Loot Council — WoW-themed Retro

A World of Warcraft themed retro tool. A session runs like a dungeon:

0. Looking for Group (online only) — the party gathers on a holding page until the facilitator starts the raid.
1. Achievements — celebrate what went well, and rally behind each other's wins.
2. Scouting — everyone adds the topics they want to discuss to a shared Mob List.
3. Threat Voting — everyone spreads threat across the topics, in secret.
4. Boss Encounters — the most threatening topics become bosses. You fight each one by proposing tactics (loot), rallying behind the best ones and distributing them with WoW Need / Greed / Pass rules. Won tactics become tasks with an owner.

When you're done, the facilitator clicks End Raid and everyone sees the Raid Summary, a read-only recap of the session. The Loot Ledger exports it all as a markdown action plan.

Running it

npm install
npm start

Then open:

• Online mode (everyone on their own laptop): http://localhost:3000/ (also at /net.html)
• Local mode (one shared screen): http://localhost:3000/index.html, or Single-screen mode in the lobby

During development, npm run dev restarts the server whenever you edit it.

Both modes need to be served (by npm start or any static web server). Opening index.html straight from disk doesn't work, because the game rules are shared ES modules and browsers don't load modules from file://.

Tests

npm test

Uses Node's built-in test runner (no extra dependencies). test/rules.test.js covers the rules: roll resolution and ties, boss tiers and HP from tactics, achievement and tactic rally thresholds, threat ballots, and bag size for different party sizes. test/engine.test.js covers whole flows: achievement and tactic rallies, merges, secret ballots, pull order and tiers, preparation and Engage, HP built from the plan (and following it mid-fight), the facilitator's rarity override, Tactical Victory, enrage timers, who counts towards bag size, bags shrinking below what someone holds, End Raid and the read-only room, the Raid Summary's totals and ordering, Looking for Group and the Group Found countdown, raid names and dates, and migrating old saved rooms.

Online mode

The lobby puts joining first: most people arrive with a code or a link.

1. One person opens Lead a new raid, optionally fills in the Raid details, chooses whether to Save this room (see below) and clicks Create Room. They become the facilitator (host) and get a 4-character room code. The raid details are:

   • Raid name (up to 60 characters), e.g. "Sprint 42 Retro". Left blank, the raid is called "Raid" plus the room code, e.g. "Raid XAB9".
   • Retro date, which starts as today (in the browser's time zone). Today resets it, and it's written out UK style under the box, e.g. "Mon 2 Nov 2026". Clear it to have no date.

   The name and date show in the header, on the Looking for Group page, on Group Found, on the Raid Summary and in the Loot Ledger. The facilitator can change both at any time with Edit raid details in the character menu; everyone sees the change straight away. They lock when the raid ends.

2. The facilitator clicks Copy invite (next to the room code in the top bar) and shares the link. The link looks like http://192.168.1.42:3000/?room=ABCD: opening it joins that room straight away. If the room no longer exists, the lobby opens with the code filled in and says so.

3. Everyone else opens the link, or types the code under Join your party and clicks Enter World. The code box ignores anything that isn't a letter or digit, so pasting "ab-cd" or the whole invite link works too. Then they create a character: a character name, their real name (who's accountable for loot they win), then a faction, a race from that faction and a class that race can be.

4. Everyone then lands in Looking for Group, a holding page that shows the party live as people join: each hero's race, class, faction, real name and whether they're Ready (connected), Away, a Proxy or an Open slot. The facilitator also gets a Copy invite link button there. Nothing can be posted yet: no achievements, no Mob List topics. Only the facilitator can leave LFG, with Start the Raid.

5. Start the Raid shows Group Found on everyone's screen at once: the party's portraits, the route ahead (Achievements › Scout › Threat › Bosses › Summary) and a 5-second countdown. When it runs out, Achievements opens for everyone. The facilitator can Enter Now to skip the rest of it, or Wait for More to go back to the LFG queue; players see "The host is opening the instance." Anyone who joins or reconnects mid-countdown sees it with the time that's left. The room stays in LFG until the countdown ends, so nothing can be posted during it. Anyone joining after that goes straight into the current phase.

