Getting a group of adults to invest time into a game each week is hard enough, but then you stack on the expectation from the Dungeon Master that the players and characters will remember what happens each week. This is something that I have struggled with in the past, and something that I am continuously trying to improve. The simple fact though is this, getting players to remember NPC’s and subtle story hints from week to week or session to session is tough. The challenge is that players have their own lives outside of the game, so players have to keep two separate lives in their brains. Unlike a Dungeon Master, the players don’t live and breathe the story, so this is something good for DM’s keep in mind. That said, I have developed a few tricks that I use to help my players remember past sessions and important story points.

The Recap

The recap is a great place to start. If you are not already, set aside about ten to fifteen minutes to recap what last happened and any important details from the past that might come into play for the night's session. You will need to develop a feel for the foreshadowing part, but try to recap with those points in mind and encourage players to jump in and help tell the recap. This last part can give you a feel for what the players think they remember and can help correct any deviation in story canonical.

Senses mean everything

Ok, so this is going to get a little technical so just bare with me. Let’s start with a simple overgeneralization “The brain is nothing but a computer.” The brain has the complicated equivalent of RAM, Hard Drive and a processor. Now what your goal is, as a Dungeon Master and a storyteller, is to make sure that your story gets firmly implanted into your player's long-term memory. This means that you must get your story to be important to your players (which it is probably a little already seeing how they keep showing up) and you need to get the hippocampus to classify those memories as important. The worst way to do that is through your player’s sense of sound. Sound is the weakest sense medium for memory creation. The best way to get the memories to stick is to get your players to relate the new memories to a very strong, old memory. Be careful here, and try to purposefully relate these to positive memories. Now how you can do that is using other mediums and senses to trigger these old memories. The best ways are visual depictions, vivid audio depictions, and smell. These all can be done audibly, it just takes a long time to learn the skill. In my opinion, that person who I see does this the best is Matt Mercer from Critical Role or the Force Grey series. This dual/triple encoding will make the memories stronger in your players and make them less apt to forget. Couple this technique with the recap and you have there a great mixture as the recap will keep them recalling those older memories which builds the synaptic connections up and allows them to access those memories faster and easier...Man, isn’t the brain amazing?