Playing

When playing in real life, you go to you friend's house, sit at their table and just get started immediately.

Playing your favorite TTRPG with Fari isn't more complicated than that, though there are still a couple of things you should know before getting started.

Online VS Offline

To start a new game session, Fari offers you the following two options:

• Playing Online
• Playing Offline

Online

When you click on the Play Online button on the home page, Fari will create a temporary space for you that we call a Session where you are the host and owner.

When a session is started, Fari gives you access to a Session Link that you can send to your friends so that they can join your Session.

After you sent your players the session link, they can enter their name and join the game, and every modification that you do to the Session, Scene, or Character will be synced with all the players.

How does Fari sync my data with my players ?

Fari relies on something called peer to peer communication using the WebRTC protocol.

Offline

The Offline mode is useful if everyone is physically in the same room but the GM still wants to use Fari to manage their Scenes.

When playing in Offline mode, Fari won't connect to its server and won't generate the session link cited above.

This mode is also useful if for some reason, some of your players can't connect to your Online game session and you want to share your screen with them. See more about connection issues below.

Issues When Joining a Game

Some users might experience issues when trying to join an Online game session.

If that is the case for you or one of your player, you should look into why this is happening here.

Connection Issues | Fari Wiki

Player: Choose your Character

When a player joins an Online game session, they don't have a character assigned to them yet.

Kind of like in real life, the player needs to pull their character sheet out of their bag and put it on the table.

To do that, a player simply has to click on the Assign Character Sheet button beside the player's name on the left of the screen.

You then have the ability to do three things:

• Select an existing character from the list.
• Create a New Character.
• Import a character based off a template your GM might have given you.

Once that is done, you are ready to play!

GM: Assign a Character to a player

Sometimes, it's easier if the GM does the heavy lifting of preparing the game material.

For that reason, when a GM clicks on the Assign Character Sheet button, they will be prompted to either assign an existing character sheet or assign a duplicate of a character sheet.

This can be useful if the GM prepared character templates in advance for the players

GM: Managing Game Scenes

New Scenes

When you start either an Online or Offline game, Fari creates a New Empty Scene.

From there, you can get started and start playing right away, but as you play, your players will move forward in the story and you will want to get a new scene going.

If so, you can create a New Empty Scene again by pressing the New Scene button.

Saving

During a game session, there is a very high probably that you will have to cancel the session early, but you probably don't want to lose your current scene and all the index cards you've added so far.

No worries, simply click the Save Scene button and Fari will save your scene so that you can load it in another game session.

Loading Scenes

Whether you had to leave your last game session early or you've prepared scenes in advance for tonight's game, Fari lets you load scenes on the fly during your session so that you are always on top of your game.

Use the ... menu on the right and either click Load Scene or Clone And Load Scene

Offline Access

Fari is kind of like a desktop application that runs in your browser.

It doesn't have any servers or databases to store your data. You are 100% in control of your data because it lives inside your browser's local storage on your computer.

But when you are playing an online game, Fari acts as a gateway so that you can see other people's data. Things like the current scene in play or players' character sheets.

So, Fari is like a virtual table that lets you share temporarily data with others. When you leave that table and close your browser's tab, you take with you your character sheet and put it in your backpack.

Because of that, it's not directly possible to see other people's data without sitting at the table.

But, Fari has a mechanism in place that lets you see data that doesn't belong to you using what we call the Stored Toggle.

When opening a character sheet inside an online game and clicking on the Stored Toggle, Fari will act has your personal assistant and keep an up to date copy of that character sheet in your backpack so that you can consult it later without sitting at the table.

A word of caution, if modify a character sheet that you aren't the true owner of and join an online game later, Fari might override those changes if the owner also modified the sheet on their end.

Load VS Clone and Load

Everytime you create something in Fari, Fari creates a unique identifier and attaches it to what you created.

When you Load a Scene, you are truly loading this scene. Which means that if you click Save during your game session, you will modify the scene you loaded.

When you Clone and Load a scene, Fari will clone that scene and assign it a new unique identifier. So modifications done during the game session will be done on the copy of the scene and not the original.

This can be useful if for example you want to have a "Scene Template" that you want to use or something along those lines.