The Bark Blog

Week four: a monster is just a hero the DM runs

2026-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

Week three, Cerberus learned to celebrate. Week four, the DM finally got to play too. Monsters take real turns on the same combat wheel the heroes use, their hits put conditions on the heroes’ phones, and spells like Hold Person and Bless actually do what they say at the table. Heroes also picked up companions: familiars, steeds, summoned spirits, figurines, each with a card of its own.

That was 52 merged pull requests, split between Opus and Fable again. Most of the week’s fixes came from playing whole fights end to end, over and over, so this post goes deep on the DM’s wheel, on making effects land, and on how the testing worked. The rest gets the usual one breath at the end.

A monster is just a hero the DM runs

The first DM screen was its own thing. Monster cards with an attack panel, aiming chips stuffed inside the card, and a bottom bar for Next turn and End combat. It worked, kind of. But the players already had a combat wheel that was pretty good at running a turn, and the DM was off doing something completely different.

So I wanted the monsters on the same wheel and sheet the players use. It’s easier, it’s more condensed, and picking a target felt like it belonged in a pop-up, not crammed into the attack card. Fable mocked up three layouts and three target pickers side by side. I went with the “arena” layout and a grid of faces for aiming, because the grid fits a lot more targets in the same space.

Then I pushed it further. I didn’t want a copy of the player’s screen with monster stuff bolted on. I wanted the same component. Mechanically there’s honestly not a lot of difference between a player’s hero and a monster the DM controls. The DM is basically running a bunch of heroes at once, and should get to their saves, reactions and resources just as easily.

So Fable turned the player’s in-fight sheet into a “fighter frame” that anything can stand in. An adapter fills it in, and each role adds its own tools around the edges. Monsters went in first.

The Goblin Boss, on the same wheel a hero gets. This is from the day it shipped. The Add a creature row under the wheel got cut later in the week.

Here’s how a stat block maps onto the wheel. The turn order runs across the top as a rail of tokens, each one a face in a ring of health with its Initiative on the shoulder. Attacks go under Attack, and Multiattack counts down (“Attack 1 of 2”). Bonus Actions, Reactions, Legendary Actions and Recharge sit where a hero’s resources would. Tap an attack and a grid of faces comes up to pick who’s getting hit.

Goblins fighting goblins. Part of the testing was letting monsters go after each other.

It has to actually spend the turn

The first version looked right and played wrong. My monsters could keep attacking forever, and there was no roll card popping up, just dice sounds coming from somewhere. So Fable made the wheel spend a monster’s turn exactly the way it spends a hero’s, and every DM roll now goes up on the same roll card the players see. The players’ sheets show the same rail, too.

The roll card got one more DM-flavored change. A monster’s attack used to show the damage roll right next to the hit, which kind of ruins the moment. Now a monster’s attack rolls its d20 alone, and the damage stays hidden until the DM taps Roll damage. Multiattack was the other drag, since you had to go back through the wheel for every swing. Now it chains the way a hero’s Extra Attack already did, with a Next attack button right on the roll card. Fable built both.

Effects that land

Plenty of spells and monster abilities used to just be text. Hold Person said the target was Paralyzed, and then… nothing changed. This week Opus made them actually change the creature they hit:

Hold Person, Bane, Command and Blindness roll the target’s save on the DM’s screen and put the condition on.
A Ghoul’s Claw paralyzes the hero on their own phone.
Conditions end on their own clock, no one has to remember to take them off.
Hitting a Paralyzed creature rolls with Advantage, and crits up close.
Bless adds its d4 to attacks and saves, and a Life cleric’s slot heals add Disciple of Life.
Charmed creatures can’t attack their charmer.

Read the stat block, not a new data field

Then there were the monsters whose best moves did nothing. The aboleth’s Lash could be used over and over and never hit anyone. When we counted, 32 of the SRD’s 79 Legendary Actions did nothing, because their text just points at another attack (“makes one Tentacle attack”) or at a spell (“uses Spellcasting to cast Fear”). 25 of them cast a spell.

