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: built, on the phone

A tag can be a character — tap it and that's who you are. Here's where to do it.

It's an iOS job, in the encoder. Open the encode menu in the app and pick the character-token screen: choose one of your characters, hold a blank tag to the phone, done. The tag is written and bound to the sheet in one pass, which is the part worth appreciating — encode-then-bind-later means a bag of identical blank discs you have to match up by hand afterwards.

What goes on the tag is an identity and nothing else. No name, no class, no hit points. That's deliberate and it's the right call: a snapshot on the fob would go stale the moment the character levels, takes a hit or burns a spell slot, and re-encoding a physical object because someone lost 3 HP is not a product. The sheet lives on the server; the fob is a pointer to it.

Your sheet's read-only NFC Token panel shows which tag is bound, once one is.

Not on the web: there's no button on the web to bind a tag — the endpoints are there and nothing on the site calls them. If you haven't got the app, you can't do this bit yet.

Two different characters, and they are not the same table

Worth heading off, because the words collide. A 5e character sheet — everything above — is the one you take to a campaign: unlimited, bound to a game, the thing a token on the map points at.

The RNGESUS character is something else entirely: who you are in the tavern. A name, a class from the room's own seven, ability scores rolled once by the house, an appearance and a wardrobe. It's made at /town/tavern/character, there's one of it, and it's the you that walks around downstairs rather than a sheet you play a game with.

They share no data and neither can turn into the other, which is on purpose — a tavern regular is a person in a pre-industrial room with no magic in it, and a 5e sheet is a tiefling warlock holding a flaming sword. Asking one table to hold both would break both.