# Turn & Hex

> A game master's live table board for tabletop role-playing sessions, with a model that suggests facilitation beats and re-themes encounters. https://turn-and-hex.skillsafe.ai/

Turn & Hex is the board a game master (GM) keeps open while running a tabletop role-playing game at home, at a club or at a convention. It is system-agnostic: nothing on it depends on a published rulebook. It is a facilitator's tool, not a video game.

## What runs free in the browser

- Initiative: turn order by roll, then tiebreak, then heroes before allies before foes, then the order added. Delay (step out, then "Act now" re-enters right before whoever is acting and takes their initiative), Ready (holds an action with a trigger, fires out of turn, lapses at the creature's next turn), hit points with hit and heal, stress for heroes, down and back up, timed conditions that tick at the end of the bearer's turn, a round counter. Creatures added mid-fight slot in by roll without stealing the current turn.
- Encounter builder over 104 original, generic threats (four tiers, eleven roles: minion, support, skirmisher, artillery, controller, lurker, brute, leader, elite, solo, hazard; 22 themes). A difficulty budget meter: each creature costs its role cost (minion 0.5, support 1, hazard 1.5, skirmisher/artillery/controller/lurker 2, brute/leader 3, elite 4, solo 8) times a tier factor against the party's tier (two or more below 0.25, one below 0.5, same 1, one above 1.75, two above 3, three above 5); the party's base is 2 points per hero; bands are trivial (under 0.4x base), easy (0.4-0.75x), standard (0.75-1.25x), hard (1.25-1.75x), deadly (1.75-2.5x), overwhelming.
- Hex map (pointy-top, odd-r offset; distance and line drawing in cube coordinates): draggable tokens shown as round sigils with initials, terrain stamps (wall blocks movement and sight, difficult, water, hazard, cover counts but does not block), a fog brush with a GM wash and an opaque player view, and a ruler that reports hexes, feet and whether line of sight is clear.
- Session clock with scene markers (scene, sequel, combat, social, explore, break); a spotlight tally per scene of who has acted (a hero's turn counts automatically) and who has spoken; dice from the browser's crypto random source with keep-highest/lowest and advantage, and a roll log (last 200 rolls).
- Exports: a printable GM sheet (encounter with stats, initiative with a notes column, pinned complications, the map), the map as SVG, the session log as Markdown, the roll log as CSV, and the whole session as JSON that opens again. Sessions are saved to the signed-in account, one record per session.

## The model asks (metered, gpt-terra)

- `beats` (from the skill game-facilitator): reads the session state - party, NPCs, encounter, turn order, spotlight tally, last five scene markers, tone - and returns who to spotlight next and why (a hero with the lowest tally unless it gives a concrete reason), 1-3 complications tied to the scene, a pacing call (cut, linger or escalate) with an energy level and how the scene should land, questions to ask out loud, and one line of delivery advice. The spotlight becomes a halo on that hero's initiative card and token; complications are pinned above the map; pacing is a dial.
- `retheme` (from the skill table-tone): diagnoses how the encounter sits against the table's tone (fit, flat, whiplash, purple, monotone, genre mismatch), writes a tonal anchor, proposes up to six threat swaps (id to id, from a catalog of same-role threats within one tier) to fit the tone inside the GM's difficulty band, an energy call and a short read-aloud opener. Swaps appear as ghosted cards with Accept and Decline; the budget is recomputed in the browser.
- Every reply is reconciled against the board: names that are not a hero, an NPC or a threat are flagged; a spotlight that skips the lowest tally without a reason is flagged; swaps with unknown ids or a repeated source are dropped; a budget that leaves the band is marked. The map geometry is never sent.

## Developer surface

- API tutorial: https://turn-and-hex.skillsafe.ai/api.html (task field, input fields, reply contract, four worked examples, eight languages)
- The board's logic is plain scripts: hexmath.js, tablekit.js, threats.js, initiative.js, scenekit.js, facilitate.js

## Sources

Built on two SkillSafe skills by jwynia: game-facilitator (@jwynia/game-facilitator - situations not plots, rotate the spotlight, scene and sequel structure, cut when energy flags, fail forward) and table-tone (@jwynia/table-tone - tone as the table's contract, the five tonal states, tonal anchor, humour policy, consequence dial, energy by scene type).