How to record a D&D session

Recording people without telling them is rude everywhere and against the law in a lot of places. The rules depend on where you and each of your players live, and in some of them every single person on the call has to agree. Craig, the Discord recording bot, puts it bluntly in its own FAQ: recording anyone without their permission is both immoral and illegal. None of this is legal advice, and asking everybody is the version that is safe in every jurisdiction.

Make it a session zero item and repeat it whenever somebody new joins. Say what is being recorded, who will be able to listen to it, what you will do with it, and how long you will keep it. Then take no for an answer. A table where one person is quietly uncomfortable plays worse than a table with patchy notes.

It helps to be specific about the purpose. Most players are relaxed about a recording that exists so the GM can write a recap and then delete it, and much less relaxed about audio that might end up on the internet.

If your table talks in a Discord voice channel, the answer is Craig. It is a free bot that joins the channel and records a separate audio track for each person speaking, with every track delivered in sync. Separate tracks matter more than they sound: when two players talk over each other, each voice is still clean on its own file.

The free tier records up to 6 hours and keeps the recording for 7 days. You start it by joining a voice channel and typing /join, stop it with /stop, and the person who started the recording gets a direct message with the download link. If the message goes missing, /recordings brings the link back. While it is running Craig adds [RECORDING] to its nickname, which is the only notice the channel gets, so it does not replace telling people.

Downloads come as FLAC or AAC, or as a ready-made Audacity project or Adobe Audition session. There is no MP3 export: the FAQ tells you to convert the FLAC yourself. One command worth knowing is /note, which drops a timestamped note into the recording, handy for marking the moment the party finally opened the vault.

The paid tiers run through Patreon. $1 a month extends storage to 14 days and adds cloud backup to Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. $4 a month raises the limit to 24 hours of recording and 30 days of storage. $8 a month adds transcripts in WebVTT, SRT, and plain text. Craig records voices only, so it will not capture a livestream's video or sound.

Discord itself has no way to record a whole voice channel. The closest built-in feature is Clips, which saves at most the last two minutes, is in early access for Nitro members, and only works on Windows.

Around a real table the recorder is already in your pocket. On an iPhone, Voice Memos records with one tap and exports a standard .m4a file through Share and then Save to Files. On a Pixel, Google's Recorder app takes up to 18 hours in a single recording and can share the audio file or a text transcript. Most other Android phones ship with a voice recorder of their own.

Placement beats hardware. Put the phone in the middle of the table, closer to the quiet players than to the loud one, and lift it off the wood: a folded cloth or a book under it stops every dice roll arriving as a thump. Plug it in, because a four hour recording is hard on a battery.

Then stop the phone from interrupting itself. Apple's own guide notes that Voice Memos stops recording if another app starts playing audio, so turn on Do Not Disturb or airplane mode and leave the phone alone until the session ends. Record thirty seconds before everyone sits down and listen back once. It is the cheapest test you will ever run.

A big table is the one case where buying something helps. One phone hears six people around a long table unevenly, and a second phone at the far end, or a USB conference microphone in the middle, fixes more than an expensive studio microphone pointed at the GM.

Neither Foundry VTT nor Roll20 documents a built-in way to record session audio. We searched both sets of official docs in November 2026 and found voice and video chat, and nothing that saves it. So you record wherever the voices are. If the table talks in Discord while the map sits in Foundry or Roll20, use Craig and ignore the tabletop.

Video calls are less generous than they look. Google Meet only offers recording on paid Workspace editions and on Google One plans with 2 TB or more. Microsoft Teams requires a business or education licence for both the organiser and the person recording. Check your own plan before you count on either.

The tool that works everywhere is OBS Studio, which is free and open source. It records whatever your computer plays and whatever your microphone hears, and in its advanced output mode it can keep up to six separate audio tracks, so table chat, music, and your own voice do not have to be mixed together. OBS's guide recommends recording to MKV, because an MKV file survives a crash that would corrupt an MP4, and then converting with File and Remux Recordings.

OBS records video by default, which makes very large files. If all you want is the conversation, export the audio afterwards or keep the video resolution low.

You are probably not going to listen to four hours of your own game again. The recording is raw material for a transcript or a recap, and the things that help a machine hear your table are the same ones that help a person.

Keep background music out of the recording or keep it quiet, since a tavern playlist under every sentence costs more accuracy than any microphone gains. Say an important