Roll20 adds secret rolls to keep D&D tension intact

Roll20 pushed Secret Rolls and Super-Secret Rolls into its virtual tabletop on June 22, giving Dungeon Masters a cleaner way to hide Perception checks, stealth scenes, trap detection, creature identification, and other moments where the number on the die should stay out of player sight. The company said the feature landed as the No. 4 most-requested item in its Suggestions & Ideas Forum, which has been around since 2016. Roll20 also said it has delivered 28 of its top 50 most upvoted feature requests, with 70% of those releases arriving in the last three and a half years.

The new Secret Rolls command, entered with /sr or /secretroll, sends the result to the GM while still telling the player that a secret roll happened. That makes it fit for the classic D&D beat where a character is scanning a hallway for a hidden door, listening for pressure plates, or making an Insight check that should feel uncertain without becoming invisible to the player. Roll20’s help center says the roller’s name and the outcome go only to the GM, and 3D dice are automatically turned off for both hidden-roll modes.

Super-Secret Rolls go further. Entered with /ssr or /supersecretroll, they send the result to the GM without notifying the player that a roll occurred at all. Roll20 called out trap triggers and automated Reactions as the clearest use cases, especially when even a confirmation message would change how a player moves a token or reacts to a suspicious tile. In the help center, Roll20 says Super-Secret Rolls can work with Token Reactions so a hidden roll fires when a character steps onto a trap token. The company also says trap tokens can be made invisible by setting opacity to 0%, and Automatic Reset can be enabled if the trap needs to trigger more than once.

Roll20 said Secret Rolls can be started from chat or from the Dice Roller by selecting Secret as the roll type, while Super-Secret Rolls do not yet connect directly to sheet roll buttons. The help center includes attribute-modifier examples for Dungeons & Dragons 5e and 5.5e, along with Pathfinder 2e, so hidden checks can still use token data without exposing the result to the table.

The update fits Roll20’s wider push to make the virtual tabletop feel less mechanical and more like a DM screen with a pulse. Secret Rolls and Super-Secret Rolls join the platform’s existing secret rolling, roll queries, exploding dice, and GM roll tools, but the new commands make the most common tension points in D&D easier to stage: the whispered check, the unseen trap, the monster that rolls behind the curtain, and the table that leans in because nobody knows what just happened.