Table VTT
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| Info
Table mode is Rolz' virtual tabletop. It gives your room a shared, scrollable battle map on top of everything a normal dice room already does: chat, dice, the room wiki, character sheets and card decks are all still there, in panes around the map.
Tables and
Dice Rooms are the same room, just two different views of it. You can switch between them at any time, and different players in the same session can sit in different views at the same time.
The owner options are the useful middle ground: players can move their own figures around but cannot touch anybody else's.
Two practical notes:
Shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in the chat line or in any other input field.
Opening a Table
Table mode needs an account. If you land on the login page it offers Log In , Create New Account and Try Out Rolz Without Account — the last one gives you a temporary account without a password, and sends you straight on to the table you were heading for.
- Open the room selector and pick a room under My Tables , or type a name under Join a Table . The My Tables / My Dice Rooms buttons switch between the two lists.
- Use Create a New Table to make a new room. Room names are unique across all of Rolz, so pick something distinctive.
- If the room does not exist yet you are sent back to the selector with "Room not found". If it exists but is password-protected or whitelisted, you get "This room has restricted access" instead.
- To leave Table mode for the classic chat view, use File → Switch to Dice Room . The dice room has a matching Table link in its top menu to bring you back, so you can hop between the two views freely. File → Close Table just takes you back to the Rolz front page.
- The first person to create or claim a room becomes its room owner — the GM. The GM can hand the role to somebody else later in GM Settings .
The Screen
Two bars sit at the top of the window.
The upper bar is about the room and about you:
- Help · opens this documentation inside the table
- the camera button · opens Audio and Video
- Room · the room's wiki, chat log, your character sheet and the dice bar. Hover it for the menu — a plain click jumps straight to the room wiki.
- Settings · My Settings (how dice results are displayed, notification sounds, your character page, and your chat and highlight colours), your icon, and — for the GM — GM Settings
- File · saving, loading, clearing, pasting, leaving
- the arrow button · the Pointer tool, which is also the "get me out of this tool" button
- Insert · put a token, image or text label on the map
- Edit · the drawing, tile and fog-of-war tools
- Measure · the two rulers
- View · party list, centering, following the GM
- a further button appears at the right end whenever something is selected, showing what it is ( Token , Image , Text Label , Drawing , or Tokens... for a multiple selection). It opens the same menu as right-clicking that object.
- The right dock holds the reading panes — Wiki , Personal Wiki , Chat Log , Dice Bar and Help . It opens at about a third of the window width and you can drag its left edge to resize it. Rolz remembers the width per room.
- The bottom dock holds Chat and Ini. Ledger side by side, each with its own tab. Click a tab to show or hide that pane; with all tabs off the dock collapses out of the way. Drag its top edge to make it taller or shorter.
- Some tools open small floating panels instead — the Materials palette and Drawing Options — which you can move around the map.
Moving Around the Map
The map is 128 by 128 squares.
- Pan : hold the right mouse button and drag. With the Pointer tool you can also just drag with the left button.
- Zoom : scroll wheel, in steps of about 10% per notch. The zoom range is 0.1× to 5×, and the current factor is shown briefly as you zoom.
- View → Go to center jumps back to the middle of the map if you get lost.
- View → Center on my Token jumps to your own token, creating it if it does not exist yet.
- Clicking an empty square with the Pointer tool drops a short-lived ping marker that everybody in the room sees. It is the fastest way to say "here".
Following the GM
- The GM (or anyone allowed to change the map) can use View → Center Everyone on My View to pull all players to what they are looking at.
- Players have View → Follow GM's view , which keeps their view locked to the GM's until they pick Stop following GM's view .
- The GM can also drag a single player along, from the party list: click a player, then Center user on my view .
Tokens
Tokens are the figures on the map: characters, monsters, objects, spell areas.
Creating tokens
- Insert → Token places a token in the middle of your current view.
- Insert → AoE token places an area-effect marker instead — pick a shape from the submenu.
- The GM can also use Insert → Saved Tokens to drop in a previously saved token or group of tokens.
- From the party list, clicking a player and choosing Insert as token creates that player's avatar token.
Moving and selecting
- Drag a token to move it.
- Tokens snap to quarter squares by default, which lets you place several figures inside one square. Hold Ctrl while dragging to snap to whole squares instead.
