- I have an absolutely terrible memory.
People are always asking me stuff like,
- Do you have a really good Nat 20 story?
- Oh yeah! Natural 20! I've totally rolled some of those.
- Well, do you have any super fun stories?
Like, where it happened at a really funny or epic moment?
- That's definitely happened to me!
There have absolutely been times when I've rolled a 20
and everyone was like, "Whoa!! Critical hit!!"
Lots of, lots of times like that.
- Okay. So what were they?
- Hah. Yeah. Huh. What were they?
(upbeat electronic music)
Hello friends! Today, I want to talk note-taking in D&D.
As a person with a truly appalling memory,
it's really important that I take notes when I play
so that I can remember literally anything
that happened a week ago, let alone a year ago.
But, whenever I bring up player note taking in my videos,
I always get a few comments from people who say
that they're really bad at taking notes,
or even that they struggle to take notes at all
while still paying attention during sessions.
Not everyone learns in the same way,
so the same note taking tactics won't work for everyone.
In this video, I wanted to explore a few different ways
to take notes in hopes that one of them
will feel right for you.
As a person who wants me to be able to eat
and pay my mortgage, you will be thrilled to hear
that this video is sponsored by Kobold Press
and their new adventure setting, Southlands.
- Oh, it looks like Kobold Press is launching Southlands,
that standalone setting for fifth edition
that they successfully Kickstarted last year.
- Buy it. You need more books.
- But, do I? I have kind of a lot of books.
- You don't have these! The World Book,
the City of Cats adventure book,
the Player's Guide- All newly updated.
- I mean sure, but what makes this one special?
- Are you kidding me?
They were funded in three hours!
They were knocking down the stretch goals like bowling pins,
new magic items, new maps and art, adventures, monsters,
subclasses, backgrounds.
You could run a whole campaign here,
plus a ton of short adventures.
- My bookshelf is getting so crowded though.
- Okay. They have fully optimized PDFs.
Plus, it's available for your favorite
virtual tabletop platforms.
You can even bundle the PDFs to save money. Next excuse.
- Wait.
Aren't I supposed to have an angel on my other shoulder
who's like, a good influence?
- Don't look at me. I already pre-ordered my copy.
I mean, come on.
City of Cats, no brainer.
- Southlands is available at koboldpress.com.
Check the description for the link so that you can bring
your players into this incredible world of ancient gods
and elemental magic and cats.
(quick electronic music)
The first question to ask yourself
is whether you want to take notes
with a pen and paper or on a device.
Everyone has their own preferences here.
But for me, I often make this call
based on how I'm accessing my character sheets.
For example, when I play Aisling,
everyone at the table is using a paper character sheet.
So, I take notes by hand.
But when I play Penelope,
everyone is using D&D Beyond. So I take notes on my laptop.
And of course, you can choose to use a mixture
of digital and practical note taking
if that's what suits you.
If you want to take digital notes,
you have a ton of options for platforms.
Lots of people use platforms like Evernote,
Google Keep, Trello or other productivity tools
because they usually have tons
of built-in organizational features
and can be easily linked to attachments, images,
and each other.
I'm a Google drive addict,
so I keep documents and spreadsheets and images like maps
and character portraits together in a folder.
One of the big benefits to these kinds of tools
is that most of them are very searchable.
When I want to see what I wrote
about a certain town, but I can't remember
what session it was from,
I can just search the name of the town on Drive and all
relevant notes will pop up.
I use a separate document for each session titled with the
session number and the date,
but I also keep topic specific documents
when they feel useful.
For example, once I was training a warg as a mount
using orcish commands, and for each command,
I had to set aside time to do training
and roll animal handling checks.
So, I created a separate document
where I logged all of the commands
that she had already learned and how firm
her grasp of them was.
Of course, if you're looking for style,
as well as efficiency,
you might really enjoy using a platform like World Anvil,
where you can create pages for characters
and locations and items,
and even things like charts of bloodlines
or historical timelines.
This is sort of like the digital version
of keeping a scrapbook,
and it can be especially nice if you plan
to share your notes with other players.
But, what if you're a handwritten notes kind of person?
A lot of the same tactics can still apply.
You can divide a notebook into sections
for different categories using sticky tabs,
or if you're like me, and you hate running out of pages
and having to skip to a new section,
you can use a three-ring binder and dividers
to make sure each section is rearrange-able and replaceable.
I have a whole video about my character journal for Aisling,
which I will link in the cards,
but if you are not the type to dedicate
that kind of time to a journal layout,
there are also plenty of pre-formatted D&D notebooks
for players, like Field Notes,
campaign diaries from The Rook and the Raven,
or 1985 Games' "Dungeon Notes".
