Do you take notes during RPGs?

Yes, we mostly run investigation heavy games (Call of Cthulhu and the like) so most of us take notes to keep track of things like clues, evidence, testimony, dramatis personae..

Onenote is fucking amazing for RPG notes.

Now that I've found a good group that doesn't just munch through a dozen bags of cheetos while dungeon-crawling, I do take notes. I'll sometimes explore ideas on my notepad too rather than think out loud.

I do if my character is intelligent, in which case I usually get the in-game equivalent of a pen and paper to take notes IC. Otherwise I'll rely on my memory. If I'm feeling really dickish when playing D&D 5e, I'll take the Keen Mind feat and refuse to take notes, just so the DM has to be extra careful to remember everything and anything he says or does.

No, never cared enough about any npc's or what was going on otherwise.

Have you tried videogames?

>Be DM
>Get tired of players forgetting half of the plot
>Next campaign
>"Alright guys, new houserule going forward. I ALWAYS bring extra note pads and paper, along with pencils. From now on, if YOU forget, your CHARACTER forgets. No more intelligence saving throws, no more hints."
>Suddenly, note taking suddenly triples during session

Best decision I've made, next to the rule of "if you don't show up with a character made, you play a premade or get out."

My gm's have literally just never had an npc who mattered for more than the conversation we were in with them.

I love recording sessions, especially if it's a comical or spoopy campaign.

Have you tried being the GM instead?

Nah, I'd be bad.

Yes, especially because the DM doesn't

Constantly. A lot of that has to do with my memory problems though.
And part of it has to do with my tendency to doodle. I draw maps and stuff.

It's a lot easier than you'd thing
Text only online can be super comfy if you get a good group.

Yes. I'm basically one of those court reporters. I record EVERYTHING. Often word for word. Important things get highlighted or underlined.

Usually only if my character would make a note of it, or if it's absolutely crucial. Otherwise, I got a pretty good memory for details that rarely lets me down.

You're a stenographer?

> small gaming table
> need quick reference notes for secret info
> realize notes don't have to be in English

Yes.

text only is garbo and you should feel bad for having wrong fun.

Too bad I'll wrong fun as hard as I can and you can't stop me.

I don't even know how text only would play. I imagine a lot of waiting for other people to type their shit. DMing text only would be even worse.

Not during, but after.

I keep detailed notes on campaign events in my ongoing Savage Worlds campaign for people to read between sessions. Partly because it's one of the best campaigns I've ever run, so I want to keep a good record of it.

It is slower but the session can run for ages. And if you keep OOC and IC separate it works really well and inter-party RP shines hard.

What he said; mostly it's the names of places and characters; with a little blurb of to remind me who that was.

The whole group has to. We're monster hunters rooting out vampires, shapeshifters and other parasites from a post-collpase New York. The GM is dedicated and has over 70 fleshed out, constantly acting characters in a string of refugee camps and private/government holdouts. It's one huge game of Detective/Werewolf/Secret Hitler as we try to stop monsters being put into positions of power while stopping them from killing.

Currently filled out 94 pages of notes for the 5 months we've been running the campaign.

My wife effectively keeps a fucking journal of the campaigns I run as we go along.

If anybody ever forgets something or misses a session she'll run them through a play-by-play of everything important said, person talked to, thing found, or place discovered.

It's like having a chronicler for every party.

>"if you don't show up with a character made, you play a premade or get out."
>Not forcing all players to make characters in front of you and each other.
>Having all of the players who up with horrible team composition
>Dealing with a full party of characters who have no business ever associating with each other, much less doing business together/being friends/whatever
>Having to coach players who are bad at the mechanics of the game through full rewrites because you didn't nip their shitty choices in the bud before they became the foundation for an entire character
>Also, premades ever

> I imagine a lot of waiting for other people to type their shit.
Either your WPM sucks or you're long-winded.
Most folks can slam out three to five sentences in a minute; depending on context. I can usually do about five or six. Most actions only require one however, two at most, unless you're explaining a long-term action or your character is participating in a full dialogue; meaning most of the time you're only waiting about 5-10 seconds, anyone doing anything just puts in what their character is doing at the time and you get this general narrative of what's going on. Then the DM says, "okay, so while X is Ying and Z is Qing, B went over to E and they found R. Because of this LMNOP!"

