Terminology

This page defines key terms used throughout Overseer and its documentation.

Session#

A session is your workspace in Overseer. It contains all your screens, tiles, and content.

Screen#

A screen is a canvas workspace within your session. You can have multiple screens to organize different aspects of your game.

Tile#

A tile is a rectangular region on your screen that displays content like images, PDFs, videos, or web content.

Group Tile#

A group tile is a tile that contains multiple child tiles with tabs, allowing you to switch between different content in the same space.

Extension#

An extension provides content for a tile. Plugin developers can build webview extensions (with SDK access) and iframe extensions (sandboxed). Overseer also includes built-in extensions for common content types like images, PDFs, and video.

Preset#

A preset is a premade GM screen layout — a complete session template with screens, tiles, extensions, backgrounds, and configuration that other GMs can load and start using immediately.

Plugin#

A plugin extends Overseer with additional extensions, themes, locales, presets, or datasets.

Dataset#

Structured data provided by a plugin for extensions to consume – monster stat blocks, spell lists, audio libraries, or remote API endpoints. A dataset is either static or dynamic.

Static dataset#

A dataset backed by a JSON array shipped with the plugin. Extensions can read, add, edit, and delete records; user edits are stored separately from the plugin directory and override bundled records on ID collision.

Dynamic dataset#

A dataset backed by named URL templates that resolve to remote API calls. Extensions receive the raw JSON response – no normalization or caching.

Dataset ID#

The @pluginId:localId identifier used to reference a dataset (for example, @me/dnd5e-srd:monsters). The plugin loader constructs dataset IDs, so a plugin cannot claim a dataset ID outside its own namespace.