One of the challenges of being a Dungeon Master is remembering everything that’s happened. And the more you play a campaign the more information you need to keep track of. I jot down notes of NPC’s, locations and more as I run a game, but often times there is a character mentioned twenty sessions back, I remember the situation but not the character name. Tabletop Recorder, coming to Kickstarter soon, is going to help with that.

Checkout the campaign page here. And sneak a peek at the website here.

What Is Tabletop Recorder

The best way I can put what Tabletop Recorder is, is it’s that it’s like the AI note taking technology you see for work meetings. But, it’s specifically tailored to working with RPG’s. You give it an audio file of your D&D or other RPG campaign and it is going to spit out the session notes and give you an interface where you can query what has happened.

The creators of Tabletop Recorder reached out to me to see if I wanted to give it a try before the campaign went live. And I love to see tech integrated well into something, and with my podcast equipment, it made it easy to record, though, it’d also be easy to record on a phone as well. So I got to play around with it and get early access, which I’m much appreciative for, and use it for a couple D&D sessions and a couple of dummy sessions.

Let’s talk quickly about how it works. Right now the system is record an audio file, upload that audio file and it processes it giving you some outputs and letting you query against it. There are plans depending on how the crowdfunding campaign does to let you record to the website, or with enough time and money possibly native apps for iOS and Android. But right now it’s record a file, upload, and let it do it’s thing. But let’s talk about how well it does it’s thing.

How Well Does It Work at Transcribing?

The starting thing that I wanted to know was how it worked when it came to catching everything for a full campaign. The campaign that I’m running has time travel and is reaching end game so there are a lot of already established NPC’s, locations, and lore within the game. It’s not a simple setting and series of events at this point. In fact, the players had just managed to screw up the timeline really badly with some created paradoxes via time travel.

And it does a good job with the transcription. It actually gives you four different ways that you can look at your session. There is the full transcription which is a transcription as you would expect. But there is also the long, medium, and short recaps. I think that all of them are solid and they all serve a different purpose. But for really getting all the information, the transcript and the long are going to be your best bet. The medium is great for that quick recap of what happened, and the short is a slightly too long description that I’d use for a podcast if I recorded for a podcast as well.

Short Description

The short, to it’s credit does try and be a narrative telling of what happened. And it does a pretty solid job of that. I might use it for kind of a quick check on what happened previously as I plan a next session, but it’s going to be light on details.

Cleaning It Up

And if you think it missed something, or you want to correct something you can. For example, you’ll see it below, we have a PC named Barai in our game. It learned it as Bry, so it classified Barai as an NPC. But I can go in and edit that to help it learn and connect things. And I can do that really easily. One feature that I’d love to see in their editor is a bit more of a robust find and replace feature. But I clicked edit, copy and pasted to Notepad and did it there, which is easy.

What Else Does It Do?

The other big feature is that you get a Q&A tool. This tool is going to query either a specific session or a specific campaign for you. And you get back details about what happened in a session, or in a moment. Let me give a few examples of what I’ve used it for.

Asking for NPC’s

If I want a list of NPC’s, I can ask it for a list of NPC’s. And it is going to give me that list with a little description, or I can ask for a list without a description just so I can get as many NPC names as I can. I can do that for the whole campaign if I want, and it’ll give me a solid list.

Character names won’t make any sense, but it does a very good job. I will call out that Kip and Barai are both player characters, but you can go in and tweak that.

Asking for Plot

That is a relatively easy request. So let’s give it a more open prompt. And this is a prompt that I think a lot of Dungeon Masters would like. What is the players plan?

That isn’t even everything. But it does a solid job of splitting things out. And it is going back not only across the latest session, but the multiple sessions to pull out details. I can select only the last session if I wanted to get exactly where we are out. Or I can go across everything, I like I did, and review where the players are at to help me plan my next session.

And More

And you can query more as well. These are just two examples that I think highlight a very practical side of using it. But more than that, also a very useful side in terms of gathering narrative points. But you can really ask to your hearts content with it and create queries to get the answers you need.

