The Play Tab and the Exploration Map

Play is the live table. When no fight is running, what fills it is the exploration map the DM has put up: the dungeon level, the town, the stretch of road, whatever everyone is standing on right now. Pins sit on top of it. Everything on this screen is shared, which is the point.

Drag with one finger to pan. Pinch to zoom on a phone or tablet, or scroll to zoom on a Mac or Windows machine. Both hats see the same map, but not the same pins: the DM sees everything authored on that map, and a player sees only what has been revealed to them.

The toolbar

A strip of tools sits along the map. Only one tool is armed at a time, and the map shows a one-line hint telling you what the armed tool wants you to do next.

Both hats get one tool: Note. That is the whole player toolset on this map. Next to it, a player gets the dice menu button instead of the DM's tools. See chapter 20, Dice Are Photos.

The DM gets four more, and no player ever sees them:

• Encounter, a shield icon.
• Photo, a camera icon.
• Clue, a magnifying glass icon.
• Map link, an arrow icon, covered in chapter 19, Map Links and Door Pins.

Notes, by anyone

Tap Note, type your text in the field that appears, then tap the spot on the map where it belongs. The pin lands as a sticky note and goes to the whole table immediately. There is no approval step and no "share" button. If you wrote it, everyone reads it.

Notes are the one thing players author on the map, and they need a live session to do it. Browsing revealed maps with no session running is read-only for players. See chapter 30, Browse Offline: the Player's Atlas. The DM can place notes with no session at all, which is how you stage a map before anyone arrives.

Encounter, Photo, and Clue pins, DM only

These three are not tap-to-place. Tapping the tool slides a shelf up from the toolbar: your saved encounters for the Encounter tool, your campaign assets for Photo and Clue. Press and hold an item on the shelf, drag it onto the map, and let go where you want it.

For Photo and Clue, the drop itself is the reveal. The moment the pin lands, that asset is revealed to your players and sent to them. Chapter 18, Revealing Your World, covers the reveal verbs together.

An Encounter pin is a reference, not a launcher. It marks a place on the map where a saved encounter lives, and it broadcasts that encounter's map image so players can look at it. Tapping it, now or three sessions later, opens that map to read. It never starts combat. Fights start from the Start Encounter button in the top bar, and only the DM has it. See chapter 21, Setting Up a Fight.

Tapping a pin

Tapping any pin opens a small tooltip card over the map. Depending on the pin, that card carries the author's name, the date, the narration text, a thumbnail, and a View button. View opens the encounter's static map or the photo or clue full-screen on your own device only. It is a viewer for you, not a presentation to the table. The DM has a separate control for showing something to everyone; chapter 18 covers it.

The card also carries editing controls, and who gets them is strict:

• The DM can drag any pin to reposition it, edit its narration, and delete it.
• A player can drag, edit, and delete their own notes, and nothing else.
• Photo and clue pins are repositioned by the DM only. On a player's device they are tap-only.

Deleting a pin removes it for everyone.

When pins crowd together

Zoomed out, notes and encounter pins that sit within a thumb's width of each other collapse into a single cluster badge showing how many are underneath. Tap the badge and the map zooms in on that spot, which usually splits the badge back into separate pins. Press and hold the badge instead and you get a list of every pin in the cluster, with its icon, label, and author. Photo, clue, and map link pins never cluster.

Moving a token outside combat

Once the DM starts an encounter, the battle map takes over this tab, tokens and all, even before anyone rolls initiative. A player still does not move their own token freely there. They use the Move tool to drag a movement string to the destination and submit it, and the DM accepts or rejects the request, exactly as during a fight. The DM moves their own tokens by hand with no approval step. Chapter 25, What the DM Approves, has the full workflow.