Part of the fun of Dungeons and Dragons is sitting down with your friends, buying some unhealthy snacks, cracking open a cube of Mountain Dew, and using your imaginations to do all sorts of stupid (and occasionally noble) things for hours. It's not always easy to find time in the schedule to sit at the table and bust out the D20s, though. Friends travel. Friends move. Friends, in the modern-day digital era, might not even be people you've actually met or played with in person.

The solution? Services like Roll20 give you all the conveniences of tabletop gaming right in your Web browserincluding character sheets, maps, virtual dice to roll, and even integrated video chats so you can see your fellow players' reactions when a Beholder annihilates their favorite characters. Up until now, though, you've had to be a little creative to play Dungeons and Dragons content on Roll20, as there haven't been any official D&D modules that you could purchase and integrate right into Roll20. You'd have to crudely sketch out maps yourself and make use of not-as-fun monster "tokens" to symbolize the D&D-themed baddies your party was fighting.

That's all changing now. Roll20 announced today that it has acquired a license for Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons and Dragons, and official Roll20-themed modules are already available for purchase on the service's website.

"Remember that big announcement from Roll20CON?! The word is out! Roll20 is now an officially licensed partner with Wizards of the Coast! Lost Mine of Phandelver is available now, plus Storm King's Thunder is up for pre-order and will be delivered to your Roll20 account on September 6th," reads a brief announcement over at Roll20's Facebook page.

Some commenters are already concerned that the licensing arrangement is the first step toward an eventual Dungeons and Dragons takeover of Roll20. However, the service assures this isn't the case, and that other games and non-D&D rulesets will still be fully supported.

"We have no interest in becoming a solitary system platform. We continue to love a bunch of games, and additionally know that people play even D&D in a bunch of different ways via Roll20 that would be negatively impacted by over-optimization," reads a comment from Roll20.

"So look forward to a BUNCH of other cool stuff with a bunch of other cool publishers down the line."

The one sticking point of Roll20's new license is that these digital goods are a separate purchase from any physical modules you might have already bought for your own Dungeons and Dragons sessions. In other words, you'll be paying twice to play a new digital version of Storm King's Thunder, and that's not going to come cheap: $50 for the module, which is the same price as its physical book. (The first licensed module, Lost Mine of Phandelver, costs $20.)

"We're always looking to broaden access to Dungeons & Dragons, and Roll20 already plays a significant part of that expansion. We are excited to see what the future brings," said Greg Tito, communications manager at Wizards of the Coast, as reported by Polygon.

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