There was a lazy version of the fix on the table, and I wasn’t into it. The other easy way out was adding new fields to every monster in the data. Instead, Opus taught the engine to read the stat block’s own text at runtime and follow the pointer. The nice side effect is that a homebrew stat block written the SRD way just works too.

Play the fight, don’t patch it

Once the wheel landed, the plan was simple: play whole fights from the DM’s side. Open a table, add monsters, seat two heroes, fight, and have the monsters go after each other too.

I set one rule for it. No working around a broken skill with the table’s manual tools, so no typing in damage, healing or conditions by hand. That ruled out the easy pass. If Hold Person only “works” because the DM adds Paralyzed manually, that’s broken, and it got logged as broken.

Fable wrote it up as a reusable test plan with its own harness and logged the first run. We ran it three times over Oct 22 and 23, fixing each run’s findings before the next one. Then came a full sweep of every way the app gets used on Oct 24: 2 blockers, 9 places the rules came out wrong, 17 rough spots and 20 bits of polish. A Companions-only pass after that found 1 more blocker and 3 more rules problems. Everything got fixed the same day, except one finding that turned out not to be a bug.

Some favorites from the pile:

A monster that went down for nobody. A hero’s killing blow dropped the creature on the hero’s phone, and then the DM’s device overwrote it with its old copy of the table. So the creature stood right back up for everyone and kept its turn. Pretty rude. It was an ordering problem: the DM screen now applies the incoming table first, then runs its own updates. Fable fixed it.
Two blockers that were one-liners in disguise. Coins in a loot parcel reused a number an item already had and crashed the dialog. And the import prompt’s Replace and Keep buttons silently did nothing, because they handed the database a live reactive object instead of plain data.
The one that wasn’t a bug. The sweep flagged “Stunned keeps movement.” Under SRD 5.2, Stunned doesn’t stop movement the way the older rule did, so the code was right and the test plan got the fix instead.

Heroes get companions

Once anything could stand in the fighter frame, companions were the obvious next thing. Find Familiar, Find Steed, Summon Dragon, Giant Insect, Animate Dead, Pact of the Chain, the Figurines of Wondrous Power, Bag of Tricks and more now put a creature on the hero’s sheet. Fable built it.

Each companion is a token under the hero’s chips. Tap it and you get its card, in the same frame the DM runs monsters in: HP, AC, a combat wheel of its attacks, checks and features.

A Fighter with a Mastiff and a Boar. Good dogs only. And one boar.

An Owl familiar, 1 HP of pure courage. Spot the bug: it says Round 1 out of combat. Fixed the same day.

Companions take their turn right after their hero, and leave when their timer or the spell’s Concentration runs out. At a DM’s table, Opus gave them their own seat, so monsters can go after them too. The Companions test pass caught a nasty one: a companion dropping to 0 HP crashed the sheet, because its card was still open while the creature left the list. Now the card closes first, and you get the “drops to 0 and vanishes” notice with an Undo. Backing out of a summon picker also refunds the slot, charges and Concentration it had just spent.

The table’s front door

Setting up a table got some love too. The DM picks which homebrew packs a session allows, and a hero who needs another pack waits at the door with a Let in button or an X. Opus built that one.

Brynn brought a homebrew pack. The DM decides if it comes in.

It also got sound and motion. Creatures pop into their seats, a hero sitting down gets a chime and a gold glow, and Start combat plays a horn. Players don’t see the DM’s monsters until the fight starts, because spoilers. And after playing it on my own phone, Start combat goes straight into the first turn now instead of making you tap again.

Also in the pile

The rest of the week, in one breath: in Wild Shape the combat wheel is the Beast’s, with spells only once you have Beast Spells and the next attack following the form’s Multiattack, spell slots as one tile per level with free casts as chips, a homebrew pack checker and format guide that points at the line and column of a broken pack file, joining a table by a six-digit code or QR when the Wi-Fi hides it (built, and still being tested between real phones), the local table recovering quietly when the app comes back, a slimmer monster header on the DM screen, Guidance, Divine Smite and Evasion fixes from the full sweep, and moving everything that shipped out of the roadmap and into the diary.