If you're a person who wants to keep a paper journal,
but feels like handwriting slows you down,
you can also take digital notes during the session
and then convert them into handwritten notes
in your free time between games.
Or, you can even type and then print notes
if you want to create a scrapbook style journal.
Each person will have their own preferences,
but everything I discuss in this video
can be applied to paper or digital note taking,
so just pick whatever feels the most helpful to you.
There's no wrong answer here.
(joyful instrumental music)
In my opinion, the single most important thing you can do
to make your notes usable is to sort them in some way.
There are plenty of different ways to sort notes
beyond just splitting them by session,
although I do think that can be useful.
The most obvious method is to divide your notes between
categories based on anything that comes up a lot
in your games.
Every game is different,
but here is a basic set of categories
that I think most players would find useful.
Session notes. NPCs. Locations. Quests.
Lore. Loot.
And, depending on your game,
maybe a section for notes about party member backstories.
Digitally, this can be done with different folders,
documents, tags, or whatever categorization
features your software has.
For example, I am a spreadsheet nut,
and I have found that NPCs are one of the hardest things
for me to keep track of in session-based notes,
especially if I can't remember their name
in order to search for them.
To solve this, I started a spreadsheet
where I log every NPC based on a few specific criteria.
Every time we meet someone,
I write down their name, the location where we met them,
a physical description,
and then any relevant notes about them.
I also have a column where I will note down if that NPC
gave us any sort of quest.
This means that when someone says,
"Hey, who was that dwarf we met in that farming town?",
I can search 'dwarf' and easily identify him.
Or, if I'm wondering how many wizards
there are in the Conventicle Aeternum,
I can just search 'Conventicle'
and immediately turn up a list
of each member that we are aware of.
Or, if we return to a city we've been to before
and are looking for allies,
I can sort the spreadsheet by location
and have an immediate list of all of our contacts
in that specific city.
Now, you might not need this kind of thing
for NPCs specifically,
but spreadsheets are great for anything
that you want to be able to classify like this,
such as cities, or towns, or shops.
On paper, the same concepts can be achieved with folders,
page dividers, or sticky tabs.
I think it's worthwhile to make these sections
easy to pull up quickly for reference
or to add to them.
Now I know not everyone is as obsessed
with color-coding as I am,
but my ADHD brain finds it a lot easier
to quickly locate and process information
when it's visibly differentiated,
so I really like using colored text, or highlights, or flags
in digital documents, or colored pens and highlighters
on paper to code my notes.
For example, you could highlight all NPC names in pink,
all location names in yellow,
and all lore notes in green.
If you're not a color-coding person, for whatever reason,
you can achieve the same concept with symbols.
This is a system that I initially learned about
through bullet journaling,
which is designed to make it as quick
and easy as possible to categorize and refer to information
without special tools.
Bullet Journal calls this system "rapid logging",
if you want to look it up.
In rapid logging, you use bullet points for tasks,
dashes for notes, and circles for events.
There are more symbols and more levels to this,
but that's the idea.
Similarly, you could easily notate NPCs
with circles, locations with triangles,
and lore with asterisks, for example.
You may also find that certain shorthand is useful
in the context of your specific game.
For example, in Aisling's world,
we have been uncovering lore around this set
of seven ancient long-dead gods.
I could try tagging all lore related to this history
with the tag "7G", or giving each god a number,
or shorthand name to make it easy
to locate and log information about them.
(joyful instrumental music)
Okay. I want to start by saying
what I'm about to talk about is
not for everyone,
but some people really like the idea
of bringing their character into their note taking.
And for some people, tailoring their notes
to their specific character can actually be a useful tool
in their role playing as well.
There are so many ways to bring character into your notes.
It can be as simple as asking yourself
what would your character find memorable
and as complex as writing an in-character journal entry
after every session.
Not everyone is going to want to write
an in character diary or anything similar,
but I do think asking yourself
what your character would know and find important
can be a good starting point.
For example, if a player in your party
is receiving information from the DM
about their Homeland, it might not make sense for you
to take notes on it because your character
wouldn't know all that stuff.
Or if you play a low intelligence character,
they may not be the type to put together
all the little pieces of a puzzle and solve the mystery.
If you're like me, you might find it hard
to not go into puzzle solving mode.
Even if it's out of character,
not taking notes on those puzzle pieces
could help you stick to that.
Or maybe your character has a really high Religion modifier.
So you take very detailed, very in-depth notes
about anything related to religion.
Tailoring your notes
to your character's interests and strengths
can help you role-play them more accurately.
Of course, I've also heard people say
that they just don't take notes at all
because their character has a poor memory
or isn't very smart.
And frankly, I think that's a little bit of a cop-out.
Even a person who isn't very smart
will remember things like their parents' names,
or information about their hometown,
or the basics of what happened
just a few hours beforehand.