- Click to select. Shift+click adds a token to the selection or removes it again.
- Shift+drag on empty map draws a selection box and picks up every token inside it that you are allowed to move.
- Escape deselects everything and returns you to the Pointer tool. Delete or Backspace removes the selection.
- Right-click a token for its menu: Properties... , Highlight , Clone , Copy , Cut , Delete , and for the GM Save token as... . With several tokens selected, Clone and Delete act on the whole selection, but Copy and Cut only take the one token you clicked.
Token properties
Right-click a token and choose Properties... to open its panel. It has several tabs.
- Icon · the built-in token artwork (© Devin Night, licensed for Rolz — see immortalnights.com)
- Custom · token images uploaded to this room
- Wiki · attach a room wiki page to this token; the page is then shown right there in the panel
- Style · base shape (round, hex, square, none), size (1x1, 1.5x1.5, 2x2, 3x3, 4x4), area effect shape/range/colour, round crop, border colour, a glyph (a letter or number drawn on the token), status icons, a visual effect, and a "gray" toggle
- Stats · current and maximum Health , an Initiative Code (a dice code such as d20+3) plus the current initiative value, free-text Status Effects , a Hide in ledger checkbox, and an Annotation field for longer notes
- the ? tab holds a short built-in reminder
Saved tokens (GM)
A GM can keep reusable groups of tokens — a standard patrol, a bar full of NPCs, the party's own figures — and drop them onto any map later.
- Select the tokens you want, right-click one and choose Save token as... / Save tokens as... , then give the group a name. Saving under a name that already exists replaces that group.
- Get them back from Insert → Saved Tokens . The group appears near the middle of your view, keeps the relative spacing it had when you saved it, and shifts aside if that spot is occupied.
- Each row of the list shows the group's name and how many tokens are in it, with buttons to insert or delete it.
- Saved groups belong to the room , not to a particular map or to your account. They survive Clear Map and Load Map , so they are the right place to park your recurring cast.
- Re-inserted tokens are new tokens; edits you make to them do not change the saved group. Save it again to update it.
Your own token
Rolz matches your avatar token by its title , not by its owner field. The title it looks for is your character name, or the title of the character-sheet page you selected in Settings → My Settings → My Character , or failing both, your nickname. The token panel tells you whether the token you are editing is currently your avatar token.
Building the Map
Tiles
Edit → Tiles activates the tile brush and opens the Materials palette.
- Drag across the map to fill a rectangle with the selected material.
- Hold Shift while dragging to erase back to empty.
- Tiles live underneath everything else, so they are the right tool for floors, walls and rough terrain.
Images
Insert → Image opens the room's image library, titled after your room.
- The quickest way to place an image is to drag the file straight onto the map. It is uploaded and dropped exactly where you let go.
- The library's + button uploads a file too, but only files it into the library — it does not put it on the map. To place something already in the library, use its show on table button.
- Accepted formats are JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG and WebP, up to 4 MB per file . A room is expected to stay under about 32 MB in total; you are warned when you go over, in GM Settings → Storage Used .
- A newly placed image is scaled so its shorter side is at most 800 pixels, then fitted to the grid. Use Align to Grid in its properties to line it up exactly.
- Each library entry can be renamed, filed under a category (New, Handouts, Illustrations, Places, Maps, Characters, NPCs, Monsters, Items, Tokens, Random), shown on the table, opened in a new browser tab, inserted into a wiki page, or deleted. There is a search box and a show all toggle.
- Once placed, drag an image to move it and use its handle to resize. Right-click it for Properties... , Lock / Unlock , Clone , Copy , Cut and Delete .
Drawings
Edit → Draw opens the Drawing Options panel and lets you draw straight onto the map. Hold the left mouse button and drag; let go to finish the drawing. The tool stays active afterwards, so you can keep going.
- Mode is Freehand Drawing , Rectangle , Ellipse or Triangle . Freehand follows your pointer; the three shapes stretch between where you pressed and where you let go, with a dashed preview while you drag.
- Stroke sets the outline colour and Fill the interior. Fill only appears for the shape modes, and No fill leaves the shape hollow. Both offer blue, red, green, magenta, black and white as presets; click the current-colour swatch for any other colour.
- Thickness runs from 2 to 30 pixels and Opacity from 10% to 100%. A new drawing starts out blue, 12 pixels wide, fully opaque and unfilled.
