Roadmap
None of this has a date, and none of it is a promise. It is one person’s ordered list of what seems worth building next, and the order changes when something turns out to matter more. What has actually shipped is on the changelog.
Now
Making what is already here good enough to keep using.
Better on a phone
Two thirds of this is done, and the first third took two attempts. Every control is big enough to hit with a thumb — which was claimed once before and was not true: the rule only reached buttons written a particular way, and forty-two of them were not, including several on the character sheet during a fight. It reaches all of them now, and still none of it grew on a desktop, because the floor only applies to a pointer that cannot be precise. Getting around is done too: a campaign’s seventeen sections collapse into one readable list instead of a row that scrolled sideways past the edge of the screen, and every page now says which section you are in — which nothing here had ever done at any width. What is left is the writing. The composer is still laid out for a wide screen and it is the thing people do most here; the wiki editor wants two hands; and a sheet in landscape is a column of things a phone has to scroll past. Those are three separate layouts rather than one measurement, which is why they did not come with the rest.
Being told without being here
Every notification the site raises is a row in a table you have to come here to read, which is an odd arrangement for a game built on everybody being somewhere else. Nothing sends mail, and no browser has ever been asked whether it would like to be told anything. The hard part is not the sending but the settings that stop it becoming forty emails a week.
Roles a GM can shape
Four roles, fixed: owner, co-GM, member, observer. They fit most tables and they are the wrong shape for the ones they do not — the player who should edit the wiki but not admit people, the co-GM trusted with one board and not the rest, the observer who ought to be allowed to post in character. What a role may do is a set of policies in the database rather than anything a GM can see, let alone change. The interesting part of this is not the interface: whatever a GM builds has to end up as a rule Postgres enforces, because a permission that lives in a page is a permission a direct request ignores.
The first ten minutes
A new campaign is an empty wiki, an empty board list and a page of headings nobody has written under. That is an accurate picture of a campaign nobody has started yet and a discouraging thing to be handed, and it is the moment most likely to be the last one. What is wanted is a campaign that arrives with somewhere to post, a page worth writing on and enough of a shape to argue with — not a wizard asking nine questions before anybody has played anything.
Next
Making a campaign easier to run.
A campaign that brings its own rules
A campaign can already design a sheet: a list of named fields, some of which roll. What it cannot do is say what any of the numbers mean — that this stat adds to that roll, that this one is worked out from two others, that a success is two dice over a target rather than a d20 over a number. Every system that is not D&D is currently a set of boxes to type into by hand, which is a perfectly good sheet of paper and not much of a computer. Worth doing properly or not at all: a half-built rules engine is harder to use than an honest blank field.
Concentration, and the three failed saves
Every spell already carries a concentration flag and the tracker already has a Concentrating condition, and the two have never been introduced, so nothing tells you that casting this one drops the last one. Death saves are not tracked anywhere at all, which is odd for the one moment in a game where everybody at the table is watching the same number.
Building a fight before it starts
The bestiary and the initiative tracker both exist and know nothing about each other, so a fight is assembled a monster at a time while everyone waits. Putting one together in advance, and reading its difficulty against the party roster the site already has, is most of a session’s preparation.
A map the world can read
A published world shows its maps as an image with the pins and borders listed underneath as text, which is honest but is not a map. The lines and layers a campaign can now draw are not carried out there at all — the public readers predate them — so a GM who arranges a world map into roads, borders and a layer of places the party has been publishes a flat picture of it. The half that is missing is a public canvas and readers that know what a layer is.
A campaign in a box
A wiki page can start from a template — there are a dozen, for a person, a place, a faction, a session log. A campaign cannot. Starting a West Marches game, a Minecraft nation server and a two-hander play-by-post means building the same board structures and the same handful of pages by hand every time, and the site already knows enough about all three to offer them.
Taking it all with you
A character sheet can be exported and a campaign cannot. Years of wiki, every scene anyone wrote, the timeline and the handouts all sit here on the assumption that here carries on existing, which is a promise one person running a site in their spare time is in no position to make. The honest version is a door out: one archive, readable without this site.
Finding a game
Making this somewhere you can find a table, not only host one.
