Creator Guide
How to build a TablePlots story: tags, events, and testing your own build before anyone else sees it.
Getting started
Register an account on the front page, then log in. Once you're in, you'll see Your TablePlots: every story you own. Click New TablePlot, give it a title, and you're straight into the builder for that story.
There's no player app yet. Right now, the only person who sees any of this is you, building and testing your own work.
Details
The first tab of the builder holds the things a host needs to know before they start playing your story, none of it affects how the story runs:
- Title and whether it's public or private.
- Prerequisites: what the group needs before starting, e.g. "You must have Nemesis base game, and play with at least the engineer."
- Special setup: how the physical setup differs from the official rules, e.g. which extra tokens or minis to have ready.
- Special rules: any house rules your story depends on.
These are plain text for now. A rich text editor with images is planned, not built yet, so formatting and inline pictures aren't available in these fields yet.
Tags
A tag is a fact your story can track: whether something has happened, or a number that changes over time. Every tag is one of two kinds:
- Flag: on or off, nothing in
between.
eggfound,enteredbridge. - Counter: a number.
gameround, tracked as it goes up (or down, or gets set directly).
You don't have to set tags up in advance. While you're building an event, typing a new name straight into its effects list creates a flag on the spot. A counter is different: its kind has to be chosen deliberately, so create one from the Tags tab first if that's what you need.
Icons and colours for tags are planned, not built yet, the name is all you can set for now.
Events
An event is one button. It has a title (for your own reference), a button label (what players will read), and four more things:
- Shows when: a list of conditions. Every one has to be true at once
for the button to appear. Pick a tag, then either toggle it set / not set
(for a flag) or choose a comparison like
> 2(for a counter). - Narration: the text read out when the button is pressed.
- Media: an optional mp3 or mp4 that plays alongside the narration. Attach it after saving the event once (a brand-new event needs to exist before anything can be attached to it), and use the play button next to the upload field to preview it without needing to go into Test Play.
- Physical instruction: a note for whoever is running the table about what to do to the physical game, e.g. "place the miniature and the egg." Separate from the narration on purpose, since players hear the narration but the instruction is for the host.
Then Effects: what pressing the button actually changes. Pick a tag, existing or newly typed, and choose what happens to it: a flag gets added or removed, a counter gets incremented by a number or set to one.
The Bridge. Shows when: (no conditions, always available).
Narration: "You enter the bridge and are hit by the foul aroma of death..."
Effects: add enteredbridge.
The Egg. Shows when: enteredbridge set,
eggcollected not set. Narration: "You carefully crouch and pick up the egg..."
Effects: add eggcollected.
Once an event has been used, it stops showing, for good, in that playthrough. Every event you add appears as a row; click it to expand its editor in place, click it again (or Close) to collapse it. Only one is ever open at a time, so it's always obvious which one you're looking at.
Test Play
This tab is how you check your own build actually works. It shows every button that's both not yet used and currently meets its conditions, plus the current value of every tag that's been touched so far.
- Press a button to fire it: you'll see the same narration, media, and instruction a player would, in a panel that stays open until you close it or fire something else.
- Counters can also be bumped by hand (+1 / -1), separate from any event, since something like a round count is usually the host's own action rather than a story button.
- Reset test wipes this playthrough's state and firing history completely, so you can run through the whole thing again from the start.
Tips
- A button not showing in Test Play? Check its conditions against the current tags shown at the top of the tab, every single one has to hold at once.
- Conditions decide if a button shows. Effects decide what happens when it's pressed. They're separate lists on purpose: a button can show under one set of facts and change a completely different set.
- An event only fires once per test. If you want to try it again, Reset test rather than expecting to press it twice.
- Deleting a tag doesn't touch any state already recorded against it, it just removes it from the picker for new conditions and effects.