How good at note-taking are your players?

[hunter1828]

My players in past groups were sometimes good, sometimes awful. But my current group is fantastic. They keep track of everything. They have notebooks full of campaign notes, NPC names, locations, etc. They do such a good job that I sometimes find myself asking them "What was that elf's name?"

hunter1828

 

[Wycen]

It seems like the note taker is going the way of the map maker. Bye bye. This is more of a prediction I suppose. In the games I play in now, I'm spoiled I suppose. We have our own forum for one game, so if I need to find something, I can probably dig through the off time posts and find that someone has mentioned the name or event. As it happens we actually have 2 note takers for that game, the original guy, and myself. The original guy needed a replacement when he went on his honeymoon, so I volunteered. The thing is, he is more of a cataloger, just writing down treasure, occasionally a name. That's essentially what I do as well.

The other game has no note taker, if you want to note something down you better do it then, otherwise you are out of luck. The DM might be able to find it, but his style is a little disheveled.

 

[Morpheus]

I have one player who takes meticulous notes. He even types them up at the end of session for his own personal log. The rest of my players pick up a pencil to erase their hit points and that's about it.

 

[Ao the Overkitty]

In the game I play in, we have two players who take notes (one of them is VERY meticulous).

Since, as a player, I never take notes, I can't complain that none of my players take notes for my game (well... I CAN, but that'd just make me a hypocrite).

My DM notes are very meticulous, though

 

[Storminator]

We have some note taking. We're not sure my character can even read, so I make a point of not taking notes.

But my next PC will have a magic pen that takes dictation, so I'll take some notes there. Unfortunately, the pen also writes in dirty limericks in the margins...

PS

 

[Samus_the_Lucky]

i keep notes for myself since i can't remember what i did yesterday sometimes, let alone what my imaginary wizard from a far off make-believe land did during the last game which was two weeks ago!

They are character journals/notes however, not notes for everything that happened, just what my character knows/did.

 

[wolfen]

Allow me to play devil's advocate? With the kindest of intentions:

I suppose sister-questions could be "How crazy is your DM with providing inane, irrelevant details?" and "What supporting materials are offered to help players keep track of the sprawling plot?" Theoretically a DM knows everything, right? And most players have email. You see where I'm going.

I really like the game I play in right now. But I've been in games where there were so many names and facts that it got silly. In game, the character wouldn't have to struggle to remember the names of the 5 famous people he spoke with yesterday...but in real world time that might have been a week or more ago and Captain Whataninny is a stranger to me.

"Sir John: Nice guy that curls his mustache. Lives in a sweet, and heavily guarded, mansion. Trusted friend of King Alfons. Asked you to clean up the forest outside Morrustown."

Something like that. Simple enough to build on, but for every name mentioned. If you can't do it, why should each member of a party? It's not that the players can't do this...it's that they might not do this for every name thrown at them. I know personally I don't want to stop and ask the DM to clarify the exact roles (and spelling, hello) of the 3 names he sputtered out in one sentence. Can't he just hand me something simple like this so we don't have to pause the game? It can be difficult for me to feel my way through the scenario when we spend 30 seconds getting the correct spelling for Venthril Harrspach. I can add my own notes as we go, sure, but this still makes sense because if I DON'T then I at least haven't fallen out of the game world.

I've seen DM's get upset because the players missed one fact that the DM knew was important...but how were the players to know this amongst the barrage of info thrown at them? Sometimes it gets dropped. Heaven forbid they should be actively imagining the scene and situation instead of taking detailed notes.

As a DM, I try to mercifully remember that they're supposed to be taking notes, imagining the scene I'm describing, thinking of questions to ask, and "act like their character." At some point this will cease to be categorized as "fun" and will instead seem like a fancy d20 Sobriety Test.

Am I the only one who finds that this can get out of hand and boring? If the campaign has 10x as many vital characters as a Stephen King novel, and they've all got complex relationships to each other, then something's gone wrong. That's when I just put down my pencil and wait to roll dice.

Just a player's 2 cents.

wolfen

 

[DanMcS]

No, you're not the only one. Some DMs have a leeeeetle bit too much time on their hands. I appreciate that he prepared the adventure and all, but if you have all week to prepare the information, and then spit 6 days worth of background notes you made at me in a four-hour session, be prepared for me to stop giving a crap. It probably seems like "fantastic background detail" or "subtle mystery clue" to them as they write it up, but to me it all starts sounding like "innumerable detail #186" after a while.

If everyone in the city is fantastically detailed, I have no way of knowing which ones are important for this overarching railroad-plot you have us on (and DMs that have this much background detail are inevitably the ones who wish they were writing a novel, and have a plot the PCs can't avoid). This may aid the verisimilitude of the world, since my character would really have no way of knowing which people were "plot-important" either. But it's guaranteed to bore the crap out of all of us as we spend the whole session sifting through the 8000 irrelevant details you tossed at us.

When I run games, I go the exact opposite. I only write down details I know ahead of time WILL be important. Mooks that may be encountered in combat don't even get names. Information-source NPCs don't get statistics at all, just a note of what they know. If the PCs end up trying to fight them, I make it up. If someone wants to look up the address and phone number of a contact, I tell them, "ok, you look it up and know it", I don't need to say, "yeah, that's right here in my notes, it's 1347 Bunkum St".

 

[ciaran00]

I really like the game I play in right now. But I've been in games where there were so many names and facts that it got silly. In game, the character wouldn't have to struggle to remember the names of the 5 famous people he spoke with yesterday...but in real world time that might have been a week or more ago and Captain Whataninny is a stranger to me.

My game has a significant number of names/places/facts. We finally set up a collaborative system that pools this information together. The thing is, good names are hard to come by/come up with so I only name the people that matter. Unlike the real world, it sucks to have two "Sebastians" and so the burden on the DM to keep names separate is larger.

However, I don't think that detail is a bad IF it's relevant detail. DMs that tell me what the bartender's name is will see that I'll soon forget the guy (if he truly is as unimportant as most bartenders are)... but the good details, yeah I'll take notes.

To answer the first post, I have one player that is an excellent note taker. He and I have essentially organised the wiki for our game... the second player is really bad. Then again, he's got pretty bad memory. It's frustrating sometimes, more for the other player because things keep on going in my game even if players can't come up with a solution or some bit of vital information... it's kind of like penalising the first player because the second player is that bad. We're getting a third player who is probably as good as the first at that stuff, so...

I think that the number of names players know should be proportional to the amount of effect they have on the game world

ciaran

 

[ciaran00]

No, you're not the only one. Some DMs have a leeeeetle bit too much time on their hands.

What if the guy's introducing complexity on the fly? Is that the same kind of bad? I'm just curious...

ciaran