That’s week four. See you next week.

Week three: the week the sword actually caught fire

2026-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

Week two, Cerberus learned to sit at a table. Week three, it learned to celebrate, and its magic items stopped being paragraphs. Level ups, checks, rests and Initiative all got fanfare, the combat wheel got motion, and by the end of the week every SRD magic item either does something on your sheet or says exactly what it leaves to the table.

That was 70 merged pull requests, split between Opus and Fable. Two of them were dependency bumps, so, 68 if you’re counting the fun ones. This post goes deep on the items, the fanfare and the wheel, and the rest gets the usual one breath at the end.

Items that actually do things

Right after I reworked attunement, I went looking at what the items themselves did. The answer was: not much. The store was full of magic items that were really just text telling you what they should be doing. A Flame Tongue was a longsword with a nice paragraph attached.

Fable’s first pass gave 37 items hand-written mechanics and flagged everything else as “left to the table.” Honestly, that’s a reasonable first move, and it showed me where I wanted the line. If it’s SRD, the engine should run it. A table flag is fine for homebrew the engine can’t express yet, or for things that are purely narrative. A Bag of Holding isn’t narrative. It’s just a place to put stuff.

So instead of more flags, the engine grew vocabulary. Items now speak the same effect language as class features, and they only apply while the item is carried, worn or attuned, whichever its text asks for. On top of that, Fable added weapon riders, Immunity, printed DCs, consumables, charged casting at higher levels, several uses per item, Climb and Swim Speeds, roll tables, containers and Spell Scrolls.

What that looks like on the sheet:

A Flame Tongue hit offers “Add Flame Tongue 2d6”. The sword actually catches fire now. Hence the title.
Spells from items land with your spells, at the item’s printed DC, and they spend its charges. Higher levels are offered at their charge cost.
Potions are a Bonus Action that heals straight onto the sheet and uses one up.
Spell Scrolls come as one kind per SRD spell, with the DC 10 + level check when the spell is above your level.
Bags of Holding and backpacks hold items. And a Bag of Holding can’t go inside another Bag of Holding, because we’ve all seen how that ends.
The Wand of Wonder and friends roll their SRD tables, as data.

Some things still need a person, like stepping onto another plane. Those stay “At the table”, but now each one says exactly what in one sentence instead of shrugging.

An early capture. Wand’s DC, wand’s charges, wand’s Fireball. Spot the two bugs: it says Free and a Long Rest, and the wand recharges at dawn. Both got fixed by the end of the week.

Spells from items aren’t your spells

This one’s subtle and I’m glad we got it right. Under the SRD’s rule for spells cast from items, a wand’s Fireball uses the wand’s DC and the wand’s charges, never your own slots. So the cast panel and the combat wheel only offer the item’s costs for item spells. Items that boost your spell DC, like the Robe of the Archmagi, raise your own casting but never a printed DC.

Not taking the easy way out

The tempting version was a “table only” checkbox on anything hard. Doing it properly meant teaching the engine new tricks. A Rod of Lordly Might is several items in one, so an item can have several uses. Potions of Giant Strength set your Strength while they last, and your saves, attacks and carrying weight follow along.

To keep all that honest, there’s a content test that checks every DC, die, save, level and charge count against the item’s own text. If the data says one thing and the item says another, it fails.

Fanfare for the moments the table cheers

Leveling up used to save and dump you back on your sheet. That’s it. It’s the biggest moment in a campaign and the app treated it like a form submission.

I wanted some fanfare right at the end of the wizard, before you head back to the sheet. So now there’s a gold burst and a chime, and Opus made the gains arrive as headlines.

The real design call was the order. What changes how you play (a subclass, Extra Attack, new spells) goes first, and the arithmetic (HP, Proficiency Bonus, slots) comes after. Past five headlines it says “and N more on your sheet”, so it never turns into a list.

Extra Attack first, math second. Bram earned this.