6. The facilitator moves the session through its phases with Back / Next in the row under the phase tracker (with the optional phase timer). Everyone sees the current phase.

How to play in the lobby, and in the character menu, gives a short overview of the phases.

The header

Once you're in a room, the header is a slim bar with a phase tracker under it:

• Raid — the raid name (cut short with "…" when it's long; hover for all of it) over "date · Room CODE", plus Copy invite for the facilitator, which briefly reads "Link copied". On phones only the name and code show.
• Status — Connected / Connecting… / Disconnected (it reconnects by itself), and Saved / Not saved. Select the save status for what it means.
• Tools — Mob List (after LFG and Achievements), Party (facilitator) and Loot Ledger.
• Your character — your avatar, name and "Real name · Race Class" (plus "Facilitator" for the host). It opens a menu with Loot Table (facilitator), Edit my character, Edit raid details (facilitator), Sound effects (see below), How to play and Leave group. Edit my character reopens the character screen, prefilled; your loot stays with you.
• Phase tracker — LFG › Achievements › Scout › Threat › Bosses › Summary, with done phases ticked, the current one outlined, and a one-line hint for what to do now.

On phones the bar collapses to the swords, the raid name and room code (with an icon-only copy button), your avatar and a Menu button that holds everything else, and the tracker shows "Phase n of N" with a progress bar.

Sound effects

Four short sounds mark the big moments, on every screen in the room:

Moment	Sound
The host starts the raid (Group Found)	InviteAccept.ogg
An achievement is posted, or rallies raise it to a new rarity	Achievement.ogg
A boss is slain	LevelUp.ogg
The raid ends	QuestComplete.ogg

Each achievement plays once when it's posted and once for each rarity it reaches through rallies; merges, and rallying back after an un-rally, are silent. Nobody hears sounds for things that happened before they arrived. Everything a sound marks also shows as a toast. Sound effects in the character menu turns them off (and stops one that's playing); the choice is kept in that browser. Single-screen mode has the same sounds, apart from Group Found.

Saved and unsaved rooms

When creating a room, the facilitator chooses whether to save it. The default is not to save.

• Unsaved rooms live in the server's memory only. Nothing is written to disk, and the room is gone if the server restarts.
• Saved rooms are written to server/data/rooms.json (debounced on every change) and reload after a restart. Everyone rejoins with the same code and reclaims their character; the first person back becomes the facilitator.

The header shows Saved or Not saved. Abandoned rooms (empty for 24 hours) are pruned either way.

Rooms and single-screen sessions saved by older versions load as they were and are brought up to date: characters of the removed High Order and Windshaper races move to the first race of their faction that can be their class, and bosses, tactics and phases saved before preparation, rallies or Looking for Group existed carry on where they left off.

Playing with remote teammates

The server listens on your LAN, so people on the same network can use your machine's IP (e.g. http://192.168.1.42:3000/). For remote folks, expose it with a tunnel such as npx ngrok http 3000; the client switches to wss automatically over HTTPS. Invite links use whatever address the facilitator opened the page with, so open it by the address your team will use (your LAN IP or the tunnel URL), not localhost.

Browsers only allow one-click copying on HTTPS or localhost. On a plain-HTTP LAN address, Copy invite link falls back to an older copy method, and if that's blocked too it shows the link selected so you can copy it by hand.

The server only serves the client files (the pages, scripts, styles, fonts and shared/). Saved rooms, the server code and everything else in the repo stay private.

Managing players

The Party dialog (facilitator only) can add a proxy slot for someone who isn't online, Kick a player (their slot stays open to reclaim, and stops counting towards bag size), Make host to hand over the facilitator role, or remove a slot. If the facilitator closes their tab, the next connected person is promoted. The host has a crown on their panel, and your own character has a star.

If you drop out (a closed tab, a refresh, a flaky connection), your panel shows Away and you keep your place in the party. The character screen lists characters nobody is playing under Returning? Reclaim your character; click yours to carry on with your loot intact. Leave group gives your slot up instead.

Local mode

Local mode runs the same page and the same game engine in the browser, for a team around one screen. The header reads Single screen where the room code would be, and the character button shows whoever the screen is acting as. Its menu lists everyone at the table: pick a name to act as them (to post achievements, rally and vote), or Add a party member. Edit my character edits whoever you're acting as.

