D&D General My experience with popular D&D session summarizer tools

[Algorithmancer]

I've been testing session summarizer tools over the last 2 months across my campaigns, and I figured I’d share my experience in case anyone is looking to explore these tools which seem to be relatively new.

disclaimer: All of these offer free trial sessions, so I'd strongly encourage trying them yourself before committing to anything. Unfortunately, they're all paid services with monthly subscriptions - none are free or have lifetime purchase options like some other D&D tools sadly. My experience might also be very different from yours depending on your group's style and needs.

I was surprised to find out there are three different tools doing essentially the same thing for what feels like a pretty niche area in D&D. I focused on what seem to be the three most popular ones (as far as I can tell, or have been recommended) - Saga20, GM Assistant and Chargen.

Pricing Comparison (for 4 sessions/month, 5 hours each)​

• Saga20: $9 USD/month
• GM Assistant: $25 USD/month
• Chargen: $27 USD/month

Saga20 - 8.5/10​

This one has the best core summarization quality and feels more polished. It feels like using Notion but for D&D sessions, the notes are shown as flexible blocks rather than sections which I personally prefer. I tend to dislike having rigid sections in other tools as well like Kanka (World building tool) so your experience might be different.

What it does well:

• Great summary quality, it managed to capture events accurately and concisely (I noticed that these tools sometimes like to exaggerate or mention things that didn’t happen. This one does it the least)
• Remembers and references things from previous sessions when creating new summaries
• Voice matching across sessions is great and saves time (not perfect but its a novel feature that the others don’t have)
• Most affordable option, the price difference is a bit staggering

The downsides:

• Can't share summaries with players - no sharing function at all
• Fewer bells and whistles compared to competitors
• No access to full transcripts
• No different summary format options

This one seems to have the best core functionality and opts for depth of feature quality rather than breadth of feature options, which I appreciate. However the missing sharing feature is a bit frustrating as I need to manually copy everything over to another app to share it with players.

GM Assistant - 7/10​

If you want comprehensive features and don't mind paying for it, this covers a lot of ground. GMAssistant seems to have the most options and features out of all these tools, some of which are quite useful.

What it does well:

• Multiple summary formats (Full/Short/Stylized) - the variety is genuinely useful
  
  • The 'Middle English' stylized option is random but entertaining
• Very detailed summaries with structured sections (Recap, Notes, Outline, Location, Spells, etc.)
• Spell tracking that's quite accurate - huge win for spellcaster heavy parties
• Access to full transcripts
• Working share function for getting summaries to players

The downsides:

• The extreme detail in its summaries is a double edged sword, it doesn’t miss any detail in your transcript but however tends to hallucinate more and mention additional things that didn’t happen.
• Expensive - Its hard to justify spending over $25 a month on a session summariser, which would be over half of the ~$40 I previously spent for ALL my D&D tools each month.
• Processing time is brutal in my experience (It took over 30+ minutes to process my audio)
• Interface feels less polished overall

If you need maximum features and spell tracking is important, this might justify the higher cost. But that processing time really tests your patience. The sharing feature is nice, the players I tested with mentioned that they appreciate the different formatting options when viewing it.

Chargen - 5/10​

This one has some interesting ideas but the execution needs serious work. When it functions, it has some promising features, but reliability and experience is a major issue.

What it does well:

• Auto-label enemies/allies (gets it right ~60% of the time which is honestly impressive for a feature like this)
• Has character/location/event type labels. Not super accurate but has promise, I could see this being very useful if it was more accurate. The other two tools don’t have this.
• Structured sections that are actually done better than GM Assistant in some ways, I appreciate the clean tabs and sections.

The downsides:

• App feels extremely clunky and unreliable - it took me 4 attempts to create a campaign, this had the worse interface out of the three tools.
• Basic functionality breaks regularly (buttons that don't work, frequent loading failures on the dashboard)
• Sign-up process is buggy (password requirements don't show proper errors, it took me 10 minutes to sign up)
• Share button literally doesn't work. I wasn’t able to test it at all.
• Major privacy concern: Doesn't seem to delete your audio files and gives you permanent access to them (other tools delete after processing)
• Most expensive option despite the major technical issues

This tool had alot of potential, I liked the landing page and the features it promised. However, it just isn’t there yet and feels almost unusable. The privacy issue alone would make me hesitant to use this regularly. I don't want my session audxed fornitely without a clear way to delete it.