Checks and saves got the same treatment, with the same rule: only fire when there’s something to say. When the DC is known, a check stamps Passed, Saved or Failed and washes the screen edges green or red. When it isn’t, nothing gets stamped. A manual check from the sheet also stopped asking you whether you passed, because that was just one more tap.

Short and Long Rests got their own fanfare too, and rolling Initiative now lifts the number off the roll card and flies it up to the Combat line.

A wheel that moves like it means it

I wanted the combat wheel to feel more mechanical. Think Transformers, a ton of parts all moving in sync. We prototyped three takes side by side and recorded each one with the same taps:

Iris: aperture blades.
Gearbox: plates folding up in 3D.
HUD: a radar sweep that draws each wedge.

I picked HUD. Then I wanted it in reverse when combat ends, so the wheel sweeps itself back out of existence. Then I liked the iris more than I expected, so we split the job: the sweep for the wheel showing up and leaving, and the iris blades for moving between rings. Fable built all of it. A ring of light also pings out from the hub when your turn starts.

Mid-iris. Hild’s on 7 HP, so she’d like the Cure Wounds wedge to hurry up.

Once the motion and the light were showing whose turn it was, the “On your turn” and “Ready” captions weren’t saying anything new, so they went. Screen readers still hear them. The wheel is now the only combat view, too. The old list option is gone.

The glow behind the wheel took three tries. Even the third one reached way too far out and came out kind of egg-shaped. Then I spotted why: the buttons were a little see-through, so the glow stacked up on top of them. Solid wedges, gaps for the glow to come through, no outer ring. Fixed.

The dice shaker

The free roller from last week had a lot going on. What I actually wanted was simple: every tap on a die tosses that die into the pile, and the total keeps counting. The first rework still had too much stuff around it. So Opus cut it down to the die buttons, the same 3D dice the character sheet uses, Reset and Toss dice. That’s the whole screen now.

I also wanted a d100, which is really just two d10s, so that’s how it rolls: a tens die and a ones die.

2d100 + 1d6 = 189. No idea what you’d roll that for. It’s fun to shake though.

Attunement is a rule, not a toggle

Attuning to an item worked exactly like equipping it. I’d seen language about it taking a Short Rest and asked whether that was right. Nope. In SRD 5.2 you spend a Short Rest focused on the item. So with strict rules on, attuning or ending attunement takes a Short Rest, one item per rest, never in a fight and never at 0 HP. Opus built that one.

The same conversation reshaped the loadout. Attunement can cover things you’re also holding, or extra stuff like rings and cloaks, so the two needed to look different. Now it’s two rows: armor and both hands on top, three violet attunement sockets below.

Hands up top, attunement down below. One socket still open.

The store got the same kind of rethink. Magic items used to sit in their own tab, badly grouped, with nothing past a short blurb. Now the store opens on a market of stalls, one per content pack, with shelves by what an item is. A magic longsword sits with the longswords. Fable built the market and a single detail card that every item opens.

Filming the shorts turned into QA

Every daily short gets filmed in the real app, and this week filming kept tripping over bugs. A “Saved” notice showed up while the d20 was still tumbling, which kind of spoils the roll. The armor card showed the hero’s total AC instead of the armor’s own. Opus fixed both.

The Wand of Fireballs short alone found five more: “At will” on casts that actually cost charges, a Cleric being offered her own slot for the wand’s Fireball, a socket that just said “Wand”, “back on a Long Rest” for a wand that recharges at dawn, and a DM log calling three Magic Missile darts “Dart 1”. Fable fixed all five in one go. Another short caught the spell level arrow sitting right on top of the cast button.

Two more sneaky ones: on spinning rings of nine or more options, hidden wedges kept a backing that ate taps in some spots, and on iOS a swipe inside a popup still moved the page behind it. Both fixed.

