Friction Points of Solo Play (Part Six): Record Keeping

Enough to remember. Not so much that you dread it.

TTRPG journaling sits on a razor’s edge: too much of it and you’ve traded a game for a writing a, spending more time documenting your adventure than actually having one. Too little, and three months from now you’ll have no real sense of what your character actually did, leaving you with a vague impression that something happened involving a dungeon and a betrayal by…what was their name again?…

Both are genuine friction points, and they pull in opposite directions. The first kills your momentum in the moment, turning what should be a satisfying post-session wind-down into something that feels like admin work. The second robs you of one of the longer payoffs of solo play: watching a narrative accumulate over time, looking back at months of sessions and seeing the actual shape of an adventure. That’s one of the best feelings this hobby offers. But you can’t have it if you’ve got nothing to look back at.

Which brings us to the record-keeping sweet spot. A brief summary — not a transcript, not a diary entry, just a few bullet points that capture what happened before the details dissolve into the next week of ordinary life.

Here’s the format I use:

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Session Summary Template

• Summary — Bird’s of view of the session. Two sentences max.

• Major Event 1 — What happened? Two sentences max.

• Major Event 2 — What happened? Two sentences max.

• Major Event 3 — etc.,…

• Conclusion — How did the session end? Where are things left?

• Rating — /10

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Example:

Session 14 — The Road to Veldrath

• Summary: Mira and the Thornback Company were hired to escort a merchant through the Ashwood, where rumors of bandits had been circulating for weeks. The merchant was clearly hiding something.

• Major Event 1: An ambush at the old mill bridge left Brek with an arrow in his shoulder. Mira bluffed her way through negotiations with the bandit captain.

• Major Event 2: The merchant’s “cargo” turned out to be a young woman trying to escape her family, which made the job more complicated and left the company divided on whether to see it through.

• Major Event 3: Made camp in the ruins of a waystation. Something watched from the tree line for most of the night. Didn’t investigate. Probably fine.

• Conclusion: Reached the outskirts of Veldrath with Brek stable and the merchant growing increasingly nervous.

• Rating: 8/10

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That took me about five minutes of writing, and I prefer to use a dedicated “adventure log” notebook that I can come back to with each session. I believe with record-keeping, consistency is more important than comprehensiveness. Capturing a few key details is more helpful than putting pressure on yourself to capturing everything or record it in narrative form (although ChatGPT is very good at taking basic session notes and enriching them with narrative prose if you so choose).

Lastly, I rate my session, which is more useful than it might initially seem. After a dozen or so sessions you start to notice genuine patterns: high-rated sessions tend to share certain qualities — meaningful choices, real surprise, some sense of consequence — while lower-rated ones tend to drift or feel mechanical, like you were going through motions and finding your attention scattered. The ratings give you data you can use to tune how you’re playing and what kinds of situations you’re setting up for yourself.

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A Brief Word on Reflection

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12

Taking time to relfect on our adventures isn’t something confined to solo gaming. It applies to our lives as well.

We don’t grow simply by doing more things or accumulating more experiences. We grow by taking time to thoughtfully process what we’ve done, to let it settle and coalesce into meaning. Experience without reflection tends to leave us busy but somehow not particularly wiser for all of it. The ancients understood this intuitively: wisdom isn’t the natural product of a full schedule, but of a practiced habit of slowing down and asking what just happened, and what does it mean for how I move forward?

Your session summaries are a small, accessible version of that discipline. You’re not just logging events for future reference; you’re making meaning out of what you experienced, giving your mind and soul a chance to catch up to the adventure before the next one begins.

And this extends off the table, too. There’s a version of a life that is full and busy and always moving and also, somehow, not quite going anywhere or meaning anything; a life that doesn’t feel like it’s building toward a larger, more inspiring story. And then there’s a version that looks nearly identical from the outside but includes a few quiet minutes at the end of the day with a notebook: a sentence or two about what happened, a rating, a note on what made it that way and what you’d carry forward. That small habit is one of the clearest differences between people who are building busy lives and people who are building meaningful ones.

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