As a GM (and player) I'm quite bad at takeing session notes, which can lead to inconsitencies (as a GM) or forgetting events (as a player). I have tried to write up "lenghty" pulpstyle session summaries. The upside of those are that they're quite fun to read afterwards and they've been rather popular within the game group as well. The downside is that they take up quite alot of time and I'm lazy. So the end result is usually that I end up with inadequate session summaries.
I hope to remedy this by creating a template with short points that help me keep track of the most important bits of the story development during the game session.
So far I've got:
* Date of the session
* Title
* Bullet list of events
* New NPCs met
So my question to you is:
* Do you use something similar to keep track of the plot development as a GM/Player? If so, what do you include in your summaries?
* Do you have any tips of anything I should include in the template?
I always end up talking to a close friend/co-gm in Discord about my sessions so that usually serves as my record.
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I tell my players before the game begins "I have enough to remember as a GM. If you can't remember the information I gave you, neither can your characters."
Seriously, GMs already do like 10x the work of players. If they're too lazy to keep up, it's not your fault...and the consequences that result in character are their fault.
I take some notes on a campaign calendar because that also helps me track time in the long term.
For a while, I had a player who took care of the summaries, but he handed it back to me. In my experience, it's best to write the summary soon after the session - the details become fuzzy fast. I use a combination of preparation notes and Roll20 maps to remember what actually happened. It's never perfect, but the players still enjoy reading it and I can use it for a quick summary at the begin of the next session.
The summaries follow the following pattern:
* Session number and title (I realized I better give the title after actual play)
* Date and time
* Participants
* Lenghty description of what happened (needs like 45 to 60 minutes, phew)
* XP for roleplay, combat and other encounters
* XP per PC and final XP value
It's additional work, yup, but it's productive. And who knows, it might help me become a better writer...
I take a few haphazard notes and hope for the best when I try to recall things later. Usually just the date on the page is enough for me to remember the important things.
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I'm not the GM, but I am the note-taker in our group. I write pretty extensive notes and then type them up later as campaign journals that I post on my personal blog.
Our group's GMs generally open every session by asking, "What happened last time?" Then all the players participate in a short (15 minute) recap of the previous session. That allows us to recall names of NPCs or places (or get them if we didn't get them during the previous session) and refresh our memories. If the GM forgets about something later on, we can remind him of it. I write the names of important NPCs on my character sheet, too. It's not the GM's job to remember everything.