- A shape needs a drag of at least a few pixels. A plain click with no drag just drops you back to the Pointer tool.
- The right mouse button still pans while Draw is active, so you do not have to switch tools to move around.
- Drawings are objects like anything else: right-click for Properties... , Clone , Copy , Cut and Delete .
Text labels
Insert → Text Label drops an editable label at the centre of your view — useful for room names, notes on the map and labelling areas. Right-click a label for Properties... , Copy , Cut and Delete .
Fog of War
Fog of war is a GM-only tool: Edit → Fog of War .
- Drag across the map to cover an area with fog.
- Hold Shift while dragging to clear fog again.
- The GM sees fog as a translucent grey wash, so you can still work underneath it. Players see it as solid black.
- A token that is completely under fog is hidden from players and cannot be clicked by them. A token that sticks out of the fog even partly stays visible. The GM always sees every token.
Measuring
The Measure menu has two rulers, and both are visible to everyone in the room while you drag:
- Steps measures along the grid, counting squares the way a figure would walk them.
- Distance measures a straight line between two points.
The Initiative Ledger
The Ini. Ledger is the combat tracker. It opens automatically in the bottom dock next to the chat, and lists the tokens on the map with Name , Ini.Code , Initiative , HP and Max HP .
- Type directly into any of those fields to change them; the token on the map updates immediately.
- Click the Initiative column header to sort the order (GM only).
- Next Round advances the combat round; the round counter is shown at the right of the ledger toolbar and can also be set by hand in GM Settings .
- The crosshair button flashes a token on the map, the figure button centres your view on it, the pencil opens its properties, and the crossed-out eye takes it out of the ledger (the same as Hide in ledger in the token's Stats tab).
- Hovering a ledger row lifts that token above the others on the map, which helps in a crowded square.
The Party List
View → Show Party List toggles the list of everyone in the room. The room owner is marked with a crown, and a small video icon shows who is streaming audio or video.
Clicking a player opens their menu:
- Center my view on token — or Insert as token if that player has no token on the map yet
- My character sheet , or Create character sheet if you do not have one
- Change my icon , Audio/video settings and My settings , on your own entry
- Mute locally / Unmute locally and a Local volume slider on everybody else's entry — these only affect what you hear
- the GM additionally gets Center user on my view , Center everyone on my view and Change user icon
Chat, Dice and Character Sheets
The Chat pane behaves exactly like the classic dice room, and it sits in the bottom dock by default. Everything in
How to Roll ,
Chat Commands and
Basic Dice Codes applies unchanged — roll with # or -, use inline codes in square brackets, use /me, /pm, /who and the rest. The Up and Down arrow keys in the chat line recall what you typed before, and while the browser window is in the background the page title counts unread messages for you.
A few things are worth knowing in Table mode specifically:
- Hovering a dice result in the chat shows small damage and heal buttons. Clicking one opens a token picker and applies the rolled number to the token you choose. Damage is floored at 0 and healing is capped at maximum HP, both of which you can switch off in the picker. If a token is currently selected on the table, it is offered first. Players can only do this to their own avatar token or tokens they own; the GM can do it to any token. Only tokens that have a maximum HP set appear in the picker — if a token is missing from the list, fill in its Max HP first.
- Where you drop a file matters. Dropping an image on the map puts it into the room's image library. Dropping a file on the chat uploads it and posts a link to it in the room.
- /clear empties your own chat display only — it does not touch the room log, which is still there under Room → Chat Log . /reload reloads the whole table.
- Personal dice macros work here as everywhere: /macro def NAME CODE to define one, /macro list to see them, and -!NAME to roll one.
Audio and Video
The camera button on the upper bar opens Audio and Video , a voice-and-video chat for the people in the room. Anyone in the table can use it; it is not a GM privilege.
- Both Microphone and Camera start at Off . Pick the ones you want and press Connect . Disconnect stops your own stream again.
- You can join to listen only : leave both devices on Off and press Connect . Rolz never asks for camera or microphone access in that case.
- My video visibility is either Only while speaking or Always while connected . "Only while speaking" is the default and shows your picture for a few seconds whenever you talk.
- Video effect offers None, Noir, Warm, Dream, Comic, Blob, Arcane and Spectral.
- Below the devices are a live mic level meter, a Mic noise gate slider for cutting background hiss, and toggles for Echo cancellation , Noise suppression , Auto gain control and Voice compressor . Echo cancellation and auto gain are on to start with.
- The preview has Zoom , Pan X and Pan Y sliders so you can crop your camera image before anyone sees it.
- Ctrl+M mutes and unmutes your microphone from anywhere in the table. A microphone button appears next to the camera button while you are publishing.
- Disconnect stops your own stream but you keep receiving everybody else. To stop receiving audio, also clear the checkbox Receive audio and video from others .
- Connect turns receiving back on
GM Settings
Settings → GM Settings is only visible to the room owner. It holds:
- Round Counter — the current combat round
- Permissions — see below
- Room Owner — hand the GM role to another person currently in the room
- Background — the backdrop behind the map
- Default Image Scaling — cover, contain or stretch, applied to newly placed images
- Info Text — a room-wide note
- Storage Used — how much table and A/V relay data this room is using
- Backup File — request a downloadable archive of the room's data
Permissions
Three settings decide what players may do. The GM can always do everything.
| Setting | Options | Controls |
| Change Map | anyone / only GM | tiles, text labels, saving/loading/clearing the map, and "Center Everyone on My View" |
| Change Tokens | anyone / Token owner + GM / only GM | creating, moving, editing and deleting tokens, and the Draw tool |
| Change Images | anyone / Image owner + GM / only GM | inserting and editing images |
- Restricting Change Map or Change Images removes the matching entries from those players' menus, so they simply do not see the tools.
- Restricting Change Tokens is enforced when the change is sent to the server, but the token entries stay in the menus and a token can still be dragged locally. The change is refused and the token jumps back to where it was. If a player reports that "tokens don't stay put", check this setting first.
Saving and Loading Maps
The File menu holds the map operations. All of them except Paste are GM-only.
- Save Map... stores a snapshot of the current map under a title of your choice, and shows you the list of maps already saved in this room. Each entry records who saved it and when, and can be deleted from the same list.
- Load Map... brings a saved map back.
- Clear Map wipes the map. Clear Tokens removes just the tokens and leaves the terrain. Clear Map is less final than it looks: it stores the map you are throwing away as a save called "Autosave" first, so you can get it back from Load Map... .
- Paste pastes an object you previously copied or cut.
Keyboard Shortcuts
| Key | Action |
| Ctrl+Shift+0 | open the File menu |
| Ctrl+Shift+1 | Pointer tool |
| Ctrl+Shift+2 | Measure (Steps) |
| Ctrl+Shift+3 | insert a Token |
| Ctrl+Shift+4 | Tiles |
| Ctrl+Shift+5 | Draw |
| Ctrl+Shift+6 | insert a Text Label |
| Ctrl+Shift+7 | insert an Image |
| Ctrl+Shift+8 | Fog of War (GM) |
| Escape | deselect, close the properties panel, back to the Pointer |
| Delete / Backspace | delete the selection |
| Ctrl+M | mute/unmute your microphone |
| Shift | while dragging a token: add to selection · on empty map: selection box · with Tiles or Fog: erase |
| Ctrl | while dragging a token: snap to whole squares |
Tips
- A missing menu entry usually means a missing permission. Check GM Settings → Permissions before assuming something is broken.
- Lock your background image. An unlocked map image will eventually be dragged out of place by somebody aiming for a token.
- Fog hides tokens, but only completely covered ones. A large token half in the fog is still visible to players.
- Tokens snap to quarter squares. If a figure looks slightly off-grid, hold Ctrl while you drag it, or use Align to Grid on images.
- Table and dice room are one room. You do not need to move your group; anybody can switch view at any time and the chat, wiki and logs stay the same.
- Hidden wiki pages work here too. GM notes, handouts and NPC pages can be prepared hidden and revealed when the party gets there — see Wiki Text Formatting .
- The audio/video feature is newer than the rest of the table. If it misbehaves, disconnect and reconnect before assuming the worst.
See Also
- Dice Rooms · the room features that Table mode is built on
- How to Roll · rolling dice
- Chat Commands · the slash commands
- Character Sheet · character sheets
- Wiki Text Formatting · writing wiki pages, including hidden GM pages
- Items and Equipment · items and equipment