The Tavern

Why it's a room

The tavern is at /town/tavern, and it's where everything on the platform actually lives. It looks like a tavern because a dashboard has nothing to offer you on a night when you have no game booked, and a room does: a fire somebody else has been keeping up, a board with tonight's notices, and occasionally other people.

It is a floor plan, not a page. You arrive looking at the whole room from above, then go and stand somewhere — the bar, the fireside, the back corner — and that area opens up. Nothing scrolls past you; you walk to it.

Where you can stand:

And two doors off it that open:

The tavern is one building in a small town, and the rest of it is across the square:

Mercer is in one place or the other. By day, when the weather will let cloth be laid out, he's at the stall. At night, or when it rains, he packs up and comes into the tavern, and the stall stands bare with a board chalked on it. Indoors he sells from the pack he carried in: press him and pick See what he has. It's the same shelf either way — what he unpacked on top, and his book for everything else.

Every door goes somewhere that exists. That's a rule — a door onto a page that isn't built teaches people that doors here don't open.

Finding your way round

A room is a fine thing to be in and a poor thing to search, so there are two bits of help, both in the corner of the floor.

Signs. There's a switch in the corner of the floor that reads Signs: on or Signs: off. On, every part of the room and every door wears its name on a small plate. It's on by itself for your first week in the room and off after that, and once you've pressed it, it's whatever you last told this browser.

The tour. Show me round again, under the signs switch: five stops — the door and the board, a table, the bar, the stairs, and the way back out to the town — one line each, Next to move on, and Leave the tour at any of them.

And there's a plain way in that isn't the room at all. VTT in the header is a menu of ordinary pages — your games, campaigns, worlds, maps, creatures, NPCs, files — for the evenings you want a list rather than a walk. They aren't a second set of things: each page says where its thing lives in here and offers to show you, and a game started from one is on a table on this floor with its lamp lit. The menu's last line reads All of this lives in the tavern, and it means it. Start a Game has both routes side by side.

Where signing in puts you is yours to choose. A new account lands on the VTT menu's Start here, which asks what brings you in; say you're just looking and from then on signing in brings you here. Change it whenever you like under When I sign in, take me to on your account page.

Two things you might expect and won't find. There is no games corner: a game is something you take off the shelf beside a table and set out for the people sitting with you, and one played at a table costs nothing. And there is no passage of party doors — the guild hall is the room that people who chose each other get.

Who you are in here

The first time you walk in, the landlord notices. He doesn't open with a tour — he tells you the house rules are posted by the door and suggests you read them before ordering anything. The room waits while you do: the notice by the door glows, and nothing else on the floor answers until it's been read. The header still works, so you're never locked in, and if you wander off the notice is still glowing when you get back.

The rules end in a signature. Write the name you want the room to call you and sign the book — or walk in as a stranger, which is a perfectly respectable way to drink. Either way you're never asked again, on this device or any other. The notice stays by the door for good; press it to reread the rules and see what you signed as.

Then he hands you the paper. The rules turn over into the new-arrival issue of the Gazette — the board, the tables, the fire, coppers, your room, the workshop and the guild hall, a paragraph each, from a landlord who would rather not explain any of it twice. Put it down (Into the room, or any other way you like) and the floor wakes up. Then he asks what brings you in — running a game, playing in one, or just looking — and points you the right way. You can pick it up again whenever you want: it's pinned to the quest board under New here?, and the signed rules point to it too.

If you signed the rules out on the plain pages, he knows. The same sheet is on Start here for anybody who arrives that way, and it's the same book. The first time you then walk in here he skips the rules, says “You’re the one who signed in the back office. Thought so.” and offers to show you round. Go on, then is the tour; I’ll find my own way is also an answer.

In here you are only ever your character. The room calls you by the name you signed with, or A stranger until you give it one. Your account handle is for signing in and for friends to find you, and it is never drawn anywhere in the tavern or at a table — not on a chair, not in the talk, not on the quest board. Your account photo stays out too; it lives on your account page and your friends list, where people who already know you can see it.

Everyone hails from somewhere, and until you say where, it's parts unknown. Write something and it shows under your name when people take a proper look at you. Nobody's obliged to; it's a joke that stops the moment you type.

There's room for one of each class, for now. That's a head count, not a rule, so they needn't be different classes. The looking glass in Your room shows who's going downstairs tonight and lets you swap: press another face and you're them, clothes and all. A name is the only thing you're ever asked for. A class, your looks and your six scores are all doors in the glass you can open later, or never. The scores are rolled for you, once, with a single press, and they're yours for good: no typing them in, and no second go. Your coppers, dice, trophies and arms belong to you, not the character, so everyone you play carries the same purse and the same shield.

Presence is where your attention is

Everyone in the tavern is somewhere, and where they are says what they're doing. It is not a movement system: your location is set as a side effect of doing something — sitting down, leaning on the counter, opening a game — and never from where you happen to be looking.

The default is in the room: through the door, reading the board, not settled anywhere. That matters more than it sounds: if the fire were the fallback, "who's at the hearth" would quietly mean "who's online", and there would be no way to leave it. So a seat is something you take: Pull up a chair, and Get up when you're done. Getting up puts you back in the room; nobody is logged out by standing up.

Your purse sits in the rail beside the room, with your face and where you're standing — and it's the only place a balance is drawn, so it can't disagree with itself.

Posture: available, quiet, dozing

• Dozing happens on its own if you haven't said or done anything for about twenty-five minutes. It's cosmetic, and it gates nothing at all — not chat, not reading, not coppers. Any keystroke wakes you. The only cost of nodding off is that other people can see you nodded off.
• A drink lifts dozing. That's the mechanic, and it's why drinks exist.
• Quiet is you pressing Leave me be. It expires by itself after a couple of hours, because a permanent do-not-disturb is a thing people set once and forget, and then look permanently unavailable — the exact problem it was meant to solve.

Quiet is not invisibility. You're still listed, still counted, still in your chair, just not up for talking. And a drink does not clear it. That asymmetry comes from one rule that settles every hard case in this room: coppers must never buy access to a person. Dozing is involuntary, so a drink lifting it is the room saying "stay a bit". Quiet is a decision, and nothing in the economy overrules a decision.

If you want to be genuinely absent, that's the privacy setting on your profile. Quiet exists so fewer people reach for it.

The fire

The only shared object in the building. Everything else at the hearth is yours — your drink, your chair, your coppers. The fire is the one thing where a stranger's action changes what you see.

Its level is worked out fresh every time anyone looks, from two numbers: how many people are about, and how many logs are still burning. Nothing ticks it down; a log stops counting after about three quarters of an hour and the fire drops on its own. People raise it, but only so far — logs go further, far enough that someone alone in the tavern can reach the top on wood alone.

Add a log costs two coppers, cheaper than a coffee, because it's the one thing you can buy here that does nothing for you at all. It's for whoever comes in next. Arrive at 3am to a dying fire, throw a log on, and the next person walks into a warm room.

It never goes out. There's an embers floor, nothing notifies you that it's low, and a log is only ever refused because the fire is already as high as it goes. Decay should read as the hour, never as neglect.

Small mercies

• The door. Coming back after four hours or more counts as arriving, and the room says so — but only once you've been in a few times. The first couple of visits nobody looks up.
• The weather comes from the date and is the same for everybody that day, so "filthy out there" is worth saying. The light through the shutters is your own clock.
• Sound is off by default; the toggle is the speaker in the header and it's remembered. The fire crackles louder as you cross the room towards it, rain taps the window, the door goes when you walk in.