Running a fight on Center Stage

Add an existing character and their sheet comes with them — the important fields show right there on their card, and their pools and abilities are usable without leaving the fight.

Add a bare name and you get a combatant with nothing attached, which you can still give stats to. That's the right choice for the four guards nobody will remember, and for the hazards that take turns but aren't people.

It did, and it's meant to. Ending a turn physically moves that combatant to the back of the queue. It looks alarming once and then never again.

The reason is that on a phone at a table, “who's up” needs to be the thing your eye lands on without hunting for a highlight halfway down a list of eleven. Top of the list, every time.

The two arrows in a combatant's header move them one place up or down. They're in the same spot on every card, so nudging someone three places is three presses in one place rather than three hunts.

That's for the mid-fight changes — someone delays, someone readies, someone rolls again.

Reorder, up with the round controls, is for the start of a fight when everyone has just rolled. The cards fold down to one line each and you drag them into order; Done saves the lot in one go.

The cards stay folded until you're finished, on purpose — a card is most of a screen when it's open, and dragging one of those over eleven others is not a thing anyone wants to do on a phone.

The arrows are still there when you're not reordering, and they're what works if your browser has JavaScript turned off. Nothing about the fight depends on being able to drag.

They're not meant to. Yours shows every combatant's card open — their pools, their abilities and every stat you track — because you're running all of them and between turns you're reading the whole board.

A player gets a short line per combatant instead, with their own character lifted to the top. They only need to find themselves, and they need it in one glance on their own turn.

A combatant who's down can be skipped rather than deleted. They stay on the board, dimmed and badged, and turn order steps over them — because someone is going to get resurrected, stabilised or dragged out of the river, and a character the app forgot is a character you have to type back in.

They keep their place while they're out, so coming back doesn't cost them a round of position. Back in returns them.

You set the shared ones up once, in Backstage under Center Stage: the stats every combatant gets, each with a name, an icon, and whether players can see it.

Visibility follows the same rule as everything else: you see everything, a player always sees their own character's, and otherwise they see a stat only if you marked that one visible. So the ogre's morale can be yours alone while its wounds are public.

A combatant can also carry one-off stats nothing else has, which is where “is on fire” goes.

It refuses, tells them which pool came up short, and spends nothing. An ability that costs a slot and an action either takes both or takes neither — there's no half-cast that leaves someone down an action with nothing to show.

Players can do this themselves for their own character. You can do it for anyone. Nobody has to ask permission to tick off their own spell slot, which is the point.

Call a Break refreshes the whole board in one press, and you pick which kind of break it was. A bigger break includes the smaller ones — calling the night's end also refills anything that recharges between rounds — so you never press three buttons to end a scene.

End it. A live encounter is what puts the Live badge on your players' screens and keeps a summary on the campaign page, so an encounter you never closed is one that's still lit up on six phones a fortnight later.

Nothing is lost by ending one. The bandits don't come back if you need them — but the sheet damage does stay, which is usually what you wanted.