Session Summary
You know how fantasy novels tend to come with a glossary of proper nouns in back? There’s a reason for that. As it turns out, when the name of the game is simulating an entire world, you’re going to have a shitload of people and places to remember. And unless the ghost of Robert Jordan decides to sit in on your campaign, you’re not getting a glossary for free. Someone is going to have to write that mess down.
Last time I sat down as a 5e player, I decided to take up the burden. I had my system all planned out. PCs listed at the top, NPCs broken down by location, a party loot table, bullet points detailing individual sessions by date, and the whole enchilada shared on Google Docs.
“This is going to be great, guys! You all have editing rights, so we can just keep it updated as we go. All of our notes in one easy-to-use place!”
This went about as well as you’d expect. By session three or so, my notes were still the only notes. People had lost the link, forgotten it was there, or defaulted to asking the DM, “Who was that one guy at the place again? You know, the one with the accent.”
Learning from my mistakes, I decided to 86 the cooperative angle. Instead, I would take the bull by the horns and write full narrative summaries. So with no expectations of outside aid, I faithfully sat down with my trusty word processor. And much to my surprise, the system worked! I knocked out each and every summary after each and every session, and posted them to the group’s Facebook page like clockwork. At last count, the combined “campaign session summaries” doc was sitting in the neighborhood of 72,507 words. It’s probably double that by now. And if that sounds like a lot of work to you, then you’re not alone in that opinion. (I’m so tired, guys. So very, very tired.)
Yes, my “solution” worked, but it takes a lot of time and dedication to pull it off. I’m beginning to suspect that “just the highlights” summaries would be a better bet, but I’ve come this far with the long-form narrative summaries. Stubborn pride refuses to relinquish its grip!
Anywho, those are my latest efforts at solving the session summary problem. What about the rest of you guys? How do you go about organizing your notes? How do you handle recapping at the beginning of sessions? Let’s hear how your group does it down in the comments!
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My regular gaming group alternates D&D 3.5 and Warhammer FRP2 every few weeks, and I tend to take very few notes, to the point where I forget to write down XP awards… All of my characters are very outclassed by the rest of the party.
Huh. Might I suggest taking more notes?
For us we assign it as one of the “player duties” (party diary, keeping track of the loot list, map-making, pizza ordering, etc), and leave it to one (or more) players to handle. Originally we intended to rotate these tasks, but certain tasks tend to gravitate towards certain players (being an Architect, when I am playing, I tend to end up the map-maker as my maps tend to come out scarily-accurate).
One of our players usually ends up with diary duty since he is very good at keeping track of small details, and usually writes in-character with often humorous results. In my WFRP campaign he was playing a very self-absorbed dwarf warrior, and we found the events described in the party diary tended to overplay his role, and downplay or often forget (particularly in the case of the Elf) the other party members contributions!
I always dig the “in character” summaries. I’ve just started doing that for a Mordheim campaign, and it’s been amusing to channel all the randomness of a skirmish game through the eyes of one particular mook.
In my current campaign as a GM I make and hand out pieces of paper with an image and name + title where appropriate for major NPCs, and ask one of the players to verbally give a resume of what happened last time each session.
In addition since it’s a nation-building game we also has a shared dropbox with links to an excel “character”-sheet for the players kingdom and the map they have explored/claimed.
As a player I write a few sparse notes to myself to help remember and otherwise rely on my strong memory and on giving verbal resumes of last session when we meet (sometimes other people do this instead).
In my community using this website called Obsidian Portal is a popular solution in general, through that is more often used for lists of NPC’s with pictures than for actual session notes, through one can make those.
I’ve tried to have players recap in the past, but the trouble I run into is one of tone. Session summaries can be a good tool to make the coming session seem tragic, lighthearted, grim, or comic. If you give that power over to the players, they wind up pushing the tone of the session in odd and sometimes inappropriate directions.
That is true, one advantage to letting the players do it on the other hand is that you as the GM get a chance to notice which things the players noticed in particular, and therefore if you need to reinforce the foreshadowing of, or something that could unexpectedly to you be since it was enjoyed.
Which advantage you prefer is a matter of taste and of the campaign, in certain very sandboxy or play-to-find-out campaigns player control over the tone might even be a desirable element rather than a negative.
Well, as a mostly GM, I tend to be the only one taking notes when I’m on the player side of the screen as well. Still have a set of notes from several games that occasionally people will run across at my house and go “Wow, you still have all this written down?” Generally, this works well with my innately good memory and my tendency to gravitate toward builds with high mental stats to result in my character being the general know-it-all.
