Pausing and resuming combat
Pause the encounter mid-session, save the full combat state, and resume exactly where you left off at the next session.
Not every session ends cleanly. A combat runs long, the table calls it a night halfway through the final boss fight, and everyone heads home. When you come back next week, the last thing you want to spend ten minutes on is reconstructing the initiative order from memory, transcribing remaining hit points from your notepad, and re-applying every tag to the right combatant.
TurnWarden preserves the full combat state when you pause mid-session. Initiative order, hit points, tags, the round counter, and the turn pointer all hold. When you sign back in and resume, the encounter picks up exactly where you left off.
Pausing mid-session
When you need to stop an encounter before it concludes, find the Pause combat button in the tracker footer (third control in the cluster, after Previous turn and Next turn). Select it; the top status badge flips to an amber PAUSED, an inline ⏸ Paused pill appears next to the round counter in the footer, and Previous turn and Next turn become disabled while the encounter is paused.
What the pause holds:
- The full initiative order and every combatant's position within it
- Current hit points for each combatant
- All applied tag pills (5e conditions and your custom presets alike)
- The round number and active turn pointer
The state is stored server-side. You can close your browser, change devices, or sign out entirely; the paused encounter waits for you when you return.
Note: your player view does not echo a paused indicator. This is an explicit design decision; players see whatever the last-rendered state was. If you want your table to know the session has stopped, tell them out of band; TurnWarden won't surface "paused" to the player URL.
Resuming next session
Sign back in to TurnWarden. You land on your DM tracker, and the paused encounter is right there: amber PAUSED status badge, every combatant still in place.
Find the same footer control you used to pause (now showing the Resume combat tooltip and a Play icon) and select it. The encounter goes back to Active immediately: Previous turn and Next turn re-enable, the amber badge flips back to IN COMBAT, and the player view picks up the live state on its next round update.
From this point the encounter runs as normal. Advance the turn, deal damage, end the round; everything works the same as if you had never paused.
The encounter state is saved server-side, not in your browser's local storage. Refreshing the page, closing the tab, or switching devices will not discard the paused combat. The player view also stays in its last-rendered state across refreshes until you resume and the next round advance pushes a new frame.
What's next
With pause and resume in place, a multi-session combat across two weeks is no different from a single-session fight: you pick up the initiative order and keep going. If you want to understand how initiative collection, HP tracking, and turns work during an active encounter, the running your first encounter article covers the full tracker workflow from start to finish. The player view article explains how the read-only screen behaves across devices.