• Threat ballots stay private by passing the screen around: each person selects their name, opens their ballot, votes, then hides it again.
• There's no lobby, so the raid name and date are set from Edit raid details in the character menu. Unnamed, the raid is a "Single-screen raid".
• There's no Looking for Group phase: the session opens straight on Achievements, and the tracker starts there.
• Need / Greed / Pass buttons appear on every party panel.
• There are no tactic rallies (nobody else is at their own screen to rally), so whoever proposes a tactic picks its rarity instead.
• The session lives in sessionStorage by default, so it's cleared when the tab closes. Tick Keep after the tab closes (in the character menu) to keep it in localStorage instead; the header then reads Kept in this browser rather than This tab only. Disband group wipes it.

1. Achievements

Anyone can post an achievement (a short title and an optional detail). It appears on everyone's board and fires an Achievement Earned toast.

• Exact duplicate titles are refused. Instead of duplicating, Rally behind someone else's achievement. You can't rally your own, and you can un-rally while the phase is open.
• Rallies raise an achievement's rarity. It starts at Rare, becomes Epic when 40% of the other party members have rallied, and Legendary at 75%. Rarity drops again if people un-rally. When an achievement upgrades, everyone gets an "Achievement upgraded to Epic!" toast.
• The board never shows rally counts or who rallied, only the rarity. The Loot Ledger lists who rallied.
• The facilitator can merge near-duplicates: posters and ralliers combine and rarity is recalculated.

2. Scouting

Everyone adds topics (a name and an optional description) to the shared Mob List. The list updates live, and exact duplicates are refused. You can keep adding topics later from the Mob List button, but anything added after threat is revealed has no threat, so it isn't pulled automatically.

3. Threat Voting

Each player has 3 threat to spread across the topics, and can stack it all on one. Votes stay hidden (others only see that you've voted) until the facilitator clicks Reveal Threat, which shows each topic's total. The server rejects ballots that go over budget or name unknown topics. The facilitator can reopen voting, and moving on to Boss Encounters reveals threat automatically.

4. Boss encounters

Pull a Boss takes the topic with the highest threat first (ties are broken at random). Topics with no threat are skipped; the facilitator can still pull any topic by hand from the Mob List.

A boss's tier comes from its topic's share of the top threat, and sets how much of the party's plan it takes to beat it:

Tier	Share of top threat	HP is this much of the plan	Tactics needed to engage
Normal	under 30% (or no threat)	50%	1
Elite	30% or more	65%	2
Raid Boss	75% or more	80%	3

The top-threat topic is always a Raid Boss.

Preparation, then Engage

A freshly pulled boss is in preparation. Its HP doesn't exist yet: the health bar reads ??? HP, and nothing can be dropped. The party proposes tactics and rallies behind the best ones, while the boss card counts them ("4 tactics proposed · needs 3 to engage").

When the plan is ready, the facilitator clicks Engage (disabled, with "Needs 2 more proposed tactics", until the tier's minimum is reached). That sets the boss's HP from the plan:

HP = the tier's percentage × the damage of every proposed tactic, rounded up.

For example, an Elite with three Uncommon tactics has ⌈150 × 0.65⌉ = 98 HP, so owning two of them kills it. A Raid Boss with five Uncommon tactics has ⌈250 × 0.8⌉ = 200 HP: owning four kills it.

The server works HP out and never sends it to anyone before Engage. The enrage timer and Tactical Victory are only available once the boss is engaged.

The fight

1. Anyone proposes tactics (a name and an optional detail). They join the boss's tactics, starting at Common.

2. The rest of the party rallies behind the tactics they back, the same way as achievements: you can't rally your own, and you can un-rally. Rarity rises with the share of the other party members who rallied:

   Share rallied	20%	40%	60%	80%
   Rarity	Uncommon	Rare	Epic	Legendary

   The board shows only the rarity, never how many rallied or who. In small parties some rarities get skipped: with 3 others, one rally is 33% (Uncommon), two are 67% (Epic) and three are Legendary.