In my current Changeling campaign, I’m fixing the problem with handouts combined with my general tendency to do session recaps at the beginning of the game. My most investigative player has laughed as I keep handing him stuff; though it’s also his first time playing with me. But for that game, everyone started with a name, Mantle/Rank, and Description of everyone in their Court (faction), and a separate handout that had details about the Freehold (larger society the factions function in) in general. I have found that while it was probably expensive in DM time spent making handout sheets and printer ink, there is a 300% increase in players remembering NPC names and personality traits.
I hope your investigative player has taken the opportunity to buy some yarn and a bulletin board:
https://fairiesexist.files.wordpress.com/1994/07/conspiracyboard.jpg
Naw dawg. This entire comic is based on the premise that we have similar gaming experiences based off of common tropes. That mess is the basis of our collective culture. You’d better believe that my group references “Beautiful Mind math” and conspiracy boards.
I for one has all my notes in that tasty brain of mine. Now the hard copies are burned at campaign’s end. Now about the content of the notes, well, with tie we have taken a direct approach about names and locations. For example lets say the party goes to a castle to meet the count of the castle, that would appear as this: “The [Party’s name] has traveled to the castle with ruinous arches to meet the count with the sleeping eyes”. Very poetic, descriptive and that way we put less effort in the names. I am really glad this system likes the rest of the group because i really suck with names and most of the time i am charged with the lore and worldbuilding of the campaign and setting. Good system for a Fallen London Campaign 🙂
Do you mean to say that the character has no name other than “the count with the sleeping eyes?” I can’t imagine him as a child.
“Count With The Sleeping Eyes? You come down here this instant young man!”
Wait, if your example is when the Count With The Sleeping Eyes was young. How is that he already was a count? Wait, maybe Count is just his first name and he is usurping the throne? Good quest hook… For a campaign we made years ago 🙁
The characters have names, we just don’t use them. It’s not a that rare narrative tool 🙂
….Wait notes are actually supposed to be a thing?
I just have an idea of what happened last session and go by head for the past sessions. I do plan the next sessions and arc, but mostly to the “okay map map map need a map and I can deal with the rest.” Because roll20 maps my dude gotta fetch tokens, gotta create monsters and gotta create effects that will show my players the true meaning of mortality such as taking 2d10 damage and making a con save versus being poisoned and taking 1d6 damage each round after that. 😀
Creating your own world that you hope to publish one day or at least have a ton of notes that you can make host your game in is hard DX
I still have to write about the drow, the fauni, the commonlanders, the luthins, and all of the 13 forts, and the dead gods DX
….I got off track didnt I?
As for being a player, I know my adhd riddled brain will either forget where i put said notes in first place and i mostly just spent 20 or so minutes after session recalculating my char or just writing in the discord.
“Hey moony dont forget to reset spell slots”
So…here’s an example from a recent session. It’s excessive, and I know it’s excessive. I just can’t seem to break myself of the habit now.
SESSION SUMMARY 1/19/19 — 27 Gozran – 4 Desnus
“It Takes a Fucking Week!?”
Brendenford is growing up. Your small town has become a large town, and Tunskalan emerged from the dungeon long enough to meet the new recruits under his command.
“I didn’t believe it when the other lads said. I mean, I thought you was an ‘ogre of a man’ or some such. Metaphorical like.”
“March!” shouted Tunskalan. The recruits hastened to obey, only marginally put off by the sudden disappearance of the ogre as he was whisked away by the usual magic that has plagued the party for so long, teleporting into the dungeon.
Thus it was that the over sized fighter joined Akorian, Alodia, and Kiedelos in the mummy lab of Shakaran Titanslayer. The pseudodragon Phanbien, newly in Alodia’s employ, was there as well.
Not wishing to linger long with the stink of alkahest bomb / undead flesh, you pushed on and into the next chamber, and there discovered the following:
“At first, this would seem to be a mostly disused closet or storage space. The main decorations are abstract water stains on the walls, the remains of some woven grass tarp sits haphazardly on the floor, and several spots along the northern wall have been discolored by the smoke from small fires. Indeed, the only item that seems to have been put here purposely is a large statue of a hulking creature. Roughly humanoid in proportions, its body is chiseled from some unidentifiable black rock and it is dressed in ceremonial golden armor covered with exotic patterns and having a strange bird-like helmet that completely obscures the statue’s head.”
You were wary of the statue, and cast detect magic over it. There was no magic.
