Four Brief Arguments for Session Reports
The proposition: session reports are worth writing even if nobody reads them.1
1.
Writing a session report is part of prepping for your next session. Whether or not the reports have utility for other readers, they are useful for their author.2
This operates on multiple levels:
- The session report is a way to routinize book-keeping. Was experience awarded correctly? Who took what magic item? Did any hirelings fade into quantum indeterminacy?
- The session report consolidates the game-state & acts as a useful reference for resolving uncertainties about past events.
- Cognitively, writing a session report is a form of "retrieval practice", an effective way of solidifying the game-state in memory, even if the written documents are never re-opened later.
2.
The aesthetic qualities of session reports are under-appreciated.
Session reports are more than a rote recounting of events. Whereas "trad"/"neotrad", and some "story" games impose a narrative structure from the get-go, much of the fun of a sandbox/"OSR" game comes from retroactively reading an emergent narrative into events that unfold through happenstance -- applying abduction to impose meaning on a set of details. This is always a creative, interpretive act.
Playing in Scribble's REDUX campaign, I have also come to appreciate D&D as a 'document generator'. Session reports exist within a broader field of secondary documents like maps, doodles, character sheets, notes, document requests, poems, songs, etc. These ephmera have a "hauntological" mystique as traces of a living process that is no more.
And as a matter of purely personal taste, there is an archly humorous 'session report voice' that I really love -- the Ryth chronicles are a good example. There's lots of comedic potential in the contrast between an aloof writing style & the lurid fantastical events of a typical campaign. But with that said, there are so many additional voices to explore! In-character session reports lend themselves to this, but you could also report your sessions as though you're a spy reporting on the party's activities to a distant handler, or as though your a scholar attempting to make sense of someone else's messy notes, or as though you're a mad prophet attributing mystical significance to events in the dungeon, or as though you're the dungeon itself describing your attempts to disgorge the interlopers, etc. etc.
3.
Session reports are useful for establishing credibility when discussing other topics.
To be clear, nobody should knee-jerk discount blogs that don't post them -- let there be a blanket good-faith assumption that we're all engaged in the hobby of tabletop gaming to the degree that life allows, with or without play reports. But reporting on a (broad or deep!) set of game sessions helps contextualize one's advice & theory.
4.
Finally, though perhaps less compelling than 1-3, session reports are valuable as historical documents. Having read Jon Peterson's Elusive Shift & Playing at the World, it's striking how much he relies on play reports published in APAs to understand how D&D and the entire genre of "role-playing game" developed out of wargaming and sci-fi fandom.
TTRPGs are ephemeral -- the "game" is a process that elapses through conversation; it leaves only traces behind. Rules texts in isolation are inadequate for fulling understanding a game. Play reports are part of the collective memory of our hobby scene. If what we do as hobbyists is ever to be understood by curious people in future generations, we should be keeping a record of our games.3
P.S. If these arguments swayed you at all toward writing session reports, consider joining Campaign26
In case this seems self-serving in light of my recent session-report posting, the arguments do not involve reading others' reports, including mine.↩
This point is mostly directed at referees, but consolidation is useful for players as well.↩
And don't think you can predict whether or not future people will find your games interesting!↩