Tuesday, May 19, 2020

How I Roll - Session Notes

Session notes. The oh-so-necessary drudge work of taking session notes. It's the only way to remember who did what when where and why. And what is going to happen to them because they did this other thing.

I feel it's necessary as a GM to take session notes in sufficient detail that I can read back to get the flavor of what was going on as well as the facts. That's me. My games tend to be an equal mix of role play and combat. If yours lean more towards combat you can have fewer notes. Probably.

In my past games I've had a spiral bound notebook with notes in my rather unique handwriting that I would have to decipher later, paging through to try to remember when things happened. It worked well enough and I could keep up the with the game for the most part. I'm old school that way as I don't allow electronics at my table.

Honestly I don't know that I could GM and write notes on a laptop. The clicky clicky would be a huge distraction to me and the players. At least that's my opinion.

Mind you, these are my notes. They're never meant for the players. That's a different blog post.

The reason this post came into being is my newer way of taking notes. I use a Rocketbook (link goes to an unaffiliated Amazon product) which was recommended by some of the GMs I follow on Twitter. It gives me the best of both worlds - writing by hand but having the notes electronically.

OK. This isn't me plugging the product. I'm describing how it works so I can move past that into more about session notes.

A Rocketbook is a spiral bound notebook with plastic pages. You write using a particular kind of ballpoint pen that kind of works like a whiteboard marker. You can erase with the end of the pen or with a bit of water on a paper towel. Then when you're done you use the app to take pictures of the pages and send them to online storage. I use Google Drive because it saves the pages as a single PDF and it does an OCR transcription that isn't bad. In theory this is the best of both worlds.

I'm also addicted to notecards so I take pictures of those when I hand loot to players. I take pictures of the battle mat and maps drawn on it.

Since my session notes are made into a document via OCR I have to go back over them and not quite rewrite them but clean them up. Sometimes heavily. I end up with notes in my format and I can embed the pictures into the notes for the session, which is a great thing for me. It really helps me know what was given out and what it does. I also don't have to keep a physical copy of the card for myself since it has the magic effects on it.

I do wonder how much time I save, if any, by using this nifty new toy. I still have a printed copy of the notes in a folder for fast reference. I haven't tried searching the documents as a whole for words. I honestly don't know if a regular notebook and typing up the notes would save me any time over the technology toy.

I do know that transcribing them helps me with getting the flow of the game session in writing. I use these notes to make the campaign posts here. If I'm caught up I do both at once - clean up the notes and write the next chapter of the story. If I'm not caught up I get the notes transcribed because I need the space to write.

I don't know how I'll handle session notes when using Fantasy Grounds. I'll have to play with that in the sample game. I might be tapping away during game or writing it down and typing it in later. That's not really what this post is about.

Now that I'm past all that let's talk about what's in my notes. Don't tell my players.

I try to get a lot of information into as few sentences as possible. I summarize things. I jot down interesting turns of phrase. Notable interactions between players and with NPCs are documented. Anything that annoys me gets documented. Interesting future plot points they bring up as part of trying to figure out what's going on very much get documented. For me it's the playbook of the game. What happened, who did it, who didn't pick up on stuff, who went off into the weeds, who was on the mark, and what happened around them. It's actually a lot of information.

Having said that my notes are generally at most 4 typed pages in a bullet point format. I'm not writing narrative when I take these notes. I'm getting the high points and things I want to remember for later. The players will never read them.

Session notes are also good for doing a retrospective about where things went off the rails. And things do go off the rails. By having decent notes you can see what led up to the change and either get it back where it should be going or find out why it went the way it did. Or both. Without a decent set of notes you can't go back and learn from the mistakes that were made. You also can't snicker over some particularly fun piece of gaming that happened. Without notes you're stuck if a player insists something happened and you don't remember it that way.

Yes. These are also meant to keep the players honest. If you're not tracking the loot you give out then how can you be sure where they got that magic item? Or how many coins they got? Or who struck the final blow in a combat? All these are things that can't be left to memory. Well. Maybe the bandit thing but not if you're going to hang an story on the bandit's sibling tracking them down.

You can't write down everything. You could record the session but then you're in an even worse place for trying to find specific events. There's a signal to noise ratio that each GM has to find for themselves. Some don't care about the nitty gritty and want to know the big things. Some want every detail (not recommended). Most seem to fall somewhere in the middle of wanting to know enough that they can figure out what they had planned before the players screwed it all up. I mean, wanting to know how the group handled encounters and interactions.

Notes are also where you keep track of NPCs, which are yet another blog post in the future. But at least a precis of them - name, race, occupation, where they were - can be helpful along with the names of shops and inns. It's amazing how you can work them back into the narrative and it's also amazing how quickly the players pick up on you reusing names.

If you're running pure modules then you probably don't need very detailed notes. If you're running a long term game with a bunch of stuff strung together then you probably need a decent set of notes. It's a matter of what you feel you need as the GM to keep the game flowing.

No comments:

Post a Comment