3. The facilitator checks each tactic's rarity before dropping it, and can override it. That's the only way a tactic becomes Poor. An override sticks even if more people rally, until the facilitator picks Rallies decide again. The log and ledger record what rallies had made it ("Rare (changed from Uncommon)").

4. Drop puts a tactic on the table, which locks its rarity, and everyone picks Need / Greed / Pass. Roll & Resolve rolls and reveals. Tactics someone owns damage the boss; tactics everyone passes on deal no damage.

Damage

Every owned tactic deals 40 damage plus a small bonus for its rarity (passed-over tactics deal none):

Rarity	Poor	Common	Uncommon	Rare	Epic	Legendary
Bonus	+0	+5	+10	+20	+30	+50
Damage	40	45	50	60	70	90

Because HP is built from the same damage numbers, rarity is neutral to winning: raising a tactic's rarity raises the boss's HP by the tier's share of the extra damage. What matters is owning enough of the plan: about half of it for a Normal boss, two thirds for an Elite and four fifths for a Raid Boss. So rarity can stay an honest measure of priority.

The plan keeps counting after Engage

Once engaged, HP follows the plan:

• A tactic proposed mid-fight adds the tier's share of its damage to both HP and max HP (a Common tactic adds ⌈45 × 0.8⌉ = 36 to a Raid Boss).
• A rarity change to a tactic that hasn't been dropped (rallies or the facilitator's override) adds or takes away the share of the difference.
• A backlog item that isn't one of this boss's tactics adds its share when it's dropped, so every drop is accounted for.

None of these can kill the boss on their own; that takes owned tactics.

How an encounter ends

• Slain — its HP reaches zero.
• Tactical Victory — the facilitator declares it when the room agrees the problem is handled, even though the boss isn't fully beaten (not available mid-vote). It's a soft win, with its own "Tactical Victory!" toast for everyone. The facilitator can add a short optional note, e.g. "Covered by the CI rewrite", which appears on the Raid Summary and in the ledger along with the HP the boss had left.
• Enraged — an optional enrage timer runs out. If a vote is in progress, the boss enrages once that drop is resolved, so no votes are lost.
• Abandoned — the raid was ended (End Raid) while the boss was still being fought or prepared. One abandoned in preparation shows "HP never set".

Then Clear Stage or pull the next boss. The optional loot table is a backlog you can drop items from with Drop from Backlog / Pick from Backlog; items someone already owns aren't offered again.

Loot rules (Need / Greed / Pass)

• If anyone Needs, only Needers roll 1–100; highest wins.
• If nobody Needs, Greeders roll instead.
• If everyone passes, the item is recorded as passed over (no owner, not a task).
• Ties on the top roll re-roll only the tied players.
• Bags limit how many open tasks each player can own (see below). With full bags you can only Pass, and anyone full at resolve time counts as passing. Ticking a task done frees its slot.

Bag size

The team shares a budget of 10 actions, split across the party, so nobody walks away with an impossible pile:

Bag size = ceil(10 ÷ party size), but never less than 3.

Party size	1	2	3	4 or more
Bag size	10	5	4	3

From four players up, the minimum of 3 means the bags add up to more than 10.

Party size counts every slot someone holds, plus proxy slots the facilitator added for people who aren't online. That includes the facilitator when they have a character. A player whose connection drops still counts (their panel shows Away) until they click Leave group or the facilitator kicks or removes them. Open slots don't count. In local mode, everyone at the table counts.

Bag size is recalculated whenever someone joins, leaves or is removed. Every panel shows it as Bags n/x, and everyone gets a "Bag size changed" toast (except during Looking for Group, where it would fire on every join).

If bags shrink below what someone already holds, nothing is taken away. Their panel shows Bags 5/3 — over the limit, with the extra bags outlined, and they can't Need or Greed until they've completed enough tasks to get back under the limit.

Timers

The facilitator can set an optional phase timer (any phase) and a per-boss enrage timer. Both are off by default and can be paused, extended (+1 or +5 minutes) or cleared at any time. A phase timer running out shows "Time's up" but doesn't close the phase.

