FAQ & Troubleshooting

The short answers to the questions people ask most, plus the handful of disambiguations and error messages worth knowing before they catch you out. If you want the full picture behind any answer, follow the link — every section points back to the page that covers it in depth.

Do I have to use AI?

No — the AI is entirely optional. You can run a complete campaign on DND.chat by hand, async (play-by-post) or live: campaign chat, the auditable dice, your shared cards (/summon), and the full combat tracker (/init, /attack, HP and conditions) all work with no model involved.

The Autopilot DM and the AI assists (/recall, /catchup, /gm, roll commentary, session recaps) are opt-in — the Autopilot DM only runs once a DM imports or generates an adventure and presses Start, and each assist has a free, non-AI fallback or is simply absent. A human DM is the default, and core chat and dice are never metered.

Accounts & billing

Do I need a separate account for each site?

No. One signup gives you one identity across the whole family. The same login, the same campaigns, cards, characters, and dice logs are yours on DNDCards.com, DND.chat, and DNDWar.com — not copies, the same rows. Sign in on one site and you're signed in on the next; DND.chat hands you off to DNDCards.com to authenticate and returns you signed in on both. The mechanics are in How It All Connects.

Is it free?

Yes — everything ships free during beta. The real, code-backed membership lives in DND.chat and has three tiers: Free (live, full access), Pro (Coming soon), and AI credits (Coming soon). Nothing is charged today — checkout is a stub, the credit meter is switched off, and every user resolves to Free. See One Membership, Every Site.

One membership, or one per site?

One. A single membership rides your shared account and covers DNDCards.com, DND.chat, and DNDWar.com — and DNDNote.com when it lands. It is not per-site billing.

What actually needs credits?

Only LLM (large-language-model) features ever meter, and only when the credit system is switched on (it's off during beta). The three credit sinks are color commentary on rolls, DM session recaps, and Autopilot DM scene turns. Core campaign chat and the auditable dice are Never required for core chat or dice — free forever. Pack prices and exactly which endpoints debit are on the AI Credits & Billing reference.

Overloaded terms (read this before you get confused)

A few words mean different things on different sites. Getting these straight saves a lot of head-scratching.

So: you Invoke a card onto a board or a battlemap; you /summon one into the tavern chat. The two are different actions on different sites. In both cases there's no magic shortcut — invoking an SRD or homebrew card simply mints a real card row, then drops it. The membership disambiguation is spelled out in One Membership, Every Site; the term details are in Cards & the Shared Compendium.

What lives where (product scope)

Which site has the PDF Shredder?

DNDCards. The PDF Shredder — with OCR and full card extraction — is a DNDCards feature, opened from a campaign board. DND.chat has its own, simpler PDF ingest inside the Autopilot DM panel, but it is text-layer only: no OCR, no card extraction. It just splits a module into scenes. DNDWar has no shredder at all — it only links out to DNDCards for PDF and character import.

Is DNDWar gridless / does it have a "theater of war" mode?

No. DNDWar.com is grid-only. Combat, movement, AoE templates, and line-of-sight all assume a square grid with 5e 5-5-5 (Chebyshev) distance, and the grid is always on. There is no separate gridless or "theater of war" combat mode. (The only "gridless" mention anywhere is an internal note about demo map images that lack a printed grid — the engine still overlays its own.)

PDF Shredder messages

When a shred doesn't go as planned, the message usually tells you exactly what happened:

The Shredder also requires sign-in (401 otherwise) and a configured OpenAI key on the server (500 otherwise). For the full flow, see the PDF Shredder walkthrough.

My adventure flow didn't reach DND.chat

The optional adventure-flow pass needs a DND.chat tavern to land in:

• { saved: false, reason: 'no_tavern' } — the campaign has no tavern yet. Open the campaign in DND.chat once (which creates the tavern), then re-import.
• A non-DM save changes 0 rows — only the campaign's DM can write the adventure flow (it's enforced by row-level security). Sign in as the DM and re-import.

If you'd rather skip the AI pass entirely, author the adventure yourself in Markdown or JSON and import it deterministically — free, instant, and no LLM. See the Adventure Format reference.

Sessions & combat gotchas

• Email reminders return 503 "Resend not configured." DND.chat sends session reminders through Resend; without the email key configured, scheduling still works but reminder emails no-op with a 503. RSVPs and the in-app schedule are unaffected.
• AI session recaps are DM-only. A non-DM gets a 403. When the LLM recap runs (and is on), it costs 50 credits; otherwise everyone falls back to the free structured-markdown recap. Details on the Credits & Billing page.
• Players never see exact monster HP or AC. In DND.chat, the encounter API nulls hp_current/hp_max for non-DM viewers, and a monster's AC is read server-side for the hit math and never returned to players — they see status badges and conditions, not raw numbers. On the DNDWar battlemap, players likewise see a token's health as a colored HP bar and a bloodied tint rather than exact figures.
• A new character starts with no AC. The character builder doesn't compute AC, so a fresh character row is created with ac = null. Combat falls back to null AC until the DM edits it or the sheet sets it, and the linked player card only shows an AC stat once AC is filled in. See the character builder walkthrough.

Homebrew

Where does my homebrew show up?

In three places, on a clear schedule:

1. Your own Homebrew source — immediately. As soon as you forge it, the card appears in your compendium and Invoke pickers (including DNDWar's My Homebrew tab), private to you.
2. The Community source — once an admin approves it. From your compendium you can submit a card (it moves private → pending), but you can never set it public yourself. A platform admin reviews pending cards and approves pending → public out-of-band. Approved cards then become invokable family-wide.
3. Rollable in combat — wherever it's visible. Because it carries the canonical stat labels and combat JSON, an approved or owned homebrew card fights correctly on the battlemap and in the tavern with no extra setup.

The full lifecycle is in the Homebrew Forge walkthrough.

How do I edit an official / SRD card?

Official cards aren't freely editable — a card counts as "official" if it has an SRD id or its source is the SRD core. To change one, Clone as homebrew: that clears the SRD link, sets the source to Homebrew, prefixes the title with "Copy of", and gives you a private, editable copy you own. See Cards & the Shared Compendium.

Still stuck?

• Start with a product page — DNDCards.com, DND.chat, or DNDWar.com.
• Learn the shared model — How It All Connects and Cards & the Shared Compendium.
• Follow a walkthrough — Building a Character, The Homebrew Forge, The PDF Shredder, or Running a Connected Group Session.