Also in the pile

The rest of the week, in one breath: loot parcels the DM shares as a file, swipe back instead of back buttons with the top bar moved into the hero menu, dice sounds that match how many dice you rolled, an attack card that goes straight to damage with Miss in red, strict rules on the dock’s cards mid-fight, temp HP in the damage preview, a coin number pad, sheet tabs for Checks, Spells, Resources and Features, the roll history dropped, tool checks with the SRD Utilize uses and DCs, Wild Shape locking spellcasting, a crowded spell ring that opens by kind and then by level, a “Kennel Armory” pack of homebrew test items, packs that are simply on or off, a sweep through the whole app cutting explainer text that was just repeating what the buttons already said, and a pile of layout and mobile fixes.

Tests once the item work landed: 439 in the rules engine, 214 for content and 274 in the app.

That’s week three. See you next week.

Week two: the week Cerberus got a DM

2026-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

Week one was all about one hero and one turn. Week two, Cerberus learned to sit at a table. A DM can run the whole fight from their own device, damage goes where you aim it, and when someone casts Haste on you, it actually shows up on your sheet. Then Fable ran the first full playtest of the whole app, and honestly, it had notes. 101 of them.

That was 91 merged pull requests, almost all of them built with Opus, which is way too much for one post. So this one sticks to the table, the soundtrack and the playtest, and everything else gets crammed into one breath at the end.

The DM’s device is the table

The idea started pretty simple. I wanted a DM to host a session, players to join it, the DM to track initiative, and everyone to get dropped into their turn automatically.

I still liked solo mode, where you track your own turns, so I didn’t want to throw it out. The trick was that a table only presses buttons a player already had. The DM’s device starts each hero’s turn on that player’s sheet and ends combat for everybody. Players still roll their own Initiative and end their own turns, because that’s what you’d do at a real table anyway.

Leave the table and you’re just back on your normal sheet. Nothing to undo.

The DM gets a screen of their own, and it’s stacked: all 329 monster stat blocks from the SRD 5.2, monster cards that track HP, conditions, Recharge and Legendary Actions, and prepared fights rated with the SRD’s encounter difficulty for your party. On a tablet it splits in two, initiative on the left and whoever’s up on the right.

Initiative on the left, whoever’s up on the right. Three goblins, rated Moderate for a level 1 party of four.

One rule decides where every number lives: the DM’s device owns the monsters, and each phone owns its own hero. Monster HP lives on the DM’s screen. Your HP lives on your phone, and your phone applies your Resistances. Players only ever see a monster’s name and whether it’s Bloodied, which is the SRD 5.2 word for half HP or less. I asked for every term like that in the SRD and nope, Bloodied is the only one.

Then I flipped it around: the DM should get the same kind of view of the heroes. So your actual HP number never leaves your phone either. The DM sees Healthy, Bloodied, Dying, Stable or Dead, plus your AC and conditions. Enough to run the fight, and nobody’s sheet is an open book.

Don’t just show the fight, track it

The first DM screen showed you the monsters. Cool, but you were still doing all the math yourself. What I really wanted was for damage rolls to just take the health off. Whoever’s attacking or casting, DM or player, picks who they’re aiming at, and the HP popup only sticks around for Hit Dice and the odd manual fix.

So that’s what we built. Roll damage, pick who you’re hitting, and the number lands on the right device after Immunities and Resistances.

Three whole damage. The Goblin Boss is shaking.

Saves work the same way. An area spell or a breath weapon asks who got caught in it and rolls damage once. A Fireball rolls its 8d6 a single time, then every creature saves on its own screen with its own bonus, and anyone who makes it takes half.

One roll of 16d6 for everybody. Ana gets to roll a save on their own phone. The goblin does not have a great day.

I also wanted a real dice switch. Turn it on and the app asks for your physical roll and you just type in the number.

Buffs follow the target

This one started small. I had Concentration going on Fly and the chip said “10 min” turn after turn after turn. It looked frozen. It wasn’t. The timer was running fine, the chip was just rounding. So now timed effects count rounds in combat (100, 99, 98, all the way down to “Last round”) and show a clock outside of it. They tick on your turn and end themselves.

Effects know how long they last, and who to blame.

