Bits and Reserves

No, and either half works without the other. A game can track pools with no ability list at all, or keep an ability list where nothing costs anything. Plenty of tables use neither and just write things in fields.

They did, and that was our fault: Cue used to be labelled “what sets it off, and what it takes”, which is half a description of Costs.

Cue is when. The moment in the fiction where this becomes available — “an action”, “on a failed save”, “once you've been hit”. It's prose. Nothing reads it, nothing enforces it.

Costs are what it spends. A Reserve and a number. The app really does subtract these, and refuses the Bit when a pool is short.

A Bit can have both, either or neither. “An action” is a Cue even in a game where actions aren't tracked; if your game does track them as a pool, that same thing becomes a Cost too.

Make it a Bit anyway and say so in Reach: “the attack it's added to”.

A monk spending a ki point to add damage to a strike is its own Bit, with its own Cost, whose Reach is whatever the thing it attaches to reached. Reach is prose, so “wherever that attack went” is a perfectly good answer — it does not have to be a distance. The reason to give it a Bit of its own rather than folding it into the attack is that the app can only subtract a Reserve when there's something to press.

Because “ability” already means something specific in most games and something different in each of them, and the moment we borrow one game's word we've picked a side. Cue and Reach are deliberately not spell terms — they work for a spell, a manoeuvre, a favour you can call in, or a thing your character is simply good at.

Yes, and you'll want to — a Bit per spell plus both attacks plus hide plus dash plus jump adds up fast. Each Bit takes a free-text Category, and categories become headings on your sheet.

There's also a show-on-Center-Stage switch, on by default. Turn it off for the ones you'll never press mid-fight. It's clutter control and nothing else — it never hides anything from anyone, it just keeps your combat screen readable.

Because plenty of games don't have a short rest, and a few don't have rests at all. Naming the moment rather than the rule means a troupe game, a heist game and a dungeon crawl can all use the same three buttons and mean different things by them. You decide what an Intermission is at your table by pressing it.

Bigger breaks include smaller ones, so calling a Curtain Call refills anything that would have come back at an Intermission. Nobody presses three buttons to go to bed.

“By hand” sits outside all that on purpose: a once-per-story favour or a slowly-earned currency has to survive a night's rest, or it isn't that kind of pool.

A free Bit simply has no cost rows. Press Add a cost to add one and the minus beside a row to take it away — nothing is saved until you save the Bit.

With JavaScript turned off there's no add button, so the form leaves one blank row sitting there instead; set it to a Reserve to add a cost, or leave it alone and it's discarded.

A spell that costs a slot and an action takes both or takes neither. If any pool is short, the whole thing is refused, nothing is spent, and the refusal names the pool that came up short.

There's no half-cast that leaves someone down an action with nothing to show for it. It's the same rule the character sheet's save follows, for the same reason: the failure that hurts is the one you don't notice.

Delete a Reserve later and Bits that cost it keep working, just cheaper. A Bit that cost two pools and lost one still costs the other.

Starting Reserves are copied onto every new character automatically — everyone gets spell slots, or stamina, or whatever your game gives everybody.

The Bit Catalog is a shelf players take from when they want something. Not everyone gets Fireball.

Taking a Bit off the shelf makes a copy. So you can rewrite the catalog version later without silently rewriting a character somebody's been playing for four months — which is the behaviour you want the first time you fix a typo in a spell.

Like starting fields, Reserves are seeded at character creation — a template you add later doesn't appear on sheets that already exist. Set them up before your players make characters if you can.

If you add one late anyway — or import a pack into a game already running — Apply missing Reserves to existing characters here catches everyone up at once. For a single sheet, each character's Reserves also have a From the campaign templates picker.

Either way, a new Reserve starts full, and one the character already has is left exactly as it is — neither of these ever resets a count someone has spent. Player characters only: Cast don't get Reserves.

Worth knowing if you import a pack: a Bit's cost is matched to a Reserve by name, so a Bit copied onto a character who hasn't got the Reserve it spends lands costing nothing. The app says so when it happens, and names the Reserve to add.

If that already happened to a few sheets, Re-link Bit costs to Reserves under the Bit Catalog fills them in afterwards. It matches Bits to catalog entries by name and only adds — a cost a Bit already has is never changed, even if you've since edited the catalog, and a Bit you've renamed on the sheet is left alone entirely.

You own everything on your own sheet. Write your own Bit makes one the GM never defined, and you can add pools of your own too.

All of it leaves with you. If you leave the game or get removed, your copy of the character keeps its Bits and Reserves, ready to walk into a different campaign.

You always see your own. Your GM sees everything. Other players see one of your pools only if it's a shared campaign-wide one that the GM marked visible — so a pool you invented for yourself stays yours to know about.