Welcome to Far Table
Far Table is an app for playing D&D with people who are not in the room. Everyone at the table runs it on their own device. The DM builds maps, handouts, and encounters ahead of time, then reveals them one piece at a time while the game runs.
It is a storytelling aid, not a game engine. It does not know the rules, it does not do your math, and it will never tell you what happens next. It shows the table what the DM wants the table to see, and it gets out of the way.
Three opinions worth knowing up front
Far Table makes a few calls that other tools do not. They are deliberate, and they shape everything else in this manual.
- Your dice are real dice. There is no roll button that produces a number. When a roll matters you photograph your dice and the photo goes to the whole table, which reads it the way it would read dice across a kitchen table. Chapter 20, Dice Are Photos, covers this in full.
- The combat tracker does not track monster hit points. Every combatant carries a plain status word instead: Healthy, Wounded, Heavy, Mortal, Dead. The DM keeps the real numbers on paper or in their head. The rules reference is a separate thing and does show hit points on a monster's stat block, because that is a book, not a scoreboard.
- The DM's device is the table. It holds the campaign, decides what is revealed, and settles anything two devices disagree about. Players connect to the DM. Nothing goes player to player directly.
What you need
- A device each: iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet, Mac, or Windows PC. Everyone can be on something different.
- Some way to talk to each other. Far Table carries maps, dice photos, and handouts. It does not carry voice or video, so keep your usual voice call running alongside it.
- Nothing else. There are no accounts, no sign-up, no servers, and no subscription. Your campaign lives on your device and moves only when you move it.
If you are playing on a Mac or a Windows PC, you also want a phone paired to it, because a computer has no camera pointed at your dice. Chapter 34, Pairing Your Phone, walks through it.
Two hats, two different apps
Far Table is not one experience with a few extra buttons for the DM. The two roles genuinely differ, so this manual always says which hat a passage describes.
- As DM you get a workspace with three tabs (Session, Atlas, Play), authoring tools for maps and encounters, and every reveal control. You see hidden monsters, unrevealed handouts, and pending player requests.
- As a player you get the same three tabs holding much less: your connection and your party, the things the DM has revealed to you, and the live table. You never see the Encounters area at all, and you never see anything the DM has not handed over.
Chapter 5, The Shape of the App, lays out both sides properly.
How to read this manual
Read it front to back if you are the DM and this is your first look at Far Table. The chapters are ordered the way a campaign actually happens: get installed, try the demo, host one short session, then build a world, then run fights in it.
- New DM, start at chapter 2, Getting Started. Chapter 4, Host Your First Session, gets you to a real live table in one sitting.
- Player, jump to chapter 15, Joining as a Player. After that, chapter 20 on dice and chapter 24, Playing Your Turn, are the two that matter most. Nothing else is required reading.
- Looking something up? Every chapter stands on its own and names its controls in plain words, so you can land in the middle and still follow along.
One more chapter deserves a mention before you start: chapter 44, What Far Table Does Not Do. It is the honest list of everything the app deliberately refuses to do, and it will save you looking for features that were never going to be there.