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 waa critical hit lots of lots of times like that okay so what were they yeah huh what were [Music] they Hello friends today I want to talk notetaking in DN 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 Cobalt press and their new adventure setting Southlands oh looks like Cobalt press is launching Southlands that's 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 players's guide all newly updated I mean sure but what makes this one special are you kidding me they were funded in 3 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 Cobalt press.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 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 sheet for example when I play Ashling 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 and 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 rearrangeable and replaceable I have a whole video about my character journal for Ashling 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 andd 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 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 eternum 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 concept 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 ashling'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 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 inch 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 a 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 roleplay 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 copout 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 2 weeks later 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 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 scrolled mids 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 struggle 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 1 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 that D and 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 this system could be improved when I first started playing Ashling 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 eldrid 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 Ashling l and develops when I read Marie condo'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 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 and noes 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 ter memory but who loves D and 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 traiter brain tries to erase it now it's time to tell me about your D and 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