A shop window with something in it
The directory, the looking-for-a-game notices and the published worlds are all built, all working, and all very nearly empty. That is not a missing feature, it is a cold start, and building a fourth way to advertise a campaign would not touch it. What is missing is a reason to arrive: somewhere the notices are actually read, a published world that turns up when somebody searches for the thing it is about, and a directory worth browsing rather than a list of nine. Written down here rather than quietly dropped, because “it was built and nobody came” is the more useful thing to know about a feature.
Told where the table already talks
Signing in with Discord works, and stops there. Every table this site is for already has a Discord, that is where they notice things, and a play-by-post site whose notifications live only on the site is asking people to remember to visit in order to find out whether anything happened. A post in a scene, a session proposed, somebody waiting on you — said once, in the room the table is already sitting in.
The rest of the move from Discord
A channel’s history can be brought here, pictures and documents included, and two parts of the move are still done by hand or not done at all. A voice nobody claimed keeps its Discord name on its posts, but the person who wrote them cannot claim them: the mapping is a screen only the GM sees, so anyone who turns up two months later has to ask. And an import is a photograph rather than a bridge — a table halfway through moving is playing in both rooms at once, which today means the GM pressing Import again every few days and nothing at all travelling the other way. The third part came off this list when files began arriving with the writing, which was the one that decided whether moving here was safe at all; the bridge is the one that decides whether the move is bearable while it happens.
The world engine
Worldbuilding that knows what it is describing.
A timeline the world can read
An event that grew into an article can point at it, and that is the whole of what the timeline knows about the rest of the world. It cannot name the powers that fought, the places it happened in or the people it happened to, so a war is a date in one place, a paragraph in another and three faction pages in a third, kept in step by whoever remembers to. An event that names what it involves — and pages that can therefore show their own history without anybody copying it across — is most of what turns a pile of articles into a world.
The map as it was then
A border is a shape that is true today, and redrawing it destroys the one it replaced. A world whose whole appeal is that its map changed has no way to show what it used to look like, and the campaigns most likely to care are exactly the ones that spend a year moving lines. Borders that carry the span they were true for, and a map that can be asked what the world looked like in a given year.
Territory that changes hands
A border knows what is inside it, and a war knows who fought — and the two have never been introduced. A war that ends by moving a border is the most interesting thing that happens on a geopolitical server, and recording it currently means redrawing a shape and hoping somebody writes down why. It sat near the top of this list for a while on the strength of how good it would be; the campaigns here draw almost no borders and have declared no wars at all, so it waits for a table that wants it.
Things this world has that no other does
Places, powers, wars and history are four shapes chosen in advance, and they are the right four often enough to be worth having. They are not right for the campaign that needs ships, or bloodlines, or gods with domains and worshippers, or a rail timetable — and today each of those becomes a wiki page, which works and gives up everything a structured kind provides: a list, a filter, a pin on a map, a search that knows what it found. A campaign defining its own kind of thing is the general case of the four that already exist.
Further off
Wanted, unscheduled, and some of it will not happen.
Fighter 3 / Warlock 2
One class and one level, and every number worked out from them assumes it stays that way. Multiclassing changes hit points, proficiency and, most awkwardly, spell slots, which stop coming from a class and start coming from a combined caster level. Worth doing properly or not at all.
A +1 sword the sheet knows about
Inventory holds a name and a count, which is exactly right for rope and rations and useless for a weapon that changes what you roll. Magic items as their own thing, the three attunement slots everyone loses track of, and a bonus that actually reaches the buttons that do the rolling.
The recap nobody wrote
An evening that has been played and not written up is already tracked, badged and folded open so the GM cannot miss it — and then handed a blank box. The thread it is a recap of is one click away and contains, in order, exactly what happened. Somewhere between the nag and the empty page is a version that starts with something already on it.
The things search cannot see
Search reads thirteen kinds, and three are still outside it: a campaign’s own sheet, which is a set of named fields rather than prose and has no page of its own to land on, and the labels on the borders and lines drawn across a map, which are reachable through the map they are on and would mostly return the same map twice. It used to be two — lines did not exist when this was written. All three were left out on purpose rather than forgotten, and they are listed so that stays a decision somebody made instead of a gap nobody noticed.
Want something that is not here, or think one of these is a bad idea? Say so. A short note about what you were trying to do is worth more than a feature request.