“Is it wearing armor, or is its armor plastered on?” asked Tunskalan.
The statue was wearing armor.
“Let’s move onto the next chamber,” you said. And so you did, opening a door in the southern wall while keeping a wary eye on the armored very-likely-not-a-statue.
“The only decoration or furnishing in this room is a weapons rack along the southern wall. The rest of the room is simply plain, unadorned stone slightly discolored with dark stains in some places and spider-web-thin cracks in others.”
Tunskalan went to examine the weapons rack. There were examples of all the common melee weapons (various blades, polearms, and non-edged weapons) as well as many of the exotic ones. None of them were magical, but to his soldier’s eye they looked like good steel. Deciding to take the most ornate piece (a quarterstaff of carved bone depicting leaping apes), you tried to decide what to do next.
“There are some unexplored doors to the south,” said Akorian. “If this is the Titanslayer’s room, then–”
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF SHAKARAN TITANSLAYER?”
The voice was deep and booming. It came from the room you’d just exited. Apparently the “statue” was every bit as alive as you suspected.
There was a good bit of back and forth, and Phanbien was nearly torn limb from limb when he admitted to serving Shakaran. But you managed to keep your heads and avoid the fight. This is what you learned:
“This ‘statue’ is an inevitable, and more specifically a marut–an extraplanar construct that exists solely to punish those who try to deny the natural order of life and death. More than 800 years ago, it was given a mission to find Shakaran and make him pay for his efforts to extend his life beyond the boundaries that a mortal frame was designed to function. The marut was sent directly to this room, since at the time Shakaran was spending nearly all his time here. However, the mage was not in any of the rooms, nor even in the Fourfold Keep. Indeed, the marut could not sense Shakaran’s presence anywhere in the region, or even in adjoining planes, so it simply stood against the wall and waited.”
When it heard you speak of the mage, the marut assumed that you might have some clue as to his whereabouts.
Promising to inform the creature if you learned anything more of Shakaran’s whereabouts, you returned once more to the weapon rack room, and there went over your options. Lissandera supposedly sealed her fellow mage’s body somewhere, so there had to be a secret door. You looked about, but found neither latch nor catch nor sliding panel. What Alodia found instead was far more esoteric. At first it seemed like any of the other cracks and discolorations on the floors and walls of the dojo. But while the other markings were the punishment created by Shakaran during over-enthusiastic sparring matches, these were mystical in nature. Alodia had discovered the physical manifestation of a long-sealed entrance to a pocket dimension! Assuming that Lissandera had trapped her colleague in that place, then you had a pretty good idea how to find him. Unfortunately, you would need to meet a DC 35 Spellcraft and a DC 35 Disable Device check in the same round to pull it off. You’d have to get Gimlet and come back in order to–
“WHAT ARE YOU GUYS TALKING ABOUT?” asked the inevitable from the other room.
When you explained the situation, it tromped through and examined the crack.
“I WILL DEPUTIZE YOU INTO THIS TASK.”
“Wat?”
The creature was already drawing a glowing rune in the air, all right angles and hard lines.
“IN THE NAME OF JUSTICE. IN THE NAME OF LAW. JOIN ME IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THIS THING.”
“Nooooo!” wailed Phanbien. “Shakaran was my friend. He would never turn lich. Please, do not hurt him!”
“If you master is alive, we will see him safe,” promised Alodia. “Besides, we aren’t even sure he’s in there.”
One by one you touched the glowing rune, and so were deputized into the service of the Inevitable.
Dealing With the Marut: 17,100 XP
You followed the gold-armored creature through a rent in space as it plane-shifted the lot of you into Lissandera’s pocket dimension. This eventuality brought with it a number of interesting implications: 1) you had no way out save through another plane shift; 2) none of you you could cast plane shift; and 3) you could not allow the marut to die.
The pocked dimension was a small, gray space, much like the dojo you’d left behind. Instead of a weapons rack, however, there was a single figured robed in a tattered cloak.
“SHAKARAN TITANSLAYER! FOR CRIMES AGAINST MORTALITY, YOU ARE HEREBY SENTENCED TO–”
The cloaked figure turned, and the party gasped in horror. Where once there was a mighty sorcerer, a deadly warrior, and one of the fabled Mages Four, now there was only The Thing That Once Was Shakaran–a living mass of writhing worms. It was a single colony creature that could move, fight, and even speak and cast spells. But as it charged you, gibbering and feral, you saw that it was also irretrievably insane.
