Guide
D&D Session Notes Template
Most DMs start taking session notes after the first time a player asks “wait, who was the guy with the ledger?” and nobody at the table remembers. Not the players, not you, not the person who swore they wrote it down.
Below is a template you can copy and use tonight. It takes about ten minutes to fill in after a session, and it is built around one idea: you are writing for a version of yourself who has forgotten everything.
The template
SESSION [N] - [DATE] Present: [which players and characters were there] WHERE WE LEFT OFF One line. What was happening when you stopped last time. WHAT HAPPENED Three to six bullets. Beats, not a transcript. DECISIONS THE PARTY MADE What they chose, and just as importantly what they chose against. NPCs Name - who they are to the party - what happened with them this session. OPEN THREADS Every promise, debt, threat, and unanswered question. LOOT AND REWARDS Items, gold, favors, information. WHERE WE STOPPED The cliffhanger, plus what the players think happens next.
Why each section is there
Where we left off. This is the section you will thank yourself for. It becomes next session's “previously on,” which is the fastest way to get a distracted table back into the story.
What happened. Resist writing everything. Notes that try to capture a whole session become a chore, and a chore gets skipped by session four. Three to six beats is enough. If a moment does not make the list, it probably was not load bearing.
Decisions. This is the part most templates miss. What the party turned down matters as much as what they did. The noble they refused to help is a plot hook with legs.
NPCs. Names are the first thing you lose. Write the name, one line on who they are, and what just happened with them. Two weeks later, “Toblen, innkeeper, lied to the guards to protect the party” will save you. There is a fuller framework in the NPC tracker guide.
Open threads. This is the money section. Every promise made, every debt owed, every threat sworn. When you sit down to prep, this list is your prep. Most sessions plan themselves out of three unresolved threads.
Where we stopped, and what they think happens next. Write down the players' theories, especially the wrong ones. A table convinced the mayor is a doppelganger is more useful to you than the truth, because that is the story they are actually playing.
Three things that make notes stick
Write them after the session, not during it. During the game your job is running the game. Ten minutes afterward, while it is fresh, produces better notes than an hour of scribbling mid combat. If you must write during play, write only names and numbers.
Capture what the players cared about. The three hour dungeon crawl may take one bullet. The five minute conversation they would not stop quoting gets its own line.
Do it before you sleep. Notes written the next morning are noticeably worse. Something about the night resets the details.
What a filled in template looks like
This is a real session from a Tomb of Annihilation campaign, session 7.
Where we left off
The party was returning from Camp Righteous to their boat.
What happened
- Goblins had seized the boat and set an ambush, with a hobgoblin boss, bomb engineers, archers, and a ridden allosaurus. Eku was restrained and gagged on the deck.
- The allosaurus pounced on Bob and Dahc immediately, dealing 16 damage each and restraining both prone before a single player had acted.
- Oak wild shaped into a brown bear and killed the allosaurus with Burning Hands.
- Dahc was downed by bomb fire and finished off by a goblin coup de grace, while Thrain chose to heal himself instead of his fallen cleric.
- Bob defused the keg bomb by cutting the green wire with two ticks left on a thirty tick fuse.
- Eku revealed she had used a one use soul trapping amulet to preserve Dahc's soul, then decapitated his body to prevent reanimation.
Decisions the party made
Refused the goblins' demand to surrender their gear. Thrain healed himself rather than Dahc, which the table has not stopped arguing about.
NPCs
Eku, guide and ally, was taken hostage and afterward revealed she can hear Dahc speak through the amulet.
Open threads
- The party has three nights to find Dahc a new body.
- Only Eku can hear Dahc. Nobody has asked what that costs her.
- The hobgoblin boss escaped.
Where we stopped
On the boat, with a headless cleric, a talking amulet, and a three day clock.
Notice how little of that is prose. It is a list of things that will matter later, written so a tired person can read it in thirty seconds.
If typing this up every week is the part you hate
That example was not typed by hand. It came out of CritSheet, which takes whatever notes you scribble, or a recording of the session, and writes the recap, the beats, and the open threads for you. It also tracks who dealt the most damage, who went down, and who has the best career record across the campaign.
You can see the full version of that session, including the box score.
The template above works fine on its own. Use it either way.