by Damien Moore
One of the most frustrating things that you can encounter as a GM is a lack of recall in your players. It is always difficult to spend months building an intricate metaplot with sneaky background characters, or a longterm badguy who they met and offended early on and who has been plotting against them ever since when you might not play regularly, or if the players are renowned for not remembering.
So, what's the solution? Give up? Institute 5 minute tests at the end of every session? Have simple plots?
One solution is to have one person involved in the game keep a written record of what happened during each session. It is often best that the GM do so, so as to rule on points where memories are a bit flaky, but this is by no means a hard rule. A particularly adept player who does remember what happens in a game and has a deft hand at prose can also provide a good chronology. Players can also write in character, in the form of a diary. Your group might even want to think about alternating the responsibility amongst all the members - this might not make for a coherent story, or the combined chapters might give a better summation of what the whole group is experiencing than just one person's account.
New players can also benefit by not needing to have everything explained to them - throw them the chronology, and ask them to read through it once to catch up on what has happened in the game so far, especially if their new character should know about the world and the past history of the existing group.
Of course, there are some possible problems involved in doing this - disagreements over what actually happened in a session, trying to find the time to write down a few hours of concentrated conversation, etc. There are are also hazards - stopping every 15 minutes to make a whole lot of notes is obviously suboptimal to the flow of a game. A group considering making a chronology of their game should be prepared to experiment a bit until they find a system which suits their game.
Admittedly, writing out what happened in a session isn't a new idea. But it does combine nicely with something that is relatively new.
Websites.
Putting your chronology, whatever form it is in, onto a website can accomplish a number of things at once. It can act as a backup memory for forgetful players (and GMs), allowing you to perhaps avoid some of the "...who?" phenonomon. It can make you a world-wide star, friends with the rich and famous. Maybe not.
By putting it on the web, you are also giving the other people in the game more of a chance to actually read it (other than at the start of the game) and remember what is going on, than they might if it was written on your home computer on a wordprocessor. Admittedly, not everyone has web access (soon Boris! soon!), but there is an ever-increasing number of people who do, especially while they are at the University (and presumably a MURP member).
Anecdotes! Come out from under the furniture. Ever tried telling an anecdote about a game that you know is interesting? Find half way through that you need so much context to find it neat that you spend half an hour explaining a one-liner? Well, putting your chronology onto a publicly accessible site can let you explain the anecdote without having to bore someone to tears by talking at them for an hour.
Depending on the style in which it has been written, you may actually find that people find your story interesting - in more than one case I have been mailed by people interstate and overseas asking whether there was going to be any more of a story put onto the web. Random people who are just interested in cool stories may just want to read it, and roleplayers might want to sieve through your story for ideas. Often it is easier to get the feel of an idea across as prose rather than as a clinical description of a plot idea, and small mini-scenarios could be built in such a way, providing a resource for other roleplayers.
In essence, writing a chronology can add a certain amount of coherency to a long term game, giving the players a sense that they are accomplishing something concrete that they can point to and say "we did that."