End Raid and the Raid Summary

The facilitator ends the session with End Raid, next to Back / Next (it asks to confirm first, and waits for any open Need / Greed / Pass vote to be resolved). Everyone's screen switches to the Raid Summary at once. A boss still being fought is marked Abandoned.

After End Raid the room is read-only: no new achievements, rallies, topics, threat, tactics, drops or rolls, and tasks can't be ticked off. Anyone can still view the summary, join late to see it, and export the Loot Ledger. If End Raid was clicked by mistake, the facilitator can Reopen Raid from the summary.

The Raid Summary is headed with the raid name, then the date written out in full ("Monday 2 November 2026"), the number of heroes and the number of bosses pulled. It shows:

1. Party totals — bosses slain, tactical victories, tactics owned, achievements earned and the gold value of all owned loot. These are team totals only.
2. Encounters — every topic with its outcome (Slain, Tactical Victory, Enraged, Abandoned or Not pulled), the HP left if it wasn't slain, any Tactical Victory note, and its tactics with their rarity and owner (or "Passed over" / "Never dropped").
3. Achievements — Legendary first, with who posted and who rallied. Who rallied is only revealed here, once the raid has ended.
4. Character sheets — one per party member: character name, race and class, real name, the tactics they own and the achievements they posted or rallied behind.
5. Export Loot Ledger — the same export as the header's Loot Ledger button.

It's deliberately not a leaderboard: no MVPs, rankings, scores or "most" anything, and no per-player gold or counts. Character sheets are sorted alphabetically by real name. Who rallied behind a tactic stays private (it's only in the Loot Ledger).

In an unsaved room the summary carries a note, next to the export button, that it disappears when the room closes. In local mode the note says it disappears when the tab closes, unless Keep after the tab closes is ticked. Saved rooms stay ended (and keep their summary) across a server restart.

Loot Ledger

Loot Ledger opens a markdown action plan to copy or download. It uses plain language so it reads clearly outside the retro: tactics are listed as actions.

It's headed with the raid name, with the date and room on the line below:

# Sprint 42 Retro

Mon 2 Nov 2026 · Room XAB9

The download is named from both, e.g. sprint-42-retro-2026-11-02.md (without a date, just sprint-42-retro.md).

1. Achievements — Legendary first, with who posted and who rallied.
2. Each boss — tier, HP, threat and status with its action count (e.g. "Slain, 3 of 4 actions open" or "Tactical Victory (60 of 250 HP left), 1 of 2 actions open"), then each action as a checklist item (ticked when done) with its rarity (and any rarity override), owner and who rallied. Any Tactical Victory note is shown under the boss.
3. Not pulled — topics that were raised but never fought, with their threat and who raised them.
4. Other looted items — backlog items someone owns that weren't one of a boss's tactics.

Tuning

All the game rules live in shared/rules.js, used by the server, the room engine and the browser:

Constant	Default	What it does
THREAT_PER_PLAYER	3	Threat each player can spend
BOSS_TIERS	see above	Per tier: share of top threat (minShare), HP as a share of the plan's damage (hpPct) and tactics needed to engage (minTactics)
TACTIC_BASE_DAMAGE	40	Damage every owned tactic deals
RARITY_BONUS	+0 to +50	Extra damage by rarity (TACTIC_DAMAGE is base + bonus)
RALLY_EPIC, RALLY_LEGENDARY	0.4, 0.75	Share of other members needed to upgrade an achievement
TACTIC_RALLY_UNCOMMON … TACTIC_RALLY_LEGENDARY	0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8	Share of other members needed to upgrade a tactic
TEAM_ACTION_BUDGET	10	Open tasks shared across the party; bag size = budget ÷ party size, rounded up
MIN_BAG_SLOTS	3	Smallest bag size, however big the party
RAID_START_SECONDS	5	Length of the Group Found countdown
RACE_CLASSES, FACTION	WoW: Forever	Legal race/class combinations
LIMITS		Maximum lengths for names (including the raid name), titles, descriptions and Tactical Victory notes

Races & classes (WoW: Forever)

Character creation follows the WoW: Forever race/class matrix: the eight Classic races, including Forever's six new combos (Human Hunter, Dwarf Shaman, Gnome Priest, Orc Mage, Troll Warlock, Undead Paladin). The engine rejects illegal combinations, so a tampered client can't create, say, a Night Elf Mage.