To me it's far preferable to people trying to talk over one another, and it cuts way WAY down on distracting banter, so the party gets way more done in the session vs. the hours spent reciting LotR lore or making cultural references in-character.

In fact, one of the best games I was in used chat for the OOC, but all character actions and dialogue were text.

your job as a dm is to be long winded. Assuming 120 words/min as an average, that's still well below the spoken words per minute average. The upper limits are even more skewed in this direction.

it just sounds like you've been in shitty groups

> your job as a dm is to be long winded.
> it just sounds like you've been in shitty groups
Said the pot.

I do. My group does not. Then they can't remember shit and it pisses me off. Even worse when I GM for them since by session four they have no idea what's going on.

Yeah this is great, we run the same thing. If you can't remember something, your character can't remember it either (unless you make a decent wisdom or intelligence check)

I take notes so I can remember names and places. Helps me immerse when I can know every main characters name, and also helps the DM out if he forgets a name.

I'm playing a wizard so I also keep notes of my spells etc.

And I keep track of initiative for the group (helps take pressure off dm) and keep track of things like how far I've climbed (I'm a half-spider vampire wizard...) and my hide or move silently checks for future reference.

And this is why I enjoy playing characters who either aren't smart enough or don't bother to remember anything about the plot.

Is there any comfortable platform to do this? I imagine even messenger would suffice, but it's a lot of distractions and it's messy to keep IC and OOC separate. How do you play it?

I haven't been because I'm actually RPing a character with shitty memory (no joke), but once this campaign wraps up I'm definitely going to start. Just randomly forgetting plot points is annoying OOC, even if it does fit IC.

Nope. My memory is frighteningly good. Not photographic, but I can recall all kinds of Info.

How weird is it to start a podcast as a player without any real involvement from the gm and the other players except in the game? I've been running into a bunch of shitty groups and players and I wanted to start something about my journey as a single player starting out and the difficulty I'm seem to face.

>mic using amateur thespian and his 3 screaming children detected

Text is superior roleplaying format. You don't need to take notes because the chat logs have everything too.

it works pretty well and i've found you get a lot more RP in general out of it, especially when you properly separate OOC and IC
that said when there's a retard who just isn't paying attention or takes too long to type out basic posts it can get frustrating

general advantages are that you can more convincingly play a character who's supposed to be good at talking, take a little more time explaining what you're doing and how (through the medium of roleplaying it out), pay more attention to the finer details, and review logs afterwards
disadvantages are that it can get slow, and sessions WILL be really long.

i've not done anything over voice, but i've done a decent amount of gaming in person and it isn't really worse or better, just different.

IRC works best, doesn't need a client and has ton of RP plugins.

Only if I'm playing a smart character.

The smarter the character, the more the notes.

Worth a shot, I'd think.

NORMIES REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I did it.
The DM, though, did not. This brought the notes to be "my word against the DM's" even for petty things and also him being annoyed by not having to roll for Int to remember stuff.

What if YOU forget to bring extra pads and papers?

I would listen to that

There aren't a lot of people who talk about their single player experiences

Yeah I usually bring a notebook, pen + pencil to sessions for some note taking. Mostly party info, names + places or bits of lore the GM might throw at us. I try to pay super close attention to the plot of each session because afterwards I keep an in character journal of whats recently transpired. As a half-orc barbarian maybe it's not exactly "in character", but the journal entries are grammatically butchered and chopped up and it's quite fun.

No darling I have someone to do that for me.

>fill a binder with notes for one campaign
>scared to throw it out just in case the campaign starts up again

Any day now...

I know that feeling

The fuck do you write in, then? Shorthand or something?

You... You know other languages exist, right?

No shit, so what does it being a "small gaming table" have to do with it?
Wait... I guess he didn't have space for a screen? I was thinking for some reason that he was writing in a language that was somehow smaller than English. Sorry, I guess that was kinda dumb.