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 is per stat, for the whole campaign: you see everything, and players see a stat only if you marked it visible — on every combatant that carries it at once, player characters included. Hiding one hides it everywhere, even from that character's own player: an unpublished stat is your note about a combatant. So the ogre's morale can be yours alone while its wounds are public — but hiding wounds hides the whole party's wounds too.

A new combatant's numbers start hidden — the disguised stranger and the monster nobody has sized up arrive secret without a tap. The exception is a combatant linked to a player's character, which arrives visible: their numbers are their player's to see. Each card's toggle names what the table sees right now — Stats Hidden means its name and place in the turn order are on everyone's board but every number on it — stats and Reserves alike — is yours alone; press it and it becomes Showing Stats. One more exception: a hidden combatant's own player, if it has one, keeps spending their own Reserves from their pinned card, because that is theirs to spend.

A combatant can also carry one-off stats nothing else has, which is where “is on fire” goes — players never see those.

The board refreshes itself every few seconds — except around a box you are part-way through, which it leaves alone so it can't eat a half-typed number. A card showing Unsaved in its header is that card: there's an unsaved value on it somewhere — possibly behind its closed fold — and that one card is waiting on you while the rest of the board carries on. Save it or put it back, and the badge goes with the wait.

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 calls a Beat — it refreshes whatever recharges every round, board-wide, in one press. It's the only break you call from here on purpose: you can't take a longer rest in the middle of a fight in most systems, so Intermission and Curtain Call live off the board instead — on the campaign page, your sheet's top strip, and its Choreography sections further down — for whenever the fight is actually over.

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.