Table tools — clocks, initiative and safety

Three tools on the Play & GM shelf of Widgets that work for any game, whether or not you run it on a PostRoll map. Each one saves to your account, and each keeps a separate set for every campaign — press Save as… in the bar above the tool.

Each looks like the thing it is rather than like a settings screen: the clocks are chalk on a board, the tracker is a field board, and the safety tools are printed cards.

Clocks

A clock is something coming closer: a ritual completing, a patrol closing in, the tide turning. It fills a segment at a time.

Name it under Chalk up a new clock — “The alarm is raised”.
Pick how many Segments it takes: four, six, eight, ten or twelve.
Press Draw it.

Each clock is drawn big, with its name and count underneath. Press the dial itself to fill a wedge — it’s the thing you do most, so it’s the biggest target on the board. The controls below are the rarer moves: − takes a wedge back, the eraser wipes the clock clean, and × rubs it out for good. A clock that fills is drawn round again in your palette’s colour and marked full.

Initiative Tracker

For fights you’re not running on a PostRoll map — at a table, over voice, or on another VTT.

Type a name under Who’s in the fight and press Add. Fill in Init if they’ve already rolled; leave it empty if they haven’t. Everyone gets a plate on the board.
Roll for them — see below — or type what was rolled.
Press Sort to put everyone in order, highest first. Anyone without a number goes last.
Press Start to begin at round 1, then Next turn to move through the order. When it comes back round, the round number goes up.

Rolling initiative

The tracker rolls with the app’s own dice, the same ones the dice roller and the battle map use — so a throw here lands on screen, goes to your roll history and counts in the Dice Lab exactly as any other roll does.

The dice button on a row rolls for that one combatant and writes the result into their Init.
Roll all rolls for everyone still standing, one after another, then sorts the order for you. Whoever is down is skipped.
Rolling picks the die the fight uses — 1d20, 1d12, 1d10, 1d8 or 1d6 — so a game that doesn’t roll d20 for initiative isn’t stuck with one. It’s saved with the fight.
Bonus on a row is added to that combatant’s roll, and shown in the notation: a bonus of 3 on a d20 fight rolls 1d20+3.

Typing a number by hand still works and always will — that’s how you enter what someone rolled with real dice on a table.

Putting them in the right order

Sort does it by the numbers, but the order is yours to change: drag a plate by the grip on its left edge to move it. The grip is a button, so you can also tab to it and move a plate with the arrow keys — no mouse needed.

Grouping creatures together

Press the link button on a plate and it joins the plate above it. The two are bracketed together, and the label on the bracket says how the group takes its turn. Press that label to switch between the two kinds:

Shares one turn — a familiar acting on its wizard’s turn, a mount and its rider. One turn between all of them, and the lamp lights down the side of the whole group.
A turn each — four rats, or a squad that moves as a unit. They stay together in the order and each gets a full turn, one after another; the lamp lights whichever plate is up.

New groups start as shares one turn, and joining an existing group takes that group’s kind — adding a fifth rat to a block doesn’t collapse it into one turn.

Either way, the group holds together:

Sort puts it where its best roll goes and keeps it whole — a wizard on 18 and a familiar on 3 both sit at 18.
Dragging moves the whole group, so a familiar can’t be stranded halfway up somebody else’s turn order.
A shared group is skipped only when every member is down; if the wizard falls, the turn passes to the familiar.
Remove one of a pair and the other goes back to taking its own turn.

Press link again on a plate to take it out of the group.

Running the fight

On each plate you can mark someone down (they’re skipped and struck through in red, until you press it again), note conditions as small labels, or remove them. Whoever’s turn it is has a lamp lit down the edge of their plate in your palette’s colour; the arrow on any plate hands them the turn directly.

Start begins the fight you have; it doesn’t clear who’s down. For a clean roster, open Start a new one from the Save bar.

Safety Tools

What your table has agreed, written down where you can reach it mid-session.

Three lists, not two

Lines are things that never appear at all.
Veils are things that happen, but off screen.
Ask first is the one the pair leaves out: fine, as long as I know it’s coming. Without it, an honest answer gets rounded down to a line — and the game loses something nobody wanted to lose — or up to a veil, and someone gets it sprung on them.

Each is a printed card with its own colour, darkest for lines and lightest for ask-first. Write on the line at the foot of a card and press +. Edit an entry by typing in it, or remove it with ×. Anyone can add to any card at any time, without giving a reason. Copy for the table puts the whole agreement on your clipboard for a chat channel or a pinned message.

The checklist

A blank box asks someone to name, out loud, the thing they least want to say. Open Checklist of common topics and each topic has three buttons beside it — L, V and A — so placing one on a card is a single tap. It’s not a complete list and it isn’t a quiz; it’s a way to start the conversation without anyone having to raise the hardest thing unprompted.

Session zero questions

Ten questions worth settling before the first session — tone, spotlight, what happens when someone misses a week, how the table wants romance and violence handled. Copy the questions sends them wherever your group talks.

The six tools

Underneath, the tools a group can agree to practise — Session Zero, Lines & Veils, the X-Card, Script Change, the Open Door and Stars & Wishes — each with what it asks of a table and who designed it. Communities on PostRoll declare the same ones, so you can see what a table practises before you join it.