A Gaming Folder (Part 8) - Notepaper and Cheat Sheets
I'm doing two parts with this post because we're getting to the end, and there isn't really a lot to say here.
I figure a quick game is a good game, as long as things are fast flowing, you can get away with a lot of hand-waves and plot holes, and it's only later that players will ask "What about this bit?" or "What happened there?" Sometimes the players will forget things, and we can just skip over them, sometimes those things can be addressed as a plot hook to be picked up in a later session. As long as enough storylines see closure at the end of a session, there's an overall feeling of a satisfying story.
However, this often means making sure plenty lof quick notes are taken along the way...a few scrawls here, a modification to the relationship map, a word or two describing a sigil or sign that might make a useful plot device later. For tyhese reasons I'll try to make sure there's half a dozen lined sheets, half a dozen plain sheets, and half a dozen grid sheets. I won't use them all, but it's nice to have the options available. At the end of the session, any sheets that I have used (it'll probably only be three or four of varying types) get replaced. If I've got half a dozen of each, and I forget to replace them, then there should be enough left over to do another session.
Sometimes I'll leave these sheets in analogue form, but if I'm really enjoying the campaign I might re-type the notes and add them into the back of the folder as an archive (that's something I hadn't included in the original list of components). If I'm really enjoying the campaign, these notes might serve to jog my memory and I hand-write the story's archive into a nice journal or diary for the game (which might serve as a prop to hand out to later sessions, or later campaigns... In one case I handed out a player diary from one game to a completely different game that occurred 20 real-world years later).
As for the last bit about cheat sheets... I don't usually run games with overly complicated rule sets. If I can't fit the basic rule system and some of the more commonly encountered rule variations and twists on one double sided page, then I figure a lot of the rules are going to be ignored in a fast paced game anyway.
Here are two links with some examples of the cheat sheets I might be looking at...
Tips and Tricks: making effective TTRPG cheat sheets
In most cases I'll make sure every player has a copy of these sheets (especially the ones relevant to their character), but there will be a couple of spares in the main folder.
.png)
Comments