As a meticulous notetaker and bullet journal user, I love seeing other people's journals and such. In my dnd notes I use a yellow highlighter and write them in pencil just so I can erase and all that. I also use a lot of doodles of locations , NPCs, and events kind of as reminders or just while I'm listening (a carryover from my college notetaking).
Oh I am bullet journal person too and I have been trying to figure out what kind of spreads I can use for note taking for my TTRPG! So far I have my Pretty Character Sheet - NPC tracker and a place tracker. We are playing Quags so don't really do spells, but I like the idea of a big bad spread
These are Rook and Raven specific. I do think they now offer pages you can either have custom printed or can print yourself but I haven't tried those out
It's funny how there are a ton of D&D channels popping up with useful player/GM tips, but not a whole bunch of "what notes should you be taking?" videos. So thank you for this. Just my two cents: One of the first things I jot down in the session is to draw a rough layout of our table, note the player names at each seat/position and their character names, along with some basic info about that character in the eyes of your own character. I play a lot of public games in which I am not friends with the players; I don't even know who they are. Doing this means I have no excuse for pointing at a player, clicking my fingers trying to remember their name(s) and resorting to addressing them as "hey, you". Some of the notes can get a little rude though. Once played a LG Paladin of Bahamut that instantly did not get on well with the CN Rogue. So my brief notes was "Loren Riddle. Elven thief. Bit of a c**t."
It's my first time playing DnD, first campaign. I did not take notes for the first couple of sessions. And then there was a time when only my character passed the perception check. And the DM said I heard and saw some things in the surroundings. There was a lot and I said, hold up let me take some notes. And he was so glad that someone decided to take notes. We were online so I don't know if the others were taking notes. But since then, I wanted to learn what exactly I should keep track of. Thanks for this!
I appreciate you making this video player oriented. I was just thinking about how little content there is which is player centered. A lot of it, outside of class videos, is GM oriented which kind of incentivizes seeing prep and the extra time investment as mostly a GM thing.
My Digital solution for handwriting/notebooks is GoodNotes (v4). It’s fantastic. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted from “digital paper” and it fully handles PDFs (allowing markups as well). I use bullet style notation for shorthand. (Screenshot on Twitter)
This is great! Brilliant video :) I use D&D beyond for all my character management but your point about hand-writing notes is really true and I much prefer that :)
The algorithm only suggested this to me today, so sorry for the lateness of my reply, but can I just say how much I appreciate that this is actually 11 minutes and 40 seconds of helpful information about Note-Taking Tips for TTRPG Players? Thank you for not filling this video with rambling. You've earned a subscriber. Cheers from Calgary!
This is so useful, I'm the main notekeeper for some of the games I play. I'm setting up a character journal I might keep a scrap of paper for on the night note-taking and keep my journal next to me to look through for past info like npc names etc. I love the idea of refreshing the notes the night before a session, great idea!
As a fellow warlock I can assure you that we absolutely count on your notes. They have saved our butts on several occasions. We joke about them but we count on them and you.
In the Wednesday night games I am in with some friends, while I have been the player for the last three years, I was the note taker. Now that I am in the DM seat, someone else had to take up that role in the group. I like to think of it as being the Lorekeeper of a group, which is a nice piece of head canon.
A cool thing you can do is take notes from your character's perspective, which can be helpful from a role-playing perspective. Example: Someone was playing a character that goes insane over the course of the story, so as time went on the notes got more sloppy and less detailed.
i know this is an old video, but do you have an example (not necessarily your own, just if someone has done it) of player notes matched up to an actual play video in order to help see how the player renders down what's happening into their shorthand notes format?
Your vids on note taking have been a wonderful help. I’m a player in one game, and I’m just about the only player who takes notes. Even my DM (who is my buddy, so I cut him slack) just tries to remember the notes for next game. I left the link for this video in our Discord server, this is a blessing :)
These are such good ideas! I love the idea for writing out spells for memory retention; as a former professor, you'd think that would have occurred to me, but it did not! I also like the idea about *where* we put things, or where we bought them, but I LOVE the idea of using a key! We could even use colored star stickers or something, like red stars for NPCs or gold ones for "there be treasure here." The discbound system allows for separation of things, too, like a tabbed section for "things to discuss with the DM" or "things I want to buy someday" or the many good ideas you had for things to add.
I write: game session description (a paragraph or three), NPCs encountered and any pertinent game dialogue (short hand), types of monsters encountered, xp per encounter and every place I've been. I use spell cards like they are in my "hand" (like poker).
Thank you for sharing this! Just started a homebrew campaign and bought a Moleskine especially for this purpose, got so much inspiration and key points to jot down from such a nicely produced video. 👏
Star players always take notes! I encourage players to keep exhaustive gear lists. I've seen lots of players say "Oh, I don't have rope listed, but I would have it." Then they would just write it in, eventually writing in 10gp worth of free gear over the course of a session. My one player keeps a note book similar to yours and running games for her is super easy!
Plus keeping the gear list means you remember what you have. I've had some ideas get sparked by looking over my gear list and realizing I've got a special item that could help
@@Roll4Initiative Oooh, I've had a lot of players MacGyver things together from mundane equipment and items from the environment. It's so cool what people come up with when they have a full list of things in front of them!
Very good video for this topic. I think it’s one of the most important things to do which really helps me enjoy the game more. I even go back and clean up my notes and it helps me remember better as well. Two thumbs up!
Idk why I am even here, I take great notes. Just need to get the players to do it, don't think they getting my hints. Maybe I should just place obstacles in the way they require the knowledge :/
A little late, but Important note on those pens: They're heat-sensitive!! So if you happen to leave your notebook in a hot car on a summer's day, your writing MAY vanish! (Happened to a teacher-friend of mine... She now makes sure that her students use other pens :D )
I am a lifetime note taking nerd but brand new D&D player so this was super helpful AND ALSO I WAS GEEKING OUT THE WHOLE TIME. I can't wait to set up my character's journal nowwww! Thank you for the tips!
I keep my notes in a very similar way, but not this organized, so this helps a lot in what to tweak and how! I love that Dawn goes through the notes the night before the game - reviewing like that not only helps with information, but also with enjoyment of the game and with getting into the mindspace for gaming, which I've been missing the last few months and I'm just starting to get back to it :3
A fellow notebook enthusiast!!!! My bf thinks I'm silly for having fifty unopened and unused notebooks but now I know I'm not alone!! I try my best to take notes, but my ADHD makes it terribly hard to listen/follow the story and take notes....
Would jotting down keywords during the game and then going back right after the session to flesh out the notes help? I've done that a few times in really intense sessions where I haven't wanted to lose the moment but knew there was stuff I wanted help remembering.
Also! Always remember to colour ordinate stuff! I put spell stuff in different colours for each source and put green boxes around names and underline important stuff (My notebook has so many notes dear god. Its my character sheet and all spell/god stuff and then all the stuff that happens)
I have a notebook that holds all my spells, player notes from the session, and the back half of the notebook holds combat details like components expended or munitions used.
I love taking the notes-it keeps me focused and always helps with all of us having crap memories. Almost all of us take notes but I always make sure to have everything *the dm asks me for stuff she made up on the spot* and its been a lifesaver so many times esspecially since my character remembers and knows stuff
I definitely am taking notes constantly throughout gameplay. We transfer everyone's notes to a Google doc (now split in two because we are at 300+ pages over this past 16 months. I have also taken moments after gameplay for Ooglat's Thoughts (my character is Ooglat Hammerthorn and she has been keeping a journal throughout). With these 'thoughts' I send them in an email to everyone. Sometimes she feels lost. One time she wasn't sure how to feel about the murder of a priest by someone in their party. I have now begun writing a journal that takes places months before the game. It's on the computer but is then being handwritten into a handmade journal. I'll end up incorporating all of our group notes once I catch up to our starting point. So much fun. So much richer gameplay.
I’m actually gonna have my first D&D game ever soon and I’m really excited! I’ve been watching a lot of tips for note taking and I think I’ve figure out a system that might work for me and it might for some other people too! Now this takes a lot of time after session but I would love to have everything written down on a journal neatly! So here you go What I would like to do is three things. Number one, record the session in a voice memo with the permission of everyone. In that case if I don’t have time to write something down I just quickly write down the time stamp and what they are talking about. For example: 31:12 lore. So then after the session I can go back and take notes! Number two is to take notes during the session but on my iPad, it’s quicker to type and if I’m in a rush my handwriting won’t look like trash and ruin the aesthetic I’m trying to go for in my D&D journal! Another method to not ruin your D&D journal could just be take notes down but in different paper and that’s ok except for the fact I might not be able to understand my handwriting. Now in my iPad a have a note taking system where I divide it by sections: session notes, locations, loot & equipment, NPCs, lore and backstories. I’ll also have a section for spells and Cantrips if my character is any sort of magic user. I also like having this section for useful links so that if I have any questions regarding something my character can use that I forgot I can just check it and it’ll be there! Now the sections might take some time to switch through if I’m taking quick notes so I’d also like to have a section for notes I don’t have time to switch sections to. Number three, then I like to organize the information I’d like to have in my journal! This isn’t exactly my character’s journal so there wouldn’t be in character note taking but I could have different colored pages that indicate they are in character note taking! This is a bit longer than I wanted it to be but I hope this helped someone! ^^
These tips are amazing and so helpful. The bad side is that I want to re-write my entire notebook again. Glad I'm still a couple more than 10 sessions in (I was already getting informations wrong due to my lack of organization). Thank you, Dawn. You're so kind.
I'm new to TTRPG, but for a few years I've been using a system called Bullet Journal. It's a concept based around creating an index with numbered pages, and I'm gonna adapt it for use in a Shadowrun game I was invited to. I can have a collection based around NPCs or Locations for example. Then I can number them and go through the Index so I can know exactly what page a given note is on. I will take notable things as they happen in a running session log, and then I can go through later and migrate the important things into the near future if it's a more immediate goal, or into a monthly tracker if it's a long term goal, or just into categories I may need to create. It's expandable, so if I need more space for NPC notes for example, the index will look like "NPCs, p12-p13, p20, p26" and I can quickly scan through. I feel like it will be a useful way to keep on top of things.
I've used the bullet journal system for a few years for work and personal journals. it works really well and I've definitely used a few of the concepts from it in my ttrpg notetaking. The collections idea is something I haven't done as much but that's a good idea