Fixing that showed the next gap. Spells without Concentration, like Mage Armor, weren’t tracked at all, and Mage Armor should only count while you’re not wearing armor. Then the table made a third thing pretty obvious: you’re already picking a target, so the buff should just land on that hero’s sheet.

And now it does. Ana casts Haste on Bo, a level 5 Fighter, and Bo’s phone says so. AC goes from 16 to 18, Speed goes from 30 to 60 feet, and both go right back the second Ana’s Concentration drops.

Ana’s Haste lands on Bo’s sheet, timer and all.

The same timers also brought Rage upkeep, Dash adding to your movement, and condition saves that roll themselves.

Making it sound like a fight

Sounds were working. They just weren’t doing much for me. Honestly? A little meh. Nobody gets hyped over a utility-grade dice clack.

So we built an audition page and I went through it on my phone with headphones, tagging every clip for a moment: a roll, a nat 20, a nat 1, a hit, a spell, coins. Candidates came from CC0 game audio and the free, royalty-free GDC game audio bundles. That’s 230 GB across ten years of bundles, which sounds like a lot, and it turned out to be wide but not deep. The whole decade had only a handful of real dice recordings, so every single one made the cut.

97 clips survived, plus 60 spell sounds. For now each moment plays a random pick from its set, and sounds for specific spells are on the list for later.

For music, I wanted rolling Initiative to feel like you just walked into the fight, the way battle music fires up in Pokémon or Expedition 33. After auditioning, I skipped intros and victory fanfares for now and went straight into a combat loop. Exploring music cuts into battle when you roll Initiative and fades back out when combat ends.

Music has its own switch, separate from Sounds, and it starts off. Picture five phones at a real table all blasting battle music over the DM’s own playlist. Yeah, no.

The music did break one thing, just not the app. Bundling about 21 MB of it pushed the Android test build to 31 MB, which is over a 10 MB attachment limit on the step that shares test builds. Every check passed. Only that last step fell over. The fix posts a download link instead. I kept the music bundled anyway so it works offline from the very first launch, because offline-first is one of my core rules for this app.

The first full playtest

After two weeks of moving fast, nobody had played the whole app end to end in one sitting. So Fable did. We wrote up 36 scenarios covering the builder, level-up, the sheet, solo combat, table play, accessibility and sound, and Fable ran every one from a wiped device.

It found 101 things. Zero blockers, thankfully: 10 major, 49 minor and 42 polish. I went through every one: agreed with 93, tweaked 8, tossed none. The fixes landed the next day in six focused batches.

The big ones:

Rules the sheet didn’t enforce yet. Dropping to 0 HP did nothing, and some class actions, like Reckless Attack, Flurry of Blows and some Channel Divinity options, just weren’t there. Fable fixed those too: 0 HP now knocks you out and prompts your death save, and the missing actions are in combat.
The builder picked a class’s key abilities from its saving throws instead of its primary ability.
The combat wheel sorted its rings alphabetically, so a caster’s real spells got buried.
Table play worked end to end. Rejoining after a page reload didn’t.

Two of my tweaks changed direction. You now pick your target before you roll, so a crit card never needs a button for every monster, and that one already shipped. The sheet’s top bar and resource dock are up for a rethink.

One more bug got caught before it merged. Replaying a table session in two browser windows showed a player’s sheet sometimes starting their turn again right after they ended it. Fixed, and each sheet’s round now stays in step with the table’s.

Which brings me to the honest part. Table play was built and tested between browser windows. The native Wi-Fi plugin compiles for iOS and Android, but we haven’t played a table across real phones yet. That’s next.

Also in the pile

The rest of the week, in one breath: a free dice roller with keep and drop notation, every SRD magic item in the inventory and store with attunement and charges, mounts, vehicles, food, lodging and services in the store, a smoother spin and snap on the combat wheel, two rounds of sheet and combat layout rework, Quickened spells lighting up both resources they spend, and a move to SvelteKit 3, which Fable handled.

That’s week two. See you next week.

