Notes as a player, mine are a mess, how do you take yours?

[MarkVIIIMarc]

During sessions in large world homebrew or Curse of Strahd or Storm King's Thunder type campaigns as a player I try to take some notes. Usually I end up with pages of legible but nonsensical sentences about random things including tavern and barkeeper names. They're there, its just a thing to try to organize it.

I was thinking about switching to a split of location notes vs NPC notes.

What methods do you all use? I sorta want to keep mine together so I have some idea where we met whoever.

[Imbalance]

Best I've done is some dungeon mapping that ends up looking like a single-line flow diagram. I can actually remember names pretty well, but irl I forget which face goes with which name - less of a problem when they all look like the DM.

Much harder is trying to keep objectives straight without a journal. I'm learning.

[Misterwhisper]

The players all have a google doc open as we play to take notes on.

We have a battle mat for maps and things that is usually prepared ahead of time if the layout is known or the players fill it in as they explore.

We have a tv on the wall that we chrome cast to if there is something big the group needs like a city map or a letter or something.

The dm has everything on dnd beyond and the players keep a window up for it.

[MarkVIIIMarc]

In game I prefer to keep a pretty clean table but just last week I copied my SKT notes to Google Sheets. I like spreadsheets lol. Funny you mentioned that! Going through my notes was getting to be a pain and I can use Google Drive on my phone w/o having a laptop taking up table space. Plus I can share and my party can read my writing.

Misterwhisper, what all does your DM keep on D&D beyond? Or how detailed do they get? I don't want to hold ppl's hands or make it less enjoyable for them.

[Sigreid]

We have a member of the group that takes great notes. Great in that they get the gist of what was going on and are freaking hilarious. Read them after just for fun.

[nickl_2000]

My Current DM is a pretty darn good writer, he records the session on a small recorder. Then between sessions, he turns it into a story with a little bit extra filled in. Not only is it super fun to have the book of the adventure, but it's also a great way to look back and find out what happened.

[Darkstar952]

My notes tend to reflect the character I am playing, high intelligence wizard makes reasonably well structured/detailed notes about most things, while my fighter makes very few notes and those only of details that are of interest to him.

[stoutstien]

In college I learned steno style shorthand. Been a huge boon for note taking on both sides of the screen

[da newt]

My during session notes are a grab bag of facts / crap. The most useful thing for me is to go back over my in session notes soon after playing and transcribe those into notes I want to keep. It helps me separate the BS from the stuff I want to keep, It allows me to organize it, and a second pass really helps my retention (I have a crap memory for specifics, so I rely on my notes for reference). I'm a Luddite, so this is all on paper - loose leaf 3 ring binder so I can add or remove stuff easily.

In the other group I play with, one of the other players takes good notes and has a great memory - so I don't even bother, they act as my notes.

[Demonslayer666]

... The most useful thing for me is to go back over my in session notes soon after playing and transcribe those into notes I want to keep. ...


I do this too, as soon as I can after the session, and it helps a lot.

I take notes on a per session basis, notebook and pencil, I keep track of session number and the date we played. I underline names in my notes, and put marks in the margin for important things. I write up a "story so far" in google docs, and I can give it to any players that missed the session.

This makes it easy for me to give a recap and provide names.

[KorvinStarmast]

Used to have a 5x8 stenographer's notebook. I was the chronicle keeper for our group. After about four sessions we began to call it "the Chronicle of the Damned" - it grew to seven steno notebooks.

Probably had the makings of a decent short story except for one small problem: during a move in the 90's the box it was in disappeared, as did the my original Chivalry and Sorcery book. :smallfurious:

[jjordan]

Depends on the game. I prefer to use a Google doc but you can't always do that at a table. Regardless of the medium I take lots of notes and then I go back over them at the end of the session and put them into a usable format. I share most of my notes with the other players and invite them to make additions/comments (yay, Google Docs) but they mostly don't. I look on the journal as being a gaming bonus for me.

[Addaran]

I was expecting everyone to answer like me, since that's what i see most of my friends do ( or take zero notes).

I just write the name of characters without any infos as well as city names. Might also write short notes for mission like "kill Tazok" or " recover magic staff"
Everything is all mixed, so sometimes i'll think that i need to kill Tazok in Highfield, but Highfield is just the town we visited a month ago.

[Grognerd]

It varies, but I never use a computer to take notes at the table. Most of what I do at the table as a player are chicken scratch notes with rather haphazard organization.

Luckily I have a fairly good memory, though, so after the fact (usually within a few days, sometimes slightly longer) if I am inclined to do so, I write up the notes "in character" as first-person missives to seniors in organizational hierarchies or journals.

[Pufferwockey]

The players all have a google doc open as we play to take notes on.

We have a battle mat for maps and things that is usually prepared ahead of time if the layout is known or the players fill it in as they explore.

We have a tv on the wall that we chrome cast to if there is something big the group needs like a city map or a letter or something.

The dm has everything on dnd beyond and the players keep a window up for it.

I nearly puked in fury that I never thought of this