Verdict

Overall out of the three I'd currently recommend Saga20. It has the best summary quality, most reliable functionality and very reasonable pricing. The lack of sharing hurts, but the core experience is extremely solid and I would use this for my sessions.

GM Assistant is also pretty good and has comprehensive features, if don't mind paying extra for the extra features and can tolerate slower processing. The sharing function alone might justify it for some groups.

Chargen has interesting ideas but needs to fix basic reliability and privacy concerns before it's worth considering seriously. In its current state I would not recommend it at all.

Are they worth it? Personally, these tools save me a lot of time since I'm running 3 campaigns and playing in another - organizing my notes and trying to remember everything well was much harder previously. Obviously not everyone needs this, but if you're in a similar situation it might be worth checking out.

Has anyone else tried these tools or have thoughts on session summarizers in general? would love to hear about others experiences as well

 

[Algorithmancer]

I'm also thinking of doing another review specifically for VTT tools. I've currently got Roll20, Foundry VTT and Fantasy Grounds on the list. If anyone else has recommendations to try please let me know

 

[el-remmen]

One of my groups plays over Zoom and its tools do a decent job of summarizing but there is a delay in processing the meeting into a summary and I usually have to fix it’s treating players and characters as separate people and a few other things it consistently gets wrong (like monster names).

 

[MNblockhead]

I use Scripty with discord to do a machine transcription of my game sessions. I upload the transcripts to ChatGPT project and have trained ChatGPT to (1) make a session summary and (2) pull out major NPCs and generate a JSON file to update my Dramatis Personae journal in Foundry.

I took a long time to get ChatGPT trained to the point where it would give acceptable game summaries. I also would rather not have to use two tools, one to transcribe and one to summarize. I've been very impressed with Google Meet's ability to transcribe and summarize business meetings. I am trying to get my players to agree to use Google Meet for our next session instead of Discord. It will be interesting to see how it performs with a long game session. If it does work, I'll happily ditch Discord.

I'll still probably use Foundry to pull out major NPCs and generate the JSON file for my foundry journal recording major NPCs. Even if Gemini can handle it, I would expect I would have to go through a lengthy process of training and testing it, which I don't really want to do again, since I already have it working in ChatGPT.

 

[Algorithmancer]

One of my groups plays over Zoom and its tools do a decent job of summarizing but there is a delay in processing the meeting into a summary and I usually have to fix it’s treating players and characters as separate people and a few other things it consistently gets wrong (like monster names).

Yeah I tried one of these Meeting tools and has the same problem too. I think an issue with those is that they're too business focused and tend to try and get 'action items' or tries to match character/spell names with business jargon.

Have you found any workarounds for the character/player confusion issue, or do you just manually clean it up each time?

 

[Algorithmancer]

I use Scripty with discord to do a machine transcription of my game sessions. I upload the transcripts to ChatGPT project and have trained ChatGPT to (1) make a session summary and (2) pull out major NPCs and generate a JSON file to update my Dramatis Personae journal in Foundry.

I took a long time to get ChatGPT trained to the point where it would give acceptable game summaries. I also would rather not have to use two tools, one to transcribe and one to summarize. I've been very impressed with Google Meet's ability to transcribe and summarize business meetings. I am trying to get my players to agree to use Google Meet for our next session instead of Discord. It will be interesting to see how it performs with a long game session. If it does work, I'll happily ditch Discord.

I'll still probably use Foundry to pull out major NPCs and generate the JSON file for my foundry journal recording major NPCs. Even if Gemini can handle it, I would expect I would have to go through a lengthy process of training and testing it, which I don't really want to do again, since I already have it working in ChatGPT.

That's a really impressive setup you've got - having it automatically export to your world journal is brilliant. I can definitely see why you wouldn't want to redo that whole process.

I'm curious how your experience would be with Google Meet handling the business meeting vs D&D session context though. When I tried it, it kept trying to extract action items from tactical discussions and struggled with fantasy names. Are you planning to add any workarounds for that?

 

[Clint_L]

I'm also thinking of doing another review specifically for VTT tools. I've currently got Roll20, Foundry VTT and Fantasy Grounds on the list. If anyone else has recommendations to try please let me know

I suggest you include Maps from DDB - it’s gotta be the most used D&D VTT by a significant margin.

 

[Algorithmancer]

I suggest you include Maps from DDB - it’s gotta be the most used D&D VTT by a significant margin.

Haven't heard of this one, will check it out thanks