Bootleg Your Sessions
Microphones and sticks emerge from the crowd, like banners in an army. This, October 27th, 1984, was the first time bootleggers were actively allowed to record Grateful Dead concerts.
Going to a concert and seeing your favorite band play is an incredibly visceral, embodied experience, that in my opinion cannot be recreated in any other way. Nothing compares to the feeling of the music in your ears, in your body, mixing with the jostling of the crowd and the heat of the lights. It can be spiritual. Despite this, people continue to record concerts. For particular bands of the more jammy persuasion, a folk practice has emerged of “bootlegging,” scoring (sometimes very high quality) recordings of live concerts. My favorite band, the Mountain Goats, has plenty of bootlegs. Despite all of my feelings about the live concert experience, I still enjoy the odd bootleg. Why? If you ask a fan of the Grateful Dead, or Phish, why their favorite bands have a culture of bootlegging, they will likely give you my answer; No two performances of the same song are the same. They’re all unique, bespoke moments of musical iteration.
Roleplaying games, too, are iterative. Indescribably so, in fact. If one could, theoretically, run the exact same adventure with the exact same rules with the exact same players knowing the exact same amount of information twice, we would see two remarkably different games. Most of us now specifically live by the adage “play to find out what happens,” which is an extrapolation of the joy of surprise. We come together and sit at our circular stages with our instruments and a few songs we’re roughly familiar and come together to jam out.
So, do like the Deadheads do, and bootleg your session. Record it, and do nothing else differently.
This is not an advocacy to turn your home game into a podcast, or to professionalize your practice, or whatever. I’m not telling you to make a product. I’m telling you to, if you can, make a recording of your session for you, you (and maybe your fellow players), to listen back to. It’s a practice I’ve been doing for around five years, and it’s made my home games better. I feel like I’ve improved my skills as a GM and a player through it. Let me detail a few reasons why.
Audio notes are better than no notes
This one feels really simple to me; if you record what you say, you’ll know what you said. Even when I am playing the most blorb-y simulationist OSR game, I will say things aloud that will become important in the future that are not in my notes. Sometimes, I want to remember a ruling I made, to see if I like it. Sometimes, I want to evoke myself by having an NPC say something exactly like another NPC did last session. Sometimes, I state something about my character that I want to bring back. Sometimes, my players make a mechanical decision that I just straight up forget because the session was a month ago.
I know I could write stuff down as we play. Sometimes I do. Most of the time, I don’t. I am so wrapped up in the process of playing that I frequently forget. Having a recording to prompt myself back into memory has proven essential to how I prep for future games.
Good quarterbacks watch film
So why don’t players? Having a recording of your own gameplay can help a GM refine particular skills. Description, particularly, is great to listen back to. Decision making between players about what to do can tell you volumes about what you can do as a GM to keep things moving. As a player, you can hit your voice better if you hear yourself doing it (as horrifying a prospect that may seem). You can note when you miss mechanical or diegetic advantages that should have come into play.
Now, it’s not useful to obsess over it. Both the quarterback despondently watching the missed catch that could’ve won her state and the GM replaying the time they spoke over a player isn’t productive. The past is illuminating, but it’s still behind you. Let me highlight a particular skill that recordings are good at illuminating.
Am I dragging or am I rushing?
Pacing, that great bugbear. The beast that lays just behind Scheduling. The thing that haunts the mind of even the most practiced GM. I hear John Harper plays scores in 45 minutes. How are we supposed to work on this process with simply our own memory, and a rough account of the length of a session? With a recording, you can hear exactly how long each song took for your band, while you were in the ecstacy of playing the dang thing. Here’s an example. I’ve pulled up the recording of a session of Errant that my friends played on September 11th (nice) of 2024. The session lasted 2 and a half hours. Using this recording, I can determine how long it was between each roll of the Exploration Turn Dice (marking the beginning of a new turn). This turn (finding a werewolf sleeping in a bedroom and jamming the door) took ~11 minutes. The next turn (opening a door into an empty abandoned nursery, finding a gem that plays calming twinkly guitar solos, and looting the place for toys) takes around 10 minutes. I can tell that during this session, I was running exploration turns at almost real-time. Neat! This also means that I was able to run around 10 exploration turns, with breaks for small skirmishes and describing traps. I am largely satisfied with this pace.
Keep yourself humble
It’s easy to mythologize your own games, remember them as these clean, smooth, exciting experiences all the way through. It’s even easier to mythologize and idolize someone else’s campaign, and create ridiculous expectations for your own group. If there’s one thing an unedited, unpolished recording of your own session is, it’s honest. When someone holds up a phone while John Darnielle sings and captures the moment where he asks the audience for the lyrics of his own songs, that won’t go away. In fact, it can become part of the charm. I now enjoy listening to myself play games, hearing the gaps and the jokes and the moments where I’m formulating the next story beat that knocks my table down dead.
Some actual plays like to lean into this. When we get to listen to Friends at the Table struggle through one single Beam Saber roll, making sure it’s as optimized and dramatic as possible, in Partizan (you know the episode, if you love the season), my partner and I like to call it “writer’s room recording.” BUT EVEN THEN, that’s still edited, refined in some way. When I listen to my player, as his prophetess mech pilot, struggle for 20 minutes over her god-machine mech commanding her to kill a civilian enemy of the faith, with all of his umms and uhhs and “aw man….”s, I get to experience that about my own game. That’s nice.
Closing thoughts
There are many times where I don’t record. Sometimes someone doesn’t want to. Most of the time I don’t record, I’m playing online and don’t want to bother with the technical nonsense needed to get a good recording. Sometimes I forget (as my archive of old recordings can attest). When I do, though, I rarely regret it. I like having an artifact like a recording, as rough and tumble as it is. I like to hear how I play Errant differently with four or seven people at the table. And though nothing will beat the experience of the in-person concert, hearing myself riff on some of my favorite tropes has its own simple charm.