Rethinking the Recap: the Mission Report

I'm taking a week off from your regularly scheduled Guide to Goblins series content to bring you another piece of GM advice. The last major GM advice article I wrote was about backstories; this time, we're going to be talking about something that I actually think I've found a way to do really, really well.

An important caveat: I certainly did not invent this. There's entire wiki softwares built around the idea of providing a program that allows you to do this. I'm also immensely helped by the fact that several of my players are professional writers, meaning that my players help me out immensely so that this is not just another GM task on my plate. As always with GM advice, your mileage may vary.

The Recap as It Stands

So first, some assumptions / goals / the problem we're solving – because if you disagree with these aims, then my solution won't do anything for you and your table.

A good recap accomplishes a few things. It reminds everyone what has happened recently, which presumably is information relevant to the upcoming session. It is a way to bring information to the forefront. It is a chance to warm up, a moment of transition between the "sitting around talking" part of a session and the "actually playing the game" part of session.

There's a lot of bad advice out there about recaps. One of the most common stances is that you should let your players do recaps, to see what things most stuck out to them. There's a problem with that, though; it means you don't get to highlight what was actually important. Particularly for traditional-style games, rather than more "narrativist" games, that should not be a power that the GM relinquishes; after all, the party doesn't know what is about to come up in the next session, so why should they choose what to emphasize and remind everyone of?

The Recap Problem

But... I still hate doing recaps as a GM. It's extra work to think about the specific way to frame what has previously happened, and frankly, my post-session notes are often worse than the notes that my players took (which I'll acknowledge is a blessing--my players are, by and large, awesome notetakers, which is definitely not true at every table). So I know the basics of what happened, but sometimes I'll go back to my session notes and go "wait, did we actually do X scene?" Or, more accurately, it might be a small thing I forgot to make note of.

To give you a real example from my past campaign, the party killed a person who was intending to poison them but took his poisons and buried them elsewhere only after they realized that they probably wouldn't be useful. Where they buried the poison was not something so critical that I felt I needed to write it down, since at the time, I didn't expect them to ever return that way. Lo and behold, plans changed, and someone with a vendetta dug up the body. "Oh, and that gets him access to the poisons," I thought, until my players pointed out that, no, actually, the poisons were elsewhere, so there's no way that this guy would have found them with the body. Oops. Thanks players.

Plus, while I think the GM highlighting important information is valuable, player recaps can provide some key insights into what the party is thinking. Did the players realize that the Duke is a good man, or do they still distrust him? Me asserting it in a recap could color their natural instincts, or it could cast the reliability of the recap itself into danger if I used it to mislead the party.

The Mission Report

The idea of the mission report came from a sort of West Marches-adjacent-style game. The group were investigators in a city, looking into various criminal or revolutionary societies, preventing civil war from breaking out in the city. But the group was big (10 players), all of whom had busy schedules. The game was structured so that you could drop in and drop out, focusing only on missions that were relevant to your character. Some PCs focused on the mundane criminal syndicate, while others were dedicated to rooting out a cult. Sometimes, one group would find a clue in one of their missions that ended up being more relevant to another focal story, but a player from focus group 1 who found the clue decided to follow that thread from then on.

We needed some way of communicating what had happened in one session to players that weren't there. Thus, the Mission Report was created.

The Mission Report was a detailed, typed-up version of player notes about the events of a session. We're not talking "every line of dialogue" detailed, but pretty much every important story beat would be captured. A clue or secret is revealed, or a culprit identified? That's getting recorded so that it can be accessed by the other players. One player at the end of every session would volunteer to write it; I didn't need to offer incentives like "advantage on a roll next session" because my players are wonderful people and many enjoyed the creative writing element, but I think offering such an incentive would be a good idea if your players are more reluctant.

The Mission Report straddles the border of in-character and out-of-character; we handled this by saying that anything out of character would be blacked out, visible to readers by highlighting the text, but otherwise "in character". Reveal a secret in the plaintext part of the mission report, and the NPC leader of your organization can read it.

When I moved on to my next campaign--a far more traditional style of game, with one consistent party--we kept the mission report for one key reason: it was a recap. Anyone could access it between sessions or even during session. It was a central repository for the answer to "oh, what was that guy's name?" It took a HUGE load off of me as the GM, because if I needed to remember a previously insignificant detail that I wanted to give new life to, I could go back to the mission reports and see what had happened.

And, as the GM, I always read and "approved" the mission reports before they were uploaded to Google Drive. This meant that if the writer missed something that WAS particularly important, I could make sure that it got added in so that I as GM could still have some control about making sure that the players had key information highlighted.

Replacing Or Adding?

The exact role of the mission report did vary between my campaigns. In that second campaign, where everyone was there every week, the reports pretty much entirely replaced the start of session recap. Everyone was there, they'd experienced it, they'd taken notes, and they read the report. If I needed to recap an event or a character dynamic from the past, sometimes I would, but there'd be no big "previously on" sequence at the start of each session. In the first campaign, however, there usually still was a more traditional, GM-led recap, because it could have been a while since the party had followed a particular plot thread.

The Benefit

But the main benefit, more than anything, was the role of repository. My current campaign has lasted over two years. Even I, as GM, don't remember that minor NPC from session 3. He's probably in my notes, but rereading my prep notes from two years ago is hard--which things made it into session? Did the party like that random NPC?

With the Mission Reports, I could say "oh yeah, this is that NPC you met in session 3." The Party themselves can go back, revisit that mission report, and refresh their memories on their opinions of him, without being affected by me saying "you thought he was evil," which might inadvertently reinforce a mistaken belief. Or, I might have not even written down that the PCs thought he was evil when he wasn't, and the party might not remember that either, leading to a total 180-degree turn on an NPC due to faulty memory. With the Mission Reports, the party can read their own words from the time.

Keeping the mission reports largely in-character also helps. It can be a place to reinforce character dynamics and personalities. Blacking out things known out of character can help keep secrets clear, letting players in on what's going on (which can make it easier to bring those secrets to the table) while also delineating "your character wouldn't know this year, because it's blacked out."

Conclusion

This is intended to be a shorter post after the behemoths of the 3000+ words Guide to Goblins series, and I don't have all that much to say beyond "give it a try." Having the repository of mission reports has changed the way I prep (for the better), it gives my players more autonomy in how they want to record the story instead of relying on me, and it gives us all a way to refer back to stuff from two years ago... with PC commentary. It reinforces dynamics and in/out of character information in a way that would be hard to do with a simple recap. It helps shift some of the workload from GM shoulders to player shoulders.

In short, if your players are willing to help out by writing, the Mission Report is a wonderful tool! Asking your players to review the mission reports can provide a great alternative to the traditional recap.

And next week, we return to the Guide to Goblins, where I'll talk about a different sort of goblin trope--goblins as a warning folktale about violating sexual taboos.