Terms

What you are agreeing to

Scout records tabletop sessions. These terms say what we undertake to do with that recording, what we do not promise, and how to end the arrangement.

Version 1. Scout is a prototype and is not for sale. It runs for a small number of tables who know they are testing it. These terms describe that arrangement honestly rather than describing a finished product, and they will be replaced before Scout is offered generally. Every consent Scout records is stamped with the version of these terms in force at the time, so a change never reaches back and alters what somebody agreed to.

Who you are dealing with

Scout is built and operated by Matt Cockayne, trading as phpboyscout. There is no company between you and us, and no support desk. You are dealing with a person.

What Scout does

Scout joins a voice channel when invited, records the session, and turns it into notes and a searchable record for the person running the game. It does not run the game, does not decide anything, and does not speak as anybody's character.

What it produces is a support for the person running the table, not a replacement for them. If it is wrong, the person running the game is the one who notices and corrects it, which is the arrangement we intend rather than a shortcoming we tolerate.

Who can use it

You must be old enough to hold a Discord account under Discord's own terms, which is 13 in most places and older in some. If a table includes anyone below that age, Scout must not be used at that table. We have no way to verify this and are relying on the person who invites Scout to know their table.

Consent is per person, per session, and can be refused

Nobody is recorded without answering first, and a session does not begin until everybody present has. The three answers are described on the privacy page. You may answer differently on a different day; consent is not a setting somebody turns on once for a table.

One answer covers both what Scout hears and what it reads. You are asked once, and it applies to voice and to any channel the person running your game has added. If you asked to be excluded, that covers your messages as well, and you are not asked again.

Scout reads no channel unless somebody adds it, and no channel it could not already see. Adding a channel does not read what is already in it. Asking Scout to read a table's history is a separate, deliberate request, and what comes back is quarantined and largely deleted before any of it is used. The privacy page says how, and that handling is stricter than anything applied to a live session.

Withdrawing is always available and never has to be explained. Scout tells the person running the game that the state has changed. It does not announce your departure to the table, and it does not say why, because it cannot know why and a reason is yours to give or keep.

What is yours

Your campaign is yours. The recordings, the transcripts, the notes Scout builds from them and everything your table creates remain your material and your table's. We claim no ownership of it and no right to publish it.

We undertake two things about that:

• You can take it with you. A table can export everything Scout holds for it, in open formats, as a record a person can actually read rather than a data dump that technically satisfies the request.
• We do not train general models on your sessions, and we do not sell your material or use it to advertise to you.

We use it only to provide the service to the table that produced it: transcription, building that table's own record, and diagnosing faults when something goes wrong.

What we ask of you

• Do not use Scout to record people who have not agreed. The consent prompt exists to make that difficult, and defeating it is a misuse of the service rather than a clever workaround.
• Do not use Scout to break the law or Discord's terms, or to harm anyone.
• Tell us if something goes wrong. While Scout is a prototype this matters more than usual, and it is most of what we are asking in exchange.

What we do not promise

Said plainly, because a prototype dressed as a product is the failure this section exists to prevent.

• Scout may be unavailable, and may fail mid-session. There is no uptime commitment and no support obligation.
• Recordings may be lost. We build carefully and we do not guarantee it. If a session matters to you, do not rely on Scout as its only record.
• Transcription is imperfect. It mishears names, invented words and crosstalk, which at a tabletop table is most of the interesting vocabulary.
• Features will change or disappear. That is what a prototype is.
• Scout is provided as it is, without warranty. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from using it. Nothing here removes rights you have that cannot be removed by agreement, and if you are a consumer you keep your statutory rights.

Ending it

Remove Scout from your server whenever you like; no notice and no reason needed. Deletion of what it holds is covered on the privacy page and is a separate request, because removing the bot stops it recording and does not by itself erase what it already has.

We may end the arrangement too, and while Scout is a prototype we may end it for any reason including simply stopping the project. If that happens we will give notice and a chance to export rather than switching it off.

Changes to these terms

These terms carry a version. When they change, the new version applies to consent given after it, and records already made keep the version they were made under. Material changes will be notified to the person who invited Scout rather than being published quietly and dated.

Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts there have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of your local law.

Contact

Questions about these terms, and anything that seems wrong in them, go to the address on the front page.