Even if you, the player,
returning to the game two weeks later, it might not.
I think it's important that you not use your character
as an excuse to just not pay attention
or not retain any information from your game.
(instrumental music)
I've heard from a lot of people
that they have trouble taking notes during sessions.
Maybe they're struggling
to keep up with the pace of information
or they can't interpret their own notes later,
or they can't listen to what's being said
while they're writing something down.
I have a few proposed solutions for this.
If you find yourself looking back on last week's notes
and having no idea what you were talking about,
it's likely that you could benefit from reviewing
and annotating, or even rewriting your notes
immediately after sessions.
Set aside 20 minutes or so,
right after you get home from a game,
or maybe the morning after,
to translate your hastily scrawled mid-session notes
into something more readable.
This is also a great time to split things into categories.
So if you keep a specific section for NPCs,
you can log any NPCs that you met into that category
during this review time.
If you find it hard to categorize information
while you're receiving it,
taking this time can solve that problem
and just make it easier to find
relevant notes later.
If you really struggled to take notes during sessions,
it might help you to record each game
with permission from all present, of course,
and simply note down timestamps during the game.
So let's say that you set up your phone's voice recorder
as the game starts.
And then when the DM starts lore dumping,
you just write down one hour, 14 minutes lore.
Then, after the game,
you can go back through the recording
and find those spots that you flagged
with relevant information and take your detailed notes then,
on your own timeline.
Remember the D&D is a game that we are playing
with our friends for fun,
so you should never feel scared to ask for help or support
to make sure that the game is working for everyone.
If there's a fellow player who's very good at taking notes,
maybe they can make those notes accessible to everyone
by sharing photos of them after each session,
or giving players access to their Google Drive files,
or something like that.
This can also be a great way to allow every player
to contribute to the notes in a way that aligns
with their strengths.
Maybe everyone has access to the same folder,
and one player takes session notes,
while one is in charge of noting down locations,
and another one keeps a quest log.
I'm also an advocate for being willing to ask your DM
to repeat something or spell a name
if it will help you record that information.
You might worry about interrupting or slowing down the game,
but it'll also slow down the game
if your DM has to repeat this exact same information later,
when it becomes relevant again.
If I were DMing and a player asked me to press pause
for a second while they noted down what I was saying,
I would not be upset.
I would just be glad that they were taking notes.
As with any system, I think it's really important
to keep tabs on how it's going
and be willing to modify that system
as you learn what's working and what isn't.
When you come up with a system
like the ones I've described here,
you're basically just guessing
at what will end up being useful in actual practice.
It may be that once you execute it,
you identify places where the system could be improved.
When I first started playing Aisling,
I used a little bound notebook,
like a journal, and laid out the first few pages
with all of her character sheet information.
But as she leveled up, and as I took on new challenges,
like multiclassing and learned new eldritch invocations,
I quickly realized that I hadn't given myself enough pages.
Instead of just starting over with a new journal,
and giving myself more pages,
I modified my system to create a journal
where I can easily add or remove pages
from each section as Aisling levels and develops.
When I read Marie Kondo's
"The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up",
one of the parts that really stuck with me
was she talked about how we often create systems
that are mismatched with our actual needs.
The example she gave was something like,
let's say that you have a jacket that you wear
when you go outside and you store it in your bedroom closet.
When you come in from outside, you take the jacket off.
Maybe it would be neater to carry it
all the way into the bedroom
and then put it away immediately.
But, there will be days where you're tired or distracted
and you just put it near the door.
Suddenly, that jacket is a thing you need to clean up,
and it's a thing you will need to clean up
over and over again.
Instead, she recommends just storing the jacket
near the door, because that's where you use it.
Make it easier to put it away
when you're finished with it.
This was a really game-changing mindset shift for me.
In short, she's saying that your systems
should be built around your habits
rather than trying to rebuild your habits
around your systems.
Note-taking is exactly the same way.
Not everyone is going to have
the same note-taking habits as someone else,
so don't try to mimic someone else's system
and then kick yourself if it doesn't work.
Maybe you're just not a color coder.
And that is okay.
If it doesn't work for you, there is no reason to use it.
By remaining flexible and paying attention
to what is and isn't working,
you can find the systems that do work for you.
I hope this got you thinking
about how your D&D notes can be easier to take
and more useful as a reference,
even if you're not usually a note taker.
As a person with a terrible memory,
but who loves D&D, notes are one of the ways
that I can make sure that I can hang on to the joy
of those games,
even when my traitor brain tries to erase it.
Now it's time to tell me about your D&D notes!
What do you struggle with?
What tools and tips have helped you take better notes?
And Dungeon Masters, what about your notes?
Let's talk about all of that in the comments.