Questions people actually ask

Four things, and they're not a to-do list — they're decisions:

• No dice roller. You own dice. Probably too many dice.
• No maps or battle grid.
• No rules math. It won't work out your modifiers — see below for what it does instead.
• No AI writing your villains or summarising your night.

The reasoning is the same each time. An app that knows one game's rules has quietly become that game's app, and everyone else is now using something that fits badly. And an app that does everything is slower at the one thing you actually needed while five people watched you scroll.

What's left is aimed at the three things that really go wrong at a table: improv pressure (name a tavern, now, out loud), memory (what did that guy say?) and pacing (writing anything down without stopping the game to do it).

• The Table — your home screen. Every game you run, every game you're in.
• Campaign — one campaign's home page: what's happened, who's in it, and everything below. PLAN.md calls this screen Yes, And; nothing on screen ever has.
• Characters — the roster. The Players are the ones your friends own; the Cast is everyone else, from the villain to the guy who sells rope.
• Backdrops — places. Props — things. Ensemble — groups: a guild, a family, a very organised bandit problem.
• Center Stage — whose turn it is, and what everyone's got left.
• Callback — where each Scene gets written up. What happened last time, before you forget it.
• Scene — one sitting at the table. Its recap, its plot hook, and the notes taken while it ran.
• Backstage — the GM's settings.
• Party Notes — the board everyone writes on. Tags — your own labels, and how everything finds everything else.
• Bits — what your character can pull off. A spell, a swing, a knack. Each has a Cue (what sets it off) and a Reach (how far it carries).
• Reserves — what gets spent doing it. Spell slots, stamina, luck, arrows.

Because “faction” means something exact in some games and nothing at all in others, and the second we borrow one game's word we've picked a side. “Ensemble” means the same amount to everybody. That's not a joke about theatre kids; it's the only way one app can sit at every table.

Reserves refill at a moment at the table rather than at a particular game's rest, for the same reason:

• Beat — every round of an encounter.
• Intermission — a short breather — a 5e short rest.
• Curtain Call — a full reset — a 5e long rest, or end of session.
• By hand — never automatically; the player refills it themselves.

Bigger breaks include the smaller ones, so calling a Curtain Call refills everything an Intermission would have. You don't have to press three buttons to go to bed.

Sure enough that there's nothing to be unsure about. Your notes are fetched by a question that only ever asks for your notes — there's no setting for it, because there's nothing for a setting to switch off. No GM button, no admin override, nothing.

That's on purpose. A promise kept by a screen is a promise the next new screen can forget; a promise kept by the question itself can't be forgotten by accident.

There are three note-shaped things and they behave completely differently:

• Your private notes — on anything you can see. Yours alone, forever.
• Party Notes — the shared board. Everyone reads them, everyone writes them, your name is on yours, and good ones get voted up.
• The GM's own notes — on the people and places they've shared with you, you get the description written for you, never the part they wrote for themselves. (Which is where the twist usually is.)

Got a private note the party should really have? There's a Copy to party notes button. It copies. Your original stays private.

One thing that isn't private, so you're never surprised by it: your character sheet. The GM of a game can see and edit every character in it, yours included. That's the job. It's your notes that are yours.

• Joining is always free. Joining a game, making a character, keeping that character when you leave — free, permanently, however many games you're in.
• The limit is about games you own, not games you're in. Play in fifteen if your calendar can take it.
• It's one payment, on your account. Not a subscription, and not per-campaign — it unlocks you, not a particular game.
• Nothing you've made is ever locked up or deleted by any of this.

When the GM shares a person, place, thing or group, you get the description written for you — never their own notes on it, which are a separate box for exactly this reason.

Something unshared isn't just hidden from the list. It can't be reached by guessing its web address either. It isn't out of sight; it's out of reach.

Two things work the other way round, and they're the useful ones:

• Your tags and private notes stay yours even on something the GM shared with you. They can't see them. Neither can anyone else.
• Party Notes stuck to a thing follow that thing. If a Backdrop gets unshared, its notes go quiet with it — there's no second switch to remember.

Your character splits in two, and both halves are real:

• The GM keeps a copy in the campaign, moved over to the Cast, so the story doesn't develop a hole where you used to be.
• You keep a copy attached to no campaign at all. Fully yours.

From that moment the two are strangers: whatever the GM does with theirs doesn't touch yours, and the other way around. It works exactly the same whether you left on good terms or didn't.

Your private notes come with you too. They were never anyone else's to keep.

In Backstage you decide which boxes every new character starts with, and mark each one Players only, Cast only or Players and Cast. So a game where your NPCs track Morale and your players track Bonds says so once and then stops being your problem.

A box can hold a word, a paragraph, a number, a yes/no, or a list to pick from. Nothing is ever calculated from anything else — the sheet holds what you put in it, and that's all it does.

You can also import a setup somebody else built. That's what the D&D 5e pack is: an example of pointing the app at one game, not the app's opinion about which game you should be playing.

You do. But you don't have to remember it, and you don't have to ask, which is the part that was actually slowing anyone down.

It also means a house rule is one edit away. Change the note on the box and everyone's sheet says the new thing — no update, no app that disagrees with your table.

No, and that's on purpose rather than unfinished. Everything you're looking at is shared — the GM's board, the party notes, whose turn it is — so a page that kept working without a signal would be showing you a copy that had quietly stopped being true. Mid-fight, an out-of-date hit point total is worse than a page that admits it can't reach anything.

If your table plays somewhere with no bars, the honest workaround is paper: print or screenshot the sheets before you start.

No. It's saved per device, not per account — so the one you picked on your phone doesn't follow you to a laptop, and nobody else at the table sees your choice.

It also works before you log in, which is a small thing that matters if you're showing someone the app in a pub with bad lighting.

• From here — everything. Sheet, abilities, pools, the lot.
• From Alchemy — there's a reader for their export file. One-way: it brings a sheet in, and never sends anything back out.

A GM can move a whole setup too — starting boxes, tracked stats, pools, the ability list — into another campaign, or onto a shelf to reuse.

Re-importing a fixed version updates what's already there by name instead of making a second copy of everything. So you can correct a typo in a template and actually apply the correction, rather than ending up with two Strengths and a decision to make.

• Leaving a game doesn't delete your character. You keep a copy (up there).
• A failed save doesn't eat your typing. If something on a sheet won't save, nothing on it saves — it comes back with every word you typed still in it and tells you what to fix. All-or-nothing on purpose: half a saved sheet is worse than none.
• A Party Note can't be edited, which isn't the same as being fragile. Delete it and post it again. That's the only way to change one, so nobody can quietly rewrite what somebody else said.