The aberration fought like a mad thing, moving and casting, engulfing and striking out with writhing tendrils. You sought to blast it, and it evaded. You sought to close with it, and it went invisible. The marut called out the locations thanks to its true seeing, but The Thing That Once Was Shakaran put out an alarming amount of damage. When you surrounded it, the creature responded with a whirlwind attack, laying 62 damage onto each of you, and putting Alodia 1 hp away from death despite her invisibility.
In the end, it was Tunskalan’s blade that finished the writhing swarm, but you might well have lost the battle were it not for the aide of the strange gold-armored outsider.
The Thing That Once Was Shakaran: 51,200 XP
“What should we tell Phanbien?”
“It is kinder,” said Akorian, “To let the legend of the mage live on. We will tell him that Shakaran was not here, and there is something very like truth in that.”
“OK then, Mr. Inevitable,” said Alodia. “Take us out of here.”
“GLADLY. IT WILL TAKE ONE WEEK FOR ME TO REGAIN MY MAGIC.”
“It takes a fucking week!?”
You set about to endure a week of short rations, tedium, and annoying nicknames (the marut called his deputies Bigstuff, Invisi-girl, and Fancy Pants respectively). Kiedelos’s magic supplemented your food stores, and so you did not starve. Still, the hours dragged by at a snail’s pace, and you were more than ready to head out when the marut finally announced that it was ready.
“JOIN CLOSE. I WOULD NOT LEAVE YOU BEHIND.”
And as you once again felt the world slip away around you, the marut brought you through the planes… and into somewhere strange. Machine spires whirred high overhead. Creatures of living stone marched past. Everything proceeded with clockwork efficiency all around you.
“WELCOME TO AXIS,” said the marut.
“Shit,” said the party, now lost somewhere out in the planes.
The date is the 4th of Desnus, which happens to be the date of the vote for the new city council! Will this part of the Holy Gnoman Empire make it home in time to lend their influence? Will they make it back at all? Will Enarme ever be raised? Will Phanbien (who had been left behind for the Shakaran fight) ever accompany his new mistress back to the surface? And what fresh hell awaits our heroes on the plane of Axis? Polish your XP totals and stack your buffs. We’ll find the answers to all these questions and more on the next exciting episode of Dragon’s Delve!
TOTAL: 68,300 XP
PLAYERS PRESENT: M–, J–, L–
— The town council meets on the first Oathday of each month, meaning that the special election will take place on the 4th of Desnus.
— Town council modifier tally: You successfully rebuilt the Lawford barn after the ghoul outbreak (+2), successfully got Whedon Rasholt’s thanks by getting Silletta to agree to wear your dress (+4), failed to sway hearts and minds at Craddock’s funeral (back down to +2), healed Fellicker Grub pro bono (back up to +4), commissioned a multitude of buildings for Brendenford (+6), and have distinguished yourself as party guests at the Not at All Red in the Least Wedding (+8).
— Braddock’s wedding is set for some indeterminate date in the near future. He has postponed until such time as his pal Enarme can attend.
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a game that lasted long enough in irl time that we needed to do campaign notes?
Though some of my play by post games have gone on long enough that I’ll need to go back through the logs to check something or ask the GM a question.
That said, I at least a bit feel your pain. I tend to assume the role of “loot keeper” because most games I’m in I can tell that if someone doesn’t take charge than the loot is going to be “picked up” but never actually written down by anyone.
Definitely an advantage of PBP games. The game is itself the session notes.
Indeed. Any lack of knowing things is either due to lack of clarity or being too lazy to go back through several pages to find where something is.
In my last group, the DM would hand out additional XP for writing a summary of the last session, so we’d take turns. The others would usually write something general along the lines of “This happened. Then this happened. We did this, but that happened.”, while my summaries would always turn into a whole novel, written from the perspective of the character and everything.
I never did figure out whether anyone actually read those.
Doesn’t matter. You read them, and had fun writing them. Same as that god-awful long post I commented a little further up the page. Sure it’s useful occasionally for someone that had to miss a session, but I like knowing that a sliver of the experience survived outside of memory.
I take notes, for me. Which means the handful of things I think I’m likely to /need/ to remember. So usually note very useful for the group.
What I do tend to do ‘for the group’, is map. And I usually play characters that are mapmakers, but I map ‘in character’… which means occasionally someone else will decide they have to map as well. This started with an older group, they knew I mapped in character, and didn’t generally care, because I was always there to translate the archaic markings, map symbology, etc.
