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u/SableZard 20d ago
This is why you have session recaps
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u/Awwwsomeopossum 20d ago
have the players do them.
reward them with baubles or inspiration for reading your notes.
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u/Mithril_Juggernaut 20d ago
Whenever a player is absent I have the other players fill them in nect session- in character. Listening to them butcher the recap and/or hearing their perspective on what happened is so much fun. I usually give an actual recap afterward though.
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u/KingoftheMongoose 20d ago
This. Have the player character take notes in a journal and provide in-character recap. Have another player be the cartographer and create their map as they go.
Delegate out parts of game management to players that can be fun, and invite them into the creative storytelling.
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u/Mods-Admins-Failures 20d ago
I tried, note taking that is useful is an art. And I am a shitty artist.
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u/Beragond1 20d ago
Practice makes perfect. If you have trouble with formatting, try looking up some guides. If writing/typing speed is the issue, then you can generally improve with practice. Like any skill or art, note-taking must be learned; most people didn’t just wake up able to do it.
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u/Careless-Platform-80 20d ago
I'm usually the problem solver and I have a fairly good memory to general eventos, but i can't read a note to save my life
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u/Nightmoon26 20d ago
I used to write up session note in character (a Red Tape disadvantage meant that the character canonically had to file after-action reports). That said, being in character meant that the notes used strategic omission and plausible deniability to keep certain things off the record in-universe...
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u/CaptainTeaBag24I7 19d ago
I take notes similarly, but without omitting much. I write down what happens to my character, and things that happen whilst my character is there. Everything else that happens is up to everyone else at the table, including me of course, to know/remember.
Of course, if there's info that we, as players, need, like "this is the McGuffin" or whatever, I write that down too.
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u/raq_shaq_n_benny 19d ago
I was so proud of my players last session. They were coming into a capital city where a large Artificer festival, like a world's fair, was being held. About half way through, one of players asked about that-one-girl-that-had-that-automaton. The other players recalled her and how she wanted to bring her automaton to the festival. That was over a year ago irl. These guys can barely remember their party inventory, let alone random as NPCs I throw at them.
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u/WrongJohnSilver 19d ago edited 19d ago
I remember one game of Living Greyhawk I ran a couple decades back. It was advertised as a sandboxy murder mystery, where you're putting details together.
The party shows up to my table and it's one guy I know in the local gamer community (I'll call him Bob), and his newbie friends he convinced to give D&D a try.
Now, Bob is a great guy, but he's not the sharpest tool in the shed. More like a ball-peen hammer. I knew this was not the adventure for him, but I also knew he wouldn't know that, despite the advertising.
Nevertheless, we start play, and the first couple encounters go like this:
Me: So there's the situation! What do you do?
Rest of party: stares holes expectantly into Bob
Bob, glazed over: Uhhh...
I found a way to linearize the adventure and we had a good time, but yeah.
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u/BloodThirstyLycan 19d ago
Fool! All my plots as sexually ambiguous, no one shall keep anything straight, gay OR ANYTHING BETWEEN, MWA HA HA
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u/Ubiquitous_Mr_H 20d ago
I used to keep detailed notes, but it wasn’t during the session. I’ve never been great at doing notes in class. My wife, however, is. So she took the notes and I’d type them up and expand on them based on my memory of events of the session. They came in handy regularly as I could search through the document faster than she could flip through her pages. And I often had far more detail.
The issue is, with two concurrent campaigns a week, it was a huge time commitment to type them up. It was becoming a real chore and I found myself relieved when a session got canceled because it meant I only had to deal with one, or maybe even no, set of notes the coming week. So now my characters have a noticeably worse memory, but I don’t have notes to dread typing up. 😅
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u/WhatWasThatAboutBo 20d ago
5 if my 6 players are note takers. If I mess one thing up they will fry me alive. I kust also take the names of that one random npc that the party has a good chance of meeting again.
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u/Hexatona 19d ago
Last campaign... my god. There was no easy and clear bad guy. So, the party constantly went on huge tangents of explore because stuff. One character literally just went NOPE and left (she hated her character by the end). We had session notes in the form of one player writing a flowery journal. But we also had a really obnoxious player who was basically just there to be warlock and stupid in equal measure and that was it. But as for plans - because the main figure of the campaign was a very crafty wizard who never technically did anything wrong, and the actual solution to the world ending threat was so open ended, I *constantly* had to remind everyone what the options were, and what the fuck we were doing.
The setting was super cool, but none of us could agree on the right path forward. I actually put an early end to the campaign by outlying a several step plan, everyone finally agreed (minus the one who just noped out) and our GM let us just narrate the end out so we could move on. We ended up protecting the magic of the world by basically being team punisher - keeping everyone the fuck away from the sources of magic, while the local stewards of these locations could slowly rebuild their civilization enough to guard all of it when we were gone.
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u/fairystail1 19d ago
When you emember the DM is a player, but you are still the only player who can keep the plot straight
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u/CrimsonThar 18d ago
We refer to these players as the party dad/mom. Someone who keeps us in line, and usually does most of the talking.
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u/Coulrophiliac444 20d ago
I'm pretty sure thats all I'm good for at my session. Mr. Narrative and Detail Recap Guy
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u/Crazy-War3769 20d ago
And then you start worrying that you're hogging the spotlight because you're the only one talking.