individuals when things go wrong.

We have a couple more improvements tee’d up to make uploads even faster, including converting all image uploads to a lossless WebP file.

Clearer Guidance In-Game

As Mike mentioned in his post, “performance isn’t a single thing.” It can show up differently depending on your hardware, browser, connection, game size, system, extensions, and more.

Alongside improving performance itself, we’re focused on making the experience easier to understand when something doesn’t go as expected, so you have clear, actionable guidance to get things back on track quickly.

We’ve already made a number of improvements here, including:

• more helpful notifications (or next steps) when something is taking longer than expected. 
• clearer status messaging during uploads
• better visibility into file size and storage limits
• making it easier to share details with our Customer Service team, so you get help faster when something is wrong

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We’ve also updated the articles in our help center to cover third-party interactions that can have a negative impact on performance, like browser extensions (including password managers). Next up, we’ll be adding more visibility to your storage usage and file upload limits before you upload new assets, so that you know exactly how much space you have available up front.

Next Steps

Some of the improvements mentioned above have already been released, and others are in progress as we speak. Performance work, as previously mentioned, is both iterative and ongoing, but we’ve had enough sustained focus over the last several months that we wanted to make sure you knew what was happening behind the scenes, and why. To keep an eye on our work at any given time, check out the shared public roadmap.

You’ll be hearing more from our partner teams working on character sheets/management, plus other important projects in the coming months.

Thank you to everyone who has kept playing and speaking up when your games aren’t running the way you need them to; you can always reach out to our support team to request troubleshooting if things aren’t feeling right in your games. It helps make the best versions of the tools you need to play.