Who is Tabletop Recorder For?

Before we get to if I’d use it or not, let’s talk about who it’s going to benefit the most. To me this is a Dungeon Master tool. Yes, I think there are things that the players will like about it too, but the strength is going to be for a dungeon master.

Why is that? Do players want to know everything in the campaign, sure. It can replace note taking. But that’s the big benefit for the players. For the Dungeon Master it is going to be a tool that helps with that note taking but also planning sessions and keeping track of all those loose ends. And I think even worldbuilding it’s going to be a dynamic tool for the Dungeon Master.

So, while everyone will get a benefit from it, there are some people it’ll benefit more. And some will depend on how you can access it. If everyone needs a subscription to access it, I don’t know that it’s worth it. But if there’s a dungeon master level to pledge and access and then lesser licenses, or links that can be shared to the campaign, it’ll be a good tool for everyone. It’ll depend on the access model to determine how much value it will hold.

Would I Use Tabletop Recorder?

So first, off, this is a preview. I was not paid for the preview, but I did get early access to the system. So, I give my honest opinion on it, but it is a preview. I want you to take what I say with a grain of salt.

I want to use this in my next campaign. It is something that I already found useful. But I think for a new campaign it is going to be very useful for me. Your mileage might vary depending on how you run your game. But for how I play Dungeons and Dragons, in my case, it is great. Let’s talk about why.

Note Taking

I am not the best at taking notes. I play theater of the mind and improv a ton in my games. That means that we go in unexpected directions a lot. And we tend to be a narrative heavy campaign and interaction heavy campaign versus a combat heavy campaign. In two sessions, I already like the ability to recap things and help me remember what happened last session. Whether it being me querying specific things or reading the short or medium recap to remember what is going on.

This is a great replacement for note taking for me. And it’s unobtrusive. I just stick my microphone in the middle of the table, hit record and we start playing. And, I think we did a good job of actually playing a real session. By that I mean tangents happened. We got sidetracked, we made references to things, and it was still useful for me.

Worldbuilding

This is an element that I think is going to be useful, but I haven’t done yet. I mainly think of it for a new campaign, but to prime for a session as well it would be good. What am I talking about?

So, I start a new game and I jot down some notes for a new world. They could offer me a way to enter them into the system, which I wouldn’t mind. But I can also record those notes, who are NPC’s that the players are going to meet. What is the end goal situation of the campaign and things like that. I can prime the system to know NPC names and all of that jazz. Then I can use a tablet, laptop, or phone, behind the DM’s screen to look those things up. It already has my planning notes in there for me.

Now not everything should go in there. If I plan to have a combat, don’t add those to the system ahead of time. That’s part of the active story. But I easy can see myself using it to prep a new campaign with some town names, NPC names, and history of the world so I can easily query it in the moment.

Final Thoughts

Tabletop Recorder is a luxury RPG add-on. Let’s be clear about that. Is it something that you need for your campaign, no. Is it something that is going to make your life easier, yes. To me that is what a good product for an RPG should be. If it claims it’s needed, I get really suspicious. But let me say, I find this nice already. I see the value already for keeping my planning time shorter and note taking easier.

You might not find that value. You might already have a way that you like to prepare for your campaign. But if that is a burden on you, I think that Tabletop Recorder is worth looking into. And for me, I see the value of it. It all comes down to how much it costs though, because there is a value of time versus the value of money that you need to make a decision on. But this is true with everything from the new version of Dungeons and Dragons to miniatures to the snacks you have while you game.

For me, I think it could very well be worth it though. I value that time that I can quickly prepare in versus the time that I spend flipping through the light notes that I have. And from what I’ve seen the technology is working well. And as a software engineer and a manager who has looked at Teams tools and Microsoft Co-Pilot, this is a nice system that is specifically for what I’d want for D&D.

So one last plug to checkout the Tabletop Recorder campaign coming soon to see if it’s for you.

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