Part 1: From Table to Page
(Some notes on notes)
I am a note-taker. I took notes before I started the story hour, before I ever thought that I would start the story hour, and take notes for games and I doubt will ever make it into a story hour. I think this is in part because I tend to fidget, and it gives me something to do with my hands. Also, I’m left-brained enough that I like to know where we used magic item x or picked up potion z.
Effect on play
I don’t like to let taking notes get in the way of actually playing the game, and most of the time, it doesn’t. Sometimes this means that when my character is doing a lot of talking, or is involved in an important scene, not many notes get taken. That’s okay. If I’m that involved in the game, I’ll probably remember what was going on without a lot of prompting.
I think it does slow me down a bit in combat. I try to remember to prompt Fajitas to give on deck warnings as we go through the initiative, but sometimes I’m still stuck going, “um…” when we get around to me. But I’d probably do that even if I weren’t taking notes. I’m sometimes also asking people what they just did if I got distracted or behind. If this has been a major impact on game play, no one has brought it up with me.
An Aside About Story Hour Philosophy
Since my notes mean I don’t have a complete or exact record of everything little thing that happened at the table, I’m not tempted to try to recreate the table on the page. (If you aren’t interested in my writing philosophy, feel free to skip over this next bit to the section on how to decipher my notes.)
There’s a reason why I call what I do when I write the story hour “adaptation.” I start with the source material, the game as it played at the table. The story hour is not a record of the game. It is a version of the game translated into prose form. I mention this explicitly because frequently, some variation on the question, “When you write the story hour, do you make things up?” comes up on the forum. The complete answer to this is both yes and no.
Yes, I change things. Sometimes that means embellishing Fajitas’ descriptions. Sometimes it means glossing events. Conversations that happened simultaneously at table might be sequential when recounted. Or a discussion that began in one locale and continued in another is brought into one exchange for the sake of clarity, simplicity, or narrative flow. The ingredients that make a great game are very similar to the ingredients that make a good story, but you have to put them together differently.
But in the important sense, no, I don’t make things up for the story hour because even if I’m not true to a player’s words, I strive always to be true to that player’s character. That’s a necessary distinction. Although, I will admit I can’t think of a single occasion where someone reading Welcome to the Halmae has singled out a line of dialogue that wasn’t a quote from table.
In short: the events are what happened in the game. The characters are the characters created and played by the people in the game. The changes I make are for the purposes of translating a game session into a serialized story.
Right, anyway. Back to my game notes.
Attached to this post are the scanned pages of the notes I took for the session we played November 13, 2004. (My notes from the second half of the fight on the 14th are coming later.) If you are trying to decipher them yourself, here are some things to watch for:
The real-time date is written in the upper right-hand corner of each page. The number that comes after the hyphen is the page number. So the first page of notes has “11/13/04 – 1” written in the corner. I learned early on the importance of numbering pages within a session because they tend to get shuffled around with each other, my character sheet, and my spell sheet as we play. (Playing a sorcerer/cleric, I’ve already got a lot of paper to keep track of.)
The first page of every session also has a date (month and day only) in a box on the left side of the page. That’s the in-game date. In this case, 4/20. This will obviously be updated through the session if we’re covering multiple days in-game. (If you’re curious about why we use the Gregorian calendar in a fantasy world, it was discussed in the thread,
here.) Having an easily accessible record of the in-game date has turned out to be one of the handiest things about my notes.
Technical note: the contrast on the first couple of pages is kind of light. It took me a little work to get my scanning technique down. It does get better.
Non-Combat
Unless we’re in combat (which we weren’t at the beginning of this game), my notes tend to be pretty general (page 11-13-04 a and b, attached). I will write down particularly good quotes I don’t want to forget, although not all of these will make it into the story hour.
Looking at the first page of notes now, (11-13-04 a and b), I notice that most of the page is taken up with random lines with very little context. If you haven’t read the story hour, I doubt they make much sense. Actually, I don’t know if they make a lot of sense to people who were there
at the game. To me, they basically act as broad memory cues when I go back to write up the game (sometimes months after the fact).
example 1 said:
In my notes this line appears: “Yes… Well let’s dwell on irony!” –Bar
This was the cue for a 313 word section of my first draft. It shows up in the thread near the end of Part the Two-Hundred Second.
This helps to explain why this page and a half of non-combat notes makes up more than half of my eventual write-up of the session.
I’ll also make general notes about who does what and conversations that seem important. Though I tend to trust my memory for a lot of this kind of thing.
Often specific non-combat notes aren’t really made with the story hour in mind. Most often, I’m jotting down things that we’ll want to check later (frequently record keeping stuff, like using one-use magic items, or dividing loot), or things that I think will be important for the party to know. The reason why I started taking notes was to help us out
in the game and I try to make sure I’m not falling down on that job.
example 2 said:
Yeah yeah, if I’m such a great note-taker, how come there is not a word in the write up about what came out of Barnabus’ bag of holding? Two reasons: first, Fajitas (the DM) had that list on a handout, which I knew I could get a copy of. Second, anything off that list was going to get noted on the character sheet of the person who took it. No worries that anyone was going to forget about that kind of loot!
Combat
By contrast, once we get into combat time, I take pretty exhaustive round-by-round notes. In the 11-13 session I took six pages of notes, five and a half of which are concerned with combat. I didn’t always do this, but I started and now can’t seem to kick the habit.
Reason one: As our combats get more complex, it’s useful for us to be able to go back and check details like how long a given spell has been running as we play.
Reason two: It saves me from having to decide on the fly what’s important in the combat and what isn’t. A missed shot might not seem to be worth noting, three missed shots in a row by the same character suddenly becomes a moment that will probably make it into the story hour. If I wrote down the first miss anyway, I don’t have to go back and annotate on the fly when I’m also trying to follow the battle generally, and plan what my own character is supposed to be doing next.
Reason three: I’m kind of compulsive.
Reason four: I find it does actually make the write-up a little easier.
Shorthand
I do try to streamline my notes, especially in combat, as much as possible. PCs are usually designated by their first initial, or first two if there’s potential for confusion (Anvil and Annika are their own special brand of fun). It doesn’t come up much in this battle because my regular character is dead, but ordinarily my combat notes are littered with notations similar to: “L mm, 7 on _____.” This translates, “Lira casts magic missile for seven points of damage to _____.” Although I usually don’t write exact damage figures on attacks, and instead indicate “tink,” “ouch,” or just “_______ hits _______.”
If we’re in a complex venue, I try to make sketches because it’s easier to draw a room than to write down a description, but it doesn’t always happen. And ultimately in the story hour I generally rely on memory and don’t sweat the details of tactical positioning.
And in case you were wondering, no, I can’t always read my own writing after the fact.
