Plates, Tables, and Showing the Table

Two things on a reference card are worth their own chapter, because both do more than sit there: the illustration at the top, and the tables in the middle. Chapter 37, Reading a Card, covered everything between them.

The plate

Entries that ship with artwork carry it as a plate: a framed 3:2 illustration sitting above the card body, ruled in maroon like the card itself. Entries you write yourself show their library photo in the same frame. Entries without art simply start at the stat block, with no gap where a picture would be.

Tap the plate and it fills the screen on a black backdrop. From there:

• Pinch to zoom on a phone or tablet, or scroll to zoom on a Mac or Windows machine.
• Close it with the X in the corner, the down arrow key, the Escape key, or your device's normal Back gesture or button.

On a Mac or Windows machine the plate also carries a small expand button in its bottom right corner, because a desktop user has no reason to guess that a picture is tappable. On a phone or tablet the picture itself is the target, so there is no extra button.

Rotating your phone or tablet to landscape opens the current entry's plate full screen on its own. Rotate back to portrait and it closes again, but only if landscape is what opened it. A plate you opened by tapping stays open. On a Mac or Windows machine, the Up Arrow key does the same job as the rotation.

The gallery

Open a plate from a list where two or more neighboring entries also have art, and you do not get one picture. You get a swipeable gallery of all of them.

• Swipe or drag sideways on a phone or tablet.
• Use the left and right arrow keys, or the chevron buttons at the screen edges, on a Mac or Windows machine.
• Zoom with a pinch, a trackpad scroll, or the plus, minus, and 0 keys.

A caption tells you where you are, in the form "Viewing Owlbear, plate 3 of 11". This is the closest the reference gets to just looking at the art, and it is worth doing.

When you close a gallery on a different picture than the one you opened, the card underneath re-points to that entry. Swipe from the owlbear to the ogre, close, and you are reading the ogre.

When artwork goes missing

Artwork you added yourself lives as a file in your library, and files can go missing: a synced folder that dropped it, a manual delete, an import that failed. When the entry still points at art that is no longer there, the plate frame says Artwork file missing from your library rather than showing you a blank box. Re-add the image in the library editor, covered in chapter 40, Homebrew: Your Own Pages.

Reference tables

Tables in the reference are laid out like printed ones: a maroon heading row in small capitals, then alternating light and dark rows so your eye holds its line across the page.

• Wide tables scroll sideways. Drag the table left or right. A soft fade at whichever edge has more table behind it tells you there is more to see.
• Equipment table rows are tappable. The name in the first column of an equipment table is a link into that item's card, so you can scan a price and weight table and open the entry from the row you were already reading. A name covering more than one record, like "Donkey or mule", expands into a linked row for each.
• Category bands break long tables. A full-width maroon row like "Simple Melee Weapons" divides a table into sections without disturbing the stripe pattern under it.

Not every table links. The class level progression tables are plain reading tables, and a class you wrote yourself may have none at all, because filling one in is optional.

Showing a plate to the table

During a live session, the DM gets one extra control on a plate: a dark chip labeled Show to players in its bottom right corner. Tap it and that illustration appears full screen on every connected player's Play tab, exactly as a revealed photo does. Chapter 18, Revealing Your World, covers dismissing it.

Three things to know:

• The chip appears on plates only. There is no way to push a card, a stat block, or a table to the players. Illustrations are the only shareable thing here, on purpose.
• Only the DM sees it, and only while a session is running.
• Plates on entries you wrote yourself present through a copy: the app quietly makes a campaign copy of the image and sends it the first time you show it. You get a "Displayed on Play tab" message when it lands. If it fails to reach the players, the app says so and tells you to show it again to retry, which does work.