The best session notes are the ones nobody had to take.

Notes taken during play and notes written from a recording are not the same artefact, and the difference is not quality — it is coverage. A person writing notes captures what they had the attention to spare for, which at a good table is whatever happened while nothing interesting was happening. The throwaway line in the second hour, the name the GM improvised and then forgot, the exact wording of the promise your party made to a dying NPC: those are precisely the moments nobody writes down, because everybody is busy reacting to them. A transcript has all of it, and the notes built from a transcript inherit that.

What arrives is not one document. There is a recap short enough to post in a channel and read on a phone — that is the one somebody catching up before next session actually wants. Under it sits the scene index, because an evening is not one continuous thing: it is an ambush, then a long argument in a tavern, then the walk to the temple, and each gets its own summary and its own place in the list. Under that is the full transcript, verbatim, for the times you need the exact words rather than a summary of them. Nobody has to choose the format in advance; all three arrive because the session ended.

The names in all of it are your characters. Daria maps each speaker to the character registered with /character, so the notes read “Fenwick bargains with the seer” rather than quoting a Discord handle somebody picked in 2017 and has been stuck with since. That is also what makes the notes searchable in a way a text file is not — a name means a person, and the same person across forty sessions.

If somebody at your table genuinely enjoys keeping a journal, none of this asks them to stop. Upload what they write with /upload_doc and it is searched alongside the sessions and cited the same way, so a GM’s prep document and the transcript of the night it was used answer the same question together. The point was never that writing is bad. It is that nobody should have to choose between writing and playing.