Faction	Race	Classes
Alliance	Human	Warrior, Paladin, Hunter, Rogue, Priest, Mage, Warlock
Alliance	Dwarf	Warrior, Paladin, Hunter, Rogue, Priest, Shaman
Alliance	Night Elf	Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, Priest, Druid
Alliance	Gnome	Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Mage, Warlock
Horde	Orc	Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Mage
Horde	Tauren	Warrior, Hunter, Shaman, Druid
Horde	Troll	Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, Priest, Mage, Shaman, Warlock
Horde	Undead	Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Mage, Warlock, Paladin

Accessibility

The interface targets WCAG 2.2 AA:

• Rarity, faction and status are never shown by colour alone: there's always a text label, a letter or a distinct icon. Rare and Epic text is slightly lighter than WoW's own colours so it meets 4.5:1 on every surface.
• Toasts are read out by a polite live region and never move focus.
• Everything works from the keyboard, with a visible focus ring. Dialogs keep focus inside, close with Escape and return focus to what opened them (except Group Found, which closes itself; see below). Confirmations start on Cancel.
• Focus is kept when other people's actions update the screen.
• When the raid ends, focus moves to the Raid Summary heading (the screen it was on is gone). The summary uses a heading per section, boss and character, and shows status and rarity as text.
• Animations (toasts, the health bar, pulses) are switched off when the system asks for reduced motion.
• Phase and enrage timers can be paused or extended by the facilitator. The 5-second Group Found countdown can be skipped or cancelled by the facilitator; nobody can act during it, so nothing is lost when it ends.
• The lobby's controls are at least 44px tall, the room code has a visible label and hint, and connection status is written out, not just a coloured dot.
• The character menu, phone menu and save-status explanation are disclosures (not ARIA menus): Escape closes them and returns focus, clicking outside or tabbing away closes them. Header targets are at least 40px tall on desktop and 44px on phones. The phase tracker marks the current phase with aria-current="step" and says "done" / "current phase" in text.
• The header reflows without sideways scrolling at 320px wide, 400% zoom and 200% text. It's only sticky on screens big enough for it, and toasts and keyboard focus are kept clear of it.
• Text sizes are in rem, so the self-hosted fonts follow browser text-size settings; the layout holds at 200% text size and at 320px wide.
• The Looking for Group roster shows each player's status as text (Ready, Away, Proxy, Open), not just colour, and new arrivals are read out ("Ana joined the group."). The queue orb's pulse stops after under 5 seconds.
• Group Found is a modal dialog: focus moves into it and stays there, the page behind it is inert, and focus goes back where it was when it closes. It has no Escape, so it can't get out of step with the rest of the room: it closes when the countdown ends or the facilitator enters now or waits for more. Screen readers hear "Group found." when the countdown starts. Its glow stops within 5 seconds, and the glow and progress bar don't animate when the system asks for reduced motion.
• Sound effects never carry information on their own: each one comes with a toast. Some run longer than 3 seconds, so Sound effects in the character menu turns them off and stops one that's already playing.

Known gaps

These parts of the interface don't fully meet WCAG 2.2 AA yet:

• Boss threat glow (2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide, Level A). While a boss is active, its card pulses with a glow that repeats with no time limit. It stops only when the encounter ends, or when the system asks for reduced motion. There is no on-page control to pause it.

The screens have been checked with axe-core at desktop and phone widths, but not yet with a screen reader (VoiceOver, NVDA or JAWS), so issues only that kind of testing finds may remain.

Files

• net.html, net-client.js — the client UI, for both modes
• local-mode.js — runs the engine in the browser for local mode
• index.html — opens local mode
• shared/rules.js — game rules and constants
• shared/engine.js — the room engine: every state change, per-viewer views and the Loot Ledger
• shared/*.ogg — the sound effects
• server/server.js — Express + ws server: connections, host role, slot claims, saving rooms and timers
• server/data/rooms.json — saved rooms (auto-created, git-ignored)
• icons.js — line-art icons
• styles.css — shared styling
• fonts/ — self-hosted Cinzel and Marcellus web fonts
• test/ — unit tests (npm test)