Until the game I was playing a Kender Thief… and the group thought my squiggle line maps with ‘pictographic’ symbols was amusing and didn’t assign anyone else to map. Until this one dungeon raid…
We’d camped nearby and during the night, during my watch, my Kender got bored and decided to investigate the dungeon on her own (it was calling to us and I was the only one who failed my save). So fine, we break for dinner, the group heads out for burgers and to pick up food for me and the DM, we were staying behind to run the “begining” of my soloing the dungeon. The group figured they’d get back and have to rescue me, or I’d come running out when it got too hard. They got back from the various fastfoody joints about an hour later…
So they come back to find a map and a pictograph note under a rock: “stick figure of me with club” “arrow pointing at next figure” “stick figure of gnome being sneaky” “stick figure of gnome going into hole” “stick figure of me with club going into hole”.
The Wizard immediately says, “The treacherous gnome snuck off and our thief went in pursuit. Stupid thief. Let’s go rescue her.” The Wizard and my kender didn’t get along very well…
The map was three sheets of paper with squiggles and circles that didn’t even line up with each other (the different pages that is, I mean they did, but one was drawn ‘mirrored’ and one was a partial redraw of part of the another) and just covered in 🙂 and 8P and a few 8D faces. Not a single 😐 face* on the maps.
So the party (sans me and the gnome who I did have to go back in and find as he snuck off right as I was getting back just before dawn) trudged down into the dungeon fearing that we were both dead. I’d marked corridors with helpful arrows pointing which way I’d gone (so all of them) and had left papers with happy faces and arrows to point out traps. They had a hard fight, slogged through undead and other nasties and found barely any treasure. Meanwhile the DM had occasionally passed me notes here and there as I stalked the crazed NPC through the dungeon, clubbed him unconscious, tied him up, and carried him back out† (he had lead us to the dungeon, but we were warned that he was obsessed with some cursed treasure deep in the dungeon).
And then my character fished and cooked the fish and waited for the group, with most of the loot, the cursed artifact, and our trussed up NPC guide… and fish dinner, which helped assuage some feelings. 😉
They got to fight (which they enjoyed) and I got to solo a dungeon in under 45 minutes (a dungeon that took them 6 more hours to slog through – I’m glad I had a book to read).
Smiley faces were where interesting things were, the more interesting (thus the crazier or more dangerous) the bigger the eyes and smile. 😛 and 8P faces were where I’d outwitted enemies by sneaking right through their midst, gotten their goods, and got away clean. 😐 faces denote boring rooms where nothing fun ever occurs. My group was happier the more “bored now” faces I made on the map.
† I missed them on my way out by only a handful a feet and a few closed doors. I wasn’t exactly ‘aiming’ to avoid them, I was legit avoiding the undead guards and their patrols and all the traps (which I reset‡ on my way out if I had disabled them on my way in, I was considerate that way) but also since OOC I knew where the group was it was easy to make a few “proper IC motivated choices” and “manage to miss them”.
‡ Which really annoyed the Player of the Wizard. Once he hit that first trap on the way out, he knew every one of those traps they’d avoided on the way in was rearmed and no longer marked… I’d taken my notes down on the way out (a clean, rearmed dungeon, is a happy dungeon).
The mapper role is an interesting point of comparison. In one of my Roll20 games, the group has taken to penciling in notes on the grid itself, turning the map into a hybrid of sessions notes, battle map, and in-game artifact. Fun with hybrids!
I once had a GM who used large sheets of paper for his maps (I mean yuuuuge sheets) and we did the same things.
I suspect in the Roll20 case it’s easier for the Players to screenshot or download the map in order to keep their own copies of…
I don’t know that it’s occurred to anyone, but I bet it’ll come up.
The fun bit is that I allowed them to buy magical “linked paper” so that the many members of he party could all be assumed to have “the same” map. It’s cool to see the technology reflecting that fiction.
I‘ve tried about three, four times to write a jourmal, all those groups fell apart depressingly quickly.
The current game I don’t bother taking notes much, been running over 4 years now.
You’re right. That is depressing.
I’d do backflips if one of my players did a full-on journal.
One of my players is actually doing that! With illustrations!
Look at me. My name is NRSASD. I’ve got invested and enthusiastic players. Blah blah blah. 😛
In our last campaign, I started each session with a session recap, which jogged the players memories about what happened, where they are, and who’s there. Additionally, my memory meant that they could ask me questions about who/what/where/why and I’d be able to answer, usually without having to consult my DM notes.
