Setting Up a Fight

An encounter becomes a fight on one screen: Combat Setup. It is a DM screen. Players see nothing of it. They are looking at the map, waiting, and possibly photographing initiative rolls while you work.

You get here from a live encounter. On a phone or tablet, tap the Start Combat button in the trailing slot of the encounter map's toolbar. On a Mac or Windows machine, the same button sits in the top toolbar. Either way the encounter you staged comes with you: its name, its monsters, and its map are already loaded. Chapter 13, The Map Prep Workbench, is where that staging happened.

What the screen holds

Five cards, top to bottom.

• Encounter. The staged encounter's name and how many monsters it brought.
• Encounter Map. A read-only picture of the map this fight will use, with a green Active badge when one is assigned. There is no map picker here on purpose. The map is inherited from the encounter you are running, so if it is the wrong map, back out and stage the right one.
• PC Roster. One row per connected player.
• Monsters. One row per monster the encounter brought.
• Setup Checklist. Four chips telling you what is still missing.

The roster

Every connected player gets a row showing their character name, their own name in brackets, and their species and class underneath. Each row carries:

• A checkbox on the left, ticked by default. Untick it and that character is not in this fight at all. Use it for the player who stepped out, or the character who is somewhere else in the story. Unticking grays out the rest of the row.
• An initiative box showing a dash until you set a number.
• A movement speed box labeled Spd, prefilled with the speed that player declared on their own sheet, or 30 feet if they declared none. Type over it for a hasted rogue or a character in difficult circumstances. This is the number the app measures movement against once the fight starts.

Getting initiative in

Two paths, and you can mix them freely.

The first is typing. Tap the dash in anyone's initiative box and a small dialog opens with a number field and three buttons: Cancel, Next, and Done. Done saves the number and closes. Next saves it and immediately reopens the dialog on the next combatant who still has no initiative, walking down the roster and into the monsters without you touching the screen between entries. Next only appears while someone is still missing a number. Cancel leaves the previous value alone.

The second is reading the player's dice. When a player photographs their initiative roll, the photo appears as a small square thumbnail on the left of their row. Tap it and you get the picture full size with an initiative field under it. Read the dice, type the number, press Set Initiative, and the photo clears out of the feed. Chapter 20, Dice Are Photos, covers the rolling side of this from the player's chair.

Monsters get initiative the same way, by tapping the dash on their row. There is no dice thumbnail for them because you rolled those yourself.

You cannot add or rename a monster here. Monsters come from the loaded encounter, and a fight that starts with an empty Monsters card says so: "No monsters, load an encounter first." Reinforcements arrive later, mid-fight, from the Add Monster bar in chapter 27.

The checklist, and what blocks you

The Setup Checklist card carries four chips, green when satisfied and amber when not:

• Map Ready. A map is assigned.
• Combatants Ready. At least one included character or one monster exists.
• PC Init. Shows a count like 3/4. Reads N/A when nobody is included.
• Monster Init. Same count, N/A when there are no monsters.

Until all four are settled, the Start Combat button wears a lock icon and names the single thing blocking it: Combatants Required, Map Required, PC Initiative Required, or Monster Initiative Required. Tapping it anyway repeats that reason as a message at the bottom of the screen. When everything is green the button glows.

Tapping Start Combat creates the fight, carries your staged token placements onto the live map, and drops you back to the map with the tracker running (chapter 22, The Combat Tracker). If the map has no scale set you get a nudge to go set one, because distance measurement depends on it.

One thing worth knowing before you press it: monsters start hidden. Your party arrives at a map that looks empty, and you reveal each creature from the tracker when it steps into the light.