Week one: from an empty repo to a combat wheel

2026-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

Seven days ago the repo for my new app was empty. Seventy-three merged pull requests later, every one of them built with Opus, it’s a guided character builder for 5E, a table-side sheet you tap to roll from, and a combat mode we designed three times in two days. All twelve classes from the 5E System Reference Document are in, levels 1 to 20, and that part was done by day three.

That’s way too much for one post, so this one sticks to the two stories that shaped everything else: a rule I set on day one, and how a turn of combat turned into a wheel.

Day one: save the choices, never the numbers

A 5E character sheet is a pile of derived numbers. Your Athletics bonus comes from your Strength, your proficiency bonus, your class, maybe your background, maybe a feat. Store those numbers and every rules fix turns into a data migration, and every screen has to be careful not to let you build something illegal.

So on day one I decided a character gets saved as the list of choices the player made, and nothing else. A pure rules engine re-derives the whole sheet from those choices every time. The builder doesn’t decide what to ask you next. It asks the engine which questions are still open and only shows those.

That one call is what makes the builder hard to get wrong. Validation lives in the engine, not in the screens. Every option is a card or chip that says what it gives you, and Next stays locked until the step is valid, with the reason right there: “pick 1 more”, or “You already have Athletics”.

Skills you already have show up as Yours instead of letting you pick them twice.

The same engine powers everything after the builder. Finish a character and you land on a table sheet where tapping any ability, saving throw, skill or initiative rolls it, with advantage and disadvantage applied for you. Attack and damage rolls, HP tracking with death saves, and short rests followed the same day. The engine’s test suite went from 53 to 81 tests on day one alone.

Athletics with advantage: roll two, keep the 11, add 5.

One small detail I really like: HP is stored as damage taken, not current HP. Level up and your max HP goes up, but the wounds you’re carrying stay put, because that’s what actually happened.

Nothing derived is ever saved, so a character also survives rule fixes. If we get a number wrong and fix it, every saved character is right the next time it opens.

I also had to pick a platform. Flutter was tempting for a game-like feel. The honest comparison was that Flutter’s 2D edge is small for an app like this and shows up mostly on low-end Android phones. The web gives you a sheet you can open on a laptop at the table, or send to your DM as a link, and an offline web app for free. I’d also already shipped Byte on Svelte, which gave us a template to start from. So I went with Svelte, web first, wrapped for iOS and Android.

Combat, three ways in two days

The first combat view tracked your Action, Bonus Action and Reaction each turn and listed everything you could do with them. It worked. It also read like a restaurant menu, not a turn.

I had four notes on it. The action bar belongs at the bottom. The “next roll” footer takes up a lot of room for something you rarely touch. Cards for things the turn guide already offers shouldn’t show up twice. And the common stuff, attacking and casting, deserves a bigger stage than “Study”. Most of all, clicking Attack should lead somewhere: to your next attack, or to the things that ride along with one. It shouldn’t just leave every other action sitting there.

Version two: a turn with a direction

So the turn bar moved to the bottom, the footer shrank to a small Adv/Dis toggle, duplicate cards hide during combat, and attacks and spells became big tiles. Taking the Attack action now locks the turn into a sequence, “Attack 2 of 3”, with Next attack and Done attacking.

Mid-turn, the Attack action is a sequence you step through.

The sequence also surfaces the things the rules tie to an attack: the extra attack from a Light weapon (and Nick, which folds that extra attack into the Attack action itself), and once-per-turn riders like Sneak Attack.

Version three: the wheel

Then I pulled an old project off the shelf: an infinite radial menu I built in Unity years ago, designed for combat action menus in games, especially on mobile. My pitch was simple: put HP in a circle in the middle, with Action, Bonus Action and Reaction buttons around it. Plus a green-to-red glow around the HP, for a little extra pizzazz.

It fit better than I expected, because a turn was already a tree: Action, Bonus Action or Reaction, then attacks, spells or features, then the thing that actually does it. That meant the wheel could be a new view over the same engine state, not a second combat system to keep in sync. Day one’s rule paid off again. Pick something and it moves to the center with its details and a Use button.

The first wheel: drill down from Action to Attack to a weapon, and it lands in the middle.