Recently, I’ve decided to start writing campaign logs, as well as a few personal notes about things I may forgot. Currently, I’m doing a Phandelver campaign log on giant in the playground, but will soon be doing a Waterdeep: dragon heist log, followed by Undermountain.
I can’t believe I forgot to mention it… I do a Starfinder version of “session recap” at the beginning of each session. My PCs are tabloid journalists, so I start off with their hated rival from The Network doing a context-relevant broadcast.
“My PCs are tabloid journalists, so I start off with their hated rival from The Network doing a context-relevant broadcast.”
That’s juicy! Relevant and makes sure to keep the antagonism levels between them and their rivals!
It’s been a blast. Some enterprising soul with a similar concept made this wonderful thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nisIyhjOCiE&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR14OV-bwV7xOSmiWNpo6w9e54c0pr7Y7tsGaaH25gSueryosU4ljjkPbDY
My players’ response when I posted it:
“Motherfu….. LOLO, get in here! That asteroid huffer now has production value, you sure we can’t turn his face into grey goo or somthim’?”
I’m actually the note taker for my group. I keep bulleted notes with the fastest versions of events I can manage, and only irregular npcs get to have names. Everyone else gets a letter.
To make it actually interesting, I’ve written my character’s journal out and shared it with my group. Both entertaining and a source of dm inspiration. Also, my character died and trying to give his voice PTSD without being too obvious is interesting and tricky.
Do you use Google Docs to share with the group? What’s your tech strategy?
I… was writing up session summaries for our whole campaign, they started out as pretty barebones notes but blossomed into full journals intended to be readable by friends outside the group as well.
…until depression started majorly kicking my ass, and now I’m several months behind.
Start writing. The hardest part is the first word.
My favorite strategy is to trick myself. “OK. I’ll just open the document. That’s all I’ve got to do. And as long as it’s open, I’ll write one sentence. That’ll take me what, thirty seconds? And now that I think about it, I’ve got a pretty good idea what the next sentence ought to look like. I’ll pencil that in before I go back to watching YouTube.”
Break it down into manageable chunks and you’ll get back into it! Like the man said, you eat that whale one bite at a time!
I’m very happy that one of my players in my Exalted game writes an IC diary entry. In the ~40 full sessions she has been in, in the last two years, that has translated into like 160 pages of diary entries. And then we’ve played out solo sessions/scenes of her past which has generated another 70 pages of diary entries. All in all, 107 k words.
Another player has made a list of all the plots that the PCs are aware of, really handy for a almost 9 year old game, since I don’t remember a lot of the silly things I introduce. 😛
Gonna make a leather-bound version of those journal entries once the campaign ends and present it to the player? Cuz that’s what an awesome ST would do…. 🙂
I’ve been chronicling the events of all our sessions so far. I don’t go into super-fine detail like that example you posted (you madman), but I do at least make notes of what happened, if anybody got any particularly high or low rolls, if somebody did something particularly amusing, etc.
I keep it all in a Word document. Once the campaign ends, I’ll probably send it to everybody in my group so we can look back on it.
The Word document seems more useful (and searchable) than the boatload of individual Facebook posts I’ve made over the years. A Google Doc might be even better.
Hmmm… Actually, I think that I’ll give a wiki a try next time around.
I take copious notes for the games I’m in, both the one where I’m a player and the other where I’m the GM. In the former, the GM asks me to do the recap at the start of each session. And every once in a while he’ll turn to me for a far back detail like an NPC’s name. Hey, at least it means the notes are coming in handy.
The alt text is also somewhat relevant as I’ve taken to documenting the party’s natural 1s and 20s in the former game. We use MapTool instead of Roll20, and we swear the RNG tends towards those extreme numbers more than chance would dictate. It’s especially notable in Cypher System games where every natural 1 is a free GM intrusion due to the RAW.
Heh. Good time to come back to this one. I found out just yesterday that my Facebook group has a search function. Suddenly all my hard-to-find session summaries are useful again. 😀
Is there a way to track rolls in MapTool? You’d think there would be a log somewhere.
I checked the RPTools wiki and double-checked with our group’s resident MapTool expert. You can manually export logs, and fortunately they do include all the dice rolling markup from our macros. The downside is the format isn’t the cleanest (even the logs are exported in MapTool’s ‘token’ file extension, though you can open in a text editor and see the raw HTML).
I enjoy having the group call out when a nat 1 or 20 happens, since we often say “write that down in your copy book” in the style of “Look Around You” skits.
I gather that it’s too much work to parse all that mess into the form of “4.003% natural 20s, 5.189% natural 1s, etc.?”