In person: put a phone face up in the middle of the table, bottom edge clear, plugged into power. Use the built-in voice recorder on a compressed setting. Have everyone say their name before you start.
Online: use the recording built into Discord, Zoom, Meet or Teams, then export the audio track on its own. Ask everyone to use headphones, which is the single biggest quality difference on a call.
Recording an in-person game
Use the phone, not a recorder
Every phone made in the last decade has a voice recorder that will handle four hours in a single file. On iPhone it is Voice Memos; on Android it is usually Recorder or Voice Recorder. A dedicated device is a nice upgrade and completely unnecessary to start.
Do a ten-second test and play it back before session one. Finding out the mic was covered is much cheaper at the start of the night than at the end of it.
Where to put it
Face up, in the middle, with the bottom edge clear, because that is where the mic usually is. Not under a character sheet, not in a dice tray, not in somebody's lap. Distance to the people talking matters more than anything else you can control.
Plug it in. Four hours of recording with the screen occasionally waking will flatten a battery, and a recording that stops at the three-hour mark tends to stop right before the interesting part.
What to tell the table
Two things, once, at the start:
- Everyone says their name. "I'm Aaron, I'm playing Kellan." Ten seconds each. This is the single highest-value thing you can do for the recording, because it gives any speaker-labelling pass a clean sample of each voice.
- One person at a time, roughly. Nobody wants a moderated game, but crosstalk is the hardest thing for any transcription to untangle. A brief pause between speakers improves accuracy more than any setting will.
Recording an online game
Every major platform can record without a plugin. In each case you want the audio at the end, not the video.
Discord
Discord has no native recording for regular voice channels, so most groups use a recording bot. Whichever you use, check two things: that it records each speaker on their own track if it can, which is the best possible input for speaker labelling, and that it is allowed on the server before session night rather than during it.
Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams
All three record to the cloud or locally depending on your plan, and all
three produce a video file by default. That is fine; you just export the
audio track before you do anything else with it. Zoom in particular will
often give you an .m4a alongside the video without being
asked.
The one thing that matters on a call
Headphones. Without them, everyone's speakers feed back into their own microphone, and the recording ends up with every voice layered faintly over every other voice. Echo cancellation hides this while you are playing and cannot remove it from the file afterwards.
Settings: smaller is better than you think
There is a strong instinct to record at the highest quality available. For speech it is the wrong instinct, and it costs you twice: a slower upload and a bigger file to move around, for a transcript that is no better.
Transcription discards everything outside the range of a human voice regardless of what you give it. Mono, compressed is the right setting. On iPhone that is Settings → Voice Memos → Audio Quality → Compressed, set before you record. A four-hour session recorded that way is a fraction of the size of the lossless version and transcribes identically.
Things that quietly ruin a recording
- Background music. Ambient tracks sound great at the table and sit underneath every line of dialogue in the file. If you use music, keep it well below speaking volume.
- Dice trays next to the mic. A handful of dice landing beside a microphone is louder than anybody talking.
- The phone locking. Most recorders keep going, some do not. Test yours.
- Recording the whole night as one file and never checking. Glance at it during a break. Four hours is a long way to find out nothing was captured.
What to do with it afterwards
The recording is not the point. Nobody re-listens to four hours of their own session. The point is the twenty lines of notes buried in it: what happened, who was there, what got promised, what everyone will have forgotten by next week.
You can pull those out by hand, and plenty of DMs do, by scrubbing through the file with a notepad open. It works and it takes about an hour. The alternative is to have something transcribe it and write the recap for you, which is the entire reason this site exists.
Scrivorn Upload the recording and it writes the recap, updates your campaign wiki, and gives your players a portal to read between games. →Related: how to prep a D&D session in 30 minutes, which starts with reading last session's recap and is much faster when one exists.