Session-Recap

If you play D&D over Discord, someone at your table has already suggested the Craig bot. They were right to. Craig is the default recording bot for online tabletop, it earned that spot honestly, and if you searched “craig bot dnd” trying to decide whether to use it, my answer is yes. Use Craig. This post is about the question that shows up after you do, the one I built a whole product around: you now have six hours of audio. Who’s going to remember what’s in it? ...

It’s 7:04. You are pulling up the map, muting the guy whose fan sounds like a leaf blower, re-reading the note you left yourself (“they owe Sallow a favor, DO NOT FORGET”), and queuing the tavern playlist. This is, minute for minute, the busiest you will be all night. And by tradition, this is also the exact moment you are supposed to stop everything and deliver a tight, evocative summary of a session that happened nineteen days ago. ...

It has been twenty-three days since the party entered the swamp. Somebody had a work trip, then somebody’s kid got the flu, and tonight, finally, five people are back at the table. Your paladin looks at the map, looks at you, and asks the question with total sincerity: “Why are we in a swamp?” Nobody knows. The rogue thinks it involved a lizard. Your notes say “they follow Meren’s trail south,” which would be useful if anyone at the table, including you, could remember who Meren is. ...

Your barbarian just proposed marriage to the lich. The whole table is losing it, someone has fallen off their chair, and you missed the exact wording because you were writing down how much the healing potions cost. If you came here searching for a D&D session notes template, you are about to get one. It fits on an index card, it takes five lines, and I want to talk you out of everything beyond it first, because the template only works once you accept what it is for. The person taking thorough notes at a D&D table is playing a worse game than everyone else. They react a beat late. They laugh at the punchline secondhand. They experience the session the way a court stenographer experiences a trial. And here is the part that stings: the notes they sacrifice all that presence for are usually bad, because writing prose in real time while five people talk over each other is a job we pay professionals to do. ...

It’s 7:09 on a Tuesday. The pizza’s late, somebody’s dog is barking on the call, and your rogue is asking — completely sincerely — whether they still have the cursed amulet. They do. They’ve had it for four sessions. They were there when they picked it up. This is the moment the recap was invented for. Not the wiki, not the binder, not the forty-page campaign bible nobody reads. The two minutes at the top of the night where five distracted adults put down their phones, climb back into people who can cast spells, and remember that last week they swore a blood oath to a goose. ...