Rectangles around a circle never look right

The first try put three rounded buttons at 12, 4 and 8 o’clock. It looked lopsided whichever way we nudged it, because a rectangle is wider than it is tall, and no amount of padding fixes that. The fix was a different shape: three equal 120° segments.

Then I pushed it further. I wanted the gaps on the top layer gone, with diamond-shaped buttons fanning out from the center like the old Simon game, and a mechanical animation for changing layers, like a sci-fi door sliding open and shut.

So Opus built touching wedges with dark seams, and a door. When you move between layers, the old panels twist into the center, the HP circle gives a little clunk, and the new panels twist out one by one with a slight overshoot. With reduced motion turned on, the layer just swaps.

Three touching wedges, HP in the middle.

Watch the clip

The door animation. This was captured in a headless browser, so it’s choppier here than on a phone.

A few more things the round shape made us think about:

Don’t move buttons under a thumb. The wheel puts the options you use most at 12 o’clock, but it only re-sorts when combat starts. Anything that appears or disappears mid-turn lands at the bottom, so nothing you were about to tap slides away.
Long spell lists on a round menu. About eight labeled options fit around a ring on a phone. Rings that would be crowded split into another layer (Spells, then by level), and only what still doesn’t fit spins, with arrows. Most rings never need to.
A bug we only found by re-checking. After the wheel shipped, we re-ran a Rogue’s turn and rolled damage before closing the result. The wheel marked the Nick extra attack “Action used”, which it wasn’t. Fixed in the same change.

Our first outside tester

This week our Android tester went through the builder and sent 17 numbered notes, plus three more comments. All but two were handled in a single change.

The biggest one: picking a species, class or background auto-advanced right past the tab that explained what it gives you, so nobody ever saw it. Now tapping a card opens what it gives you right under it, with a Choose button, and the separate tab is gone. The steps also now go Class, Background, Species, which is the order the SRD 5.2 itself uses.

Point buy used to start from the standard array, so you had to lower every score before you could spend anything. Now every score starts at 8 with 27 points, and you can’t move on until you’ve spent them all. Rolled stats got a roll counter, with a little ribbing as the number climbs, because the tester asked for one.

The review step now labels every feature, skill and tool with where it came from:

Every line says where it came from.

The notes also showed us where labels could say more. Multiclass requirement badges now read “to multiclass out” and “to multiclass in”, and Weapon Mastery explains itself right where you pick it.

One request I especially liked was an equipment store. The SRD has equipment, and new characters start with gold to buy their own gear, so I wanted it in 1.0. It shipped the same day.

Also in the pile

The rest of the week, in one breath: the remaining species and backgrounds, 3D dice, a UX pass for every class, phone notch safe areas, groundwork for the native iOS and Android builds, a motion and focus pass, previews of the bonus when you pick a skill, icons on the builder cards, equipping weapons and an inventory, Metamagic when casting, a strict rules mode, an in-app feedback button, a fix for crit damage, and effect chips in combat.

That’s week one. The Bark Blog will be back next week with what came next.

The Bark Blog

Week four: a monster is just a hero the DM runs

A monster is just a hero the DM runs

It has to actually spend the turn

Effects that land

Read the stat block, not a new data field

Play the fight, don’t patch it

Heroes get companions

The table’s front door

Also in the pile

Week three: the week the sword actually caught fire

Items that actually do things

Spells from items aren’t your spells

Not taking the easy way out

Fanfare for the moments the table cheers

A wheel that moves like it means it

The dice shaker

Attunement is a rule, not a toggle

Filming the shorts turned into QA

Also in the pile

Week two: the week Cerberus got a DM

The DM’s device is the table

Don’t just show the fight, track it

Buffs follow the target

Making it sound like a fight

The first full playtest

Also in the pile

Week one: from an empty repo to a combat wheel

Day one: save the choices, never the numbers

Combat, three ways in two days

Version one: a very good menu

Version two: a turn with a direction

Version three: the wheel

Rectangles around a circle never look right

Our first outside tester

Also in the pile