Characters and Tags

Making a character

/characters → Create Character. Five steps:

1. Identity — name, class, subclass, race, level, background, alignment. Nothing rolled; it's all picks. The name is the only required field in the whole wizard.
2. Ability Scores — four methods, below.
3. Class Features — proficiency bonus, initiative and hit die are derived for you. Pick your class skills; anything your background already granted is locked with a (bg) marker so you can't double up.
4. Background & Wealth — take the starter pack, or roll for gold instead.
5. Flavor — a trinket (with a table-roll button, entirely in your browser), height, weight, notes.

The progress bar is clickable, so skip about as you like. Only step 1 stops you, and only on the name — which does mean a character submitted without touching step 2 arrives with straight 10s.

Ability scores, four ways

Roll is the default, so landing on step 2 immediately pings your phone. If you didn't want that, the other three cards are right there.

Tap-to-roll, which is the good bit

Three places ask your phone for a roll:

• Ability scores — 4d6 drop lowest, six times. Needs a registered d6.
• Starting gold — your class's formula, which is always some number of d4 multiplied up.
• Hit points on level up — one roll of your class's hit die.

The web page fires a prompt to your account, your phone picks it up and opens the tap screen, you hold it to a die. The tap says which die you used; the roll itself is generated on the server, comes back down the same connection, and lands in the field you were looking at. No reading a number off one screen and typing it into another.

Three rules on the tap, and the error messages are worth recognising:

• The die must be registered — otherwise Die not registered.
• It must be yours. Character generation isn't a borrowing scenario.
• The faces must match. Tap a d20 for a 4d6 stat roll and you get Wrong die: spec needs a d6 but you tapped a d20. If a d20 could roll your 4d6 the gimmick would stop being honest.

When the prompt doesn't show up

• The phone must be awake and in the foreground. The app drops its connection when backgrounded, and a prompt fired while it's asleep is simply missed.
• If nothing appears, open the app and go to More → Roll for Web — the same screen, reached the long way round.
• The connected indicator on the web page reflects the web page's connection, not your phone's. A green dot is not proof the prompt arrived.
• The phone's own manual roll list is short — 4d6 drop lowest, 1d20, 1d100 — so for starting gold or an unusual hit die, a missed prompt is best answered by using another method.

Nothing here is a dead end. Ability scores fall back to the array, point buy or typing; gold falls back to the starter pack; level-up HP has Average and Manual next to the roll option.

Levelling up

The Level Up button sits in the sheet header until you hit 20. Three ways to get HP: Roll (tap die), Average: +n, Manual. In roll mode you can't confirm until a tap lands, so switch pills if you'd rather not wait on a phone.

Applying it writes five things: level, max HP, current HP (it heals you by the gain), proficiency bonus, and your hit dice pool. It does not touch class features or spell slots — the modal says so, which is better than pretending. Check your class and add anything new through Edit Character.

The tag-as-character thing: not yet

Here's where honesty beats a nice promise.

The plan is that an NFC tag can be a character: tap it and the sheet comes up. The backend for it exists — endpoints to link a tag to a sheet, unlink it, and look a character up by tag — and your sheet has a read-only NFC Token panel waiting for one.

Nothing calls any of it. No button on the web, no screen in the phone app, nothing anywhere that looks a character up by tag. The panel on your sheet currently tells you to link one via the iOS app, and that is not a thing the iOS app can do. Treat it as unbuilt.

So if you were hoping to walk into a session, tap a fob and be the paladin: not today. In the meantime the tags do the thing they're genuinely good at, which is rolling.