Do You Take Combat Notes?

[MojoGM]

I have a player in my game who takes EXCELLENT notes during the session, and then writes it up and sends it to the rest of the group.

He does a play by play of everything that happens, including combat actions and damage dealt (to and from the PCs)

We only play about once a month, and everyone finds these writeups invaluable to catching us all up to speed when we have not played in awhile.

 

[DestroyYouAlot]

In combat (as a DM), I grab a piece of scrap paper, and scribble a quick "grid" on it. Then I have everybody call initiative from the "top" down, and write the names along the left-hand side of the sheet, again from the "top" of the round down. As every person takes a turn, I mark a quick "x" on the box next to their name, and mark down any spell effects that start or stop on their turn; when I get to the bottom, I start a new row. This helps immensely since I started doing it; mostly because keeping track of spell effects without asking people "how many rounds ago did you cast xxxxx? is great, but also because some people have a disturbing tendency to go out for a smoke in the middle of a combat, and this way I know who's turn it was.

 

[diaglo]

I tape the games.

scotch tape? the cheap canadian stuff?

isn't everyone totally drunk by the end of the session.

i stick to beer & pretzels mostly myself.

 

[Brain]

In one of my groups (with the Jester as DM), the players take combat notes. We also recently started up player-scribed roleplaying notes as well. There is an xp bonus for doing so.

As far as how much detail gets written, that varies quite a bit.

 

[Mean Eyed Cat]

I record all our game sessions with a recorder program on my laptop. Later, I will go back through each session and summarize them. If there was something particularly interesting during combat, I might detail it in the summary.

 

[The Levitator]

I use DM Genie and it generates a log of every single roll made in the game. Not only combat, but skill checks, saves, and any other rolls made in the game. The nice thing is that it's an editable window so I can also make personal notes within the log itself. We use DM Genie's autoroll feature to speed up combat and reduce metagaming, so I print out the log each week and save it to our Yahoo Group page. It helps players remember the details of the session.

 

[Matchstick]

I tape the games.

Wow. I've always thought that would be a cool way to go, but I never knew someone was actually doing it. What do you use? The first times you ran with the recorder were people uncomfortable?

Thanks!

 

[Lanefan]

I track opponents' h.p. on paper, along with their relevant info e.g. pluses to hit and damage, damage dice, etc. Initiative (re-rolled each round) I just track by arranging the dice in a pattern behind my screen to match where the bad guys are on the board. Other than that, I'll only write down if someone does something spectacular, or dies; for anythng else, I figure that if can't remember it when I come to log the game later, it's probably not worth remembering.

Roll-by-roll tracking sounds extremely labour intensive; I'd only ever bother if I thought someone was cheating, and then I'd only track that player.

Lanefan

 

[Piratecat]

Wow. I've always thought that would be a cool way to go, but I never knew someone was actually doing it. What do you use? The first times you ran with the recorder were people uncomfortable?

I used to use a mini-cassette recorder, but keeping track of the tapes was a major pain in the butt. Sagiro tapes his game too, and uses a regular tape machine -- but for me, the best solution is definitely a small mp3 recorder. I got a good one for significantly less than $100, and since it holds 4 hours of good quality audio (or 8 of medium and 16 of poor quality) I can tape a game and then immediately download it to my PC, along with a date stamp and label. It helps a ton for story hours. Kid Charlemagne uses something similar as well, I think.

I don't think anyone was uncomfortable for more than a few minutes the first day. It's inobtrusive, and they know I'd never post the recordings to the internet.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I used to use a mini-cassette recorder, but keeping track of the tapes was a major pain in the butt. Sagiro tapes his game too, and uses a regular tape machine -- but for me, the best solution is definitely a small mp3 recorder. I got a good one for significantly less than $100, and since it holds 4 hours of good quality audio (or 8 of medium and 16 of poor quality) I can tape a game and then immediately download it to my PC, along with a date stamp and label. It helps a ton for story hours. Kid Charlemagne uses something similar as well, I think.

I've only actually done this as a test, since both of my two current games are being written up as story hours by players (albeit slowly), but I've advocated this many times before.

If you use a laptop at the table you could easily bypass the whole mp3 recorder, and just digitize straight to your PC and then you wouldn't have to worry about transferring files at all, or a max time. All you'd need is a simple mp3 or WAV editing program, and a microphone that can be pluggd into a mini jack.