Hosting a Session

The Session tab is the DM's switchboard. It starts the night, hands out the join code, shows you who is actually connected, and ends the night when you are done.

Players get a Session tab too, but theirs is a smaller thing: their connection, their party roster, and a Leave button. Chapter 15, Joining as a Player, covers their side. This chapter is the DM's.

Before you host

With a campaign open and no session running, the Session tab shows:

• A card naming the campaign you are about to host.
• A reminder of how long it has been since this campaign was backed up. See chapter 31, Backing Up and Restoring Campaigns.
• On a Mac or Windows machine, a card offering to pair your phone. Pair one before the session if you want dice. See chapter 34, Pairing Your Phone.
• A checkbox controlling whether onboarding tips appear.
• The Start Hosting button.

If no campaign is selected yet, the tab says so and offers a Choose Campaign button instead. You host one campaign at a time.

Start Hosting

Tap Start Hosting. A brief spinner covers the tab, then a color picker opens that you cannot dismiss until you choose. Your color marks your tokens, your pins, and everything you place, all session.

If the session fails to create, an error screen names the failure and offers a Go Back button.

Once hosting, the status pill at the top right of the screen reads LIVE in green. It reads OFFLINE the rest of the time, on every tab, so you can always tell at a glance whether players can reach you.

The join code

The session code card shows the code in large type. It looks like FAR-TABLE- followed by four characters.

• Tapping the code copies it, with a brief "Copied" confirmation.
• The Copy Code button underneath does the same thing, for pasting into a group chat.
• Under the code, Far Table spells the last four characters out phonetically, using the alphabet where A is Alfa and B is Bravo. Read that line down a voice call and nobody argues about M versus N.

Only the last four characters vary, and your players' join forms are pre-filled with the FAR-TABLE- part already.

Watching people arrive

The Players card counts heads in its header and gives every connected player one row: a dot in their chosen color, their character name with their own name after it, and their species and class underneath. An empty roster shows an hourglass and "Waiting for players to join..."

Latecomers are caught up automatically in the background. Chapter 16, "Staying in Sync", covers what that involves.

Network Status

Once at least one player is connected, a Network Status panel appears below the Players card. Collapsed, it summarizes the table in one line: how many players are syncing, how many transfers are active with how much data queued, or "All idle".

Tap the header to expand it for one row per player, each with a colored dot:

• Green means that player is idle and up to date.
• Amber means they are syncing or receiving something right now.
• Red means a transfer to them failed.

Each row names its state, such as "synced", "syncing 3 of 11", or "2 active", and any transfer in flight gets a line with a percentage. This panel is the only place you see your own outgoing transfers; the syncing banner players get never fires for you.

A red dot is not usually an emergency. Your device retries. Chapter 46, "Troubleshooting", covers the cases where it does not sort itself out.

While combat is running

If a fight is active, the Session tab grows a Combat Active card naming the encounter and the current round, with an Open Play button that jumps you to the table. Your device also switches itself to the Play tab when an encounter starts or an asset is presented full-screen.

Ending the night

The End button sits in the top bar and only appears on the Session tab while a session is live. Tapping it asks you to confirm and tells you exactly what it will do.

What clears, on every device at the table:

• The active map.
• The session's dice photos.
• Combat and encounter state.

What survives, on every device:

• Everything in the Atlas: maps, assets, and the pins on them.
• Everything you revealed to a player, which stays browsable on their own device with no session at all. See chapter 30, Browse Offline: the Player's Atlas.

Your players get a "Session ended" screen with a Return to Home button. You land back on the Atlas tab, and the status pill goes OFFLINE.

Ending is a blunt instrument. If one player has dropped, have them reconnect rather than ending the night for everyone.