It’s 7:06 and you are doing the thing. “Okay, so, last time: you guys went to the docks, and you talked to the harbormaster, and he told you about the shipment, and then there was the fight with the two guys, and you found the ledger, oh and before that you sold the cart…”

You are four sentences in. The ranger is picking dice. The warlock is reading the ledger handout from three weeks ago like it’s new. You can feel the night’s energy draining through the floor while you perform an accurate, chronological, fatal summary of a session everyone technically attended.

If you searched “how to start a D&D session,” here is my answer in one line: open the way television opens, with a previously on. Thirty to ninety seconds of narration, cut for stakes instead of chronology, ending in the middle of the tension. TV has been solving the exact problem you have, an audience returning after a long gap, since before anyone at your table was born, and the editing rules it converged on transfer to the head of a D&D session almost untouched.

Cut it like a trailer

The summary I opened with fails because it is minutes of a meeting. It reports events, in order, with equal weight, the way a secretary would. Nobody has ever leaned forward during minutes.

Watch what an actual “previously on” does instead. It is thirty seconds cut from forty-five minutes of footage, and the editors threw away almost everything. No chronology. No completeness. They keep the knife at the throat, the sentence that ended the argument, the door left open. A “previously on” is a trailer for tonight’s episode that happens to be made of yesterday’s footage. Its job is to make you need the next scene, and memory is just the raw material it’s built from.

That’s the whole reframe. Your opening recap has one job, and the job is appetite. Accuracy is a side effect. The written recap in your campaign channel can be complete; the spoken opening gets ninety seconds and a knife.

The four cuts TV makes, and you should steal

Lead with the wound, never the beginning. The first sentence out of your mouth is the most unresolved thing on the table. “Sallow’s courier is still standing in your doorway, smiling, and he has not yet said what he wants.” Where the party started three weeks ago is trivia. Where it hurts is the hook, and you open on the hurt even though it happened at 10:40 at the end of last session. Chronology is for the minutes. The cold open runs on tension order.

Present tense, in-world, no “you guys.” “The ledger is in your pack. The harbormaster knows you have it. Somewhere above the fog, a bell is ringing that nobody in this city rings at night.” Past tense files the session away as finished business; present tense reopens it. The moment you narrate instead of summarize, players stop being an audience for a report and go back to being people in trouble.

Three proper nouns, maximum. The editors of a network drama assume you forgot everyone’s name, because you did, and so did your players. Every name past the third turns your cold open back into homework. “The smuggler who whistles” beats “Orel” for a character who’s been offscreen a month. Spend your three names on the ones tonight turns on.

End inside the tension, then cut to a decision. A “previously on” ends mid-breath, with a hand still reaching into a coat, and the episode starts. Yours should land on the open question (“he’s reaching into his coat”) and your very next sentence is the first scene demanding an answer (“what do you do?”). If your recap ends and then you say “so! where were we,” you built the spring and declined to release it.

Writing one takes five minutes, three weeks early

The trick is that a cold open is written at the end of the previous session, when the tension is still warm, and merely performed at the start of the next one. If you already end sessions with two lines for future you, you have the source material. The beats:

  1. The cliffhanger. The exact image the session ended on, one sentence, present tense.
  2. The pressure. Who or what is moving against the party while they rest, one sentence.
  3. The debt. The promise, favor, or bill that remains open, one sentence.

Three sentences is a complete cold open. Read it in your narrator voice, slower than feels natural, and let the last line hang for one full second before the first scene. The whole thing costs less time than the chronological ramble and leaves the table pointed at the door instead of at their phones.

A worked example, same session as the ramble above:

The ledger in your pack names every captain the harbormaster has bribed, and one of the names is a surprise: yours. Somewhere in the fog above the docks, the night bell is ringing, and the last man who heard it rung for him had a day to leave the city. It has been nine hours. Nobody has knocked. Yet.

Everything the minutes version buried (“you found the ledger”) is now the thing the night is about.

Where the player round fits

I’ve argued before that your players should give the recap, and I still run that round most weeks, so let me reconcile the two openings honestly. The player round and the cold open do different jobs. The round collects intent: what the table still holds, what each character wants, where the memory holes are. The cold open delivers momentum: stakes, dread, the bell in the fog. On an ordinary week, the round alone is plenty.

Reach for the cold open when momentum is the scarce resource: after a month-long gap, at the start of a new arc, when half the table missed last session, or on the night you want to feel like a season premiere. And the two stack beautifully in about three total minutes: run the round, listen for the holes, then deliver the cold open into the biggest hole. The table remembers the lizard and wants it dead; your narration reminds them, in present tense, that they also owe the lizard’s owner money.

The narrator who was actually there

The honest cost of all this is that somebody has to remember what the cliffhanger was, three weeks later, with enough precision to narrate it. Your two closing lines cover the ordinary weeks. For the rest, I’ll mention what we build. Loracle sits in your Discord voice channel, records the session, and writes the campaign’s “Previously On” for you: cliffhanger first, present tense, the recent sessions in detail and the deep history reduced to a whisper, in whatever language your table plays in. We built it to the same editing rules in this post, because they’re the right rules, and a machine that heard every word is very good at finding the knife.

But the craft is yours either way. Next session, skip the minutes. Write the three sentences, read them slowly, land on the open question, and watch five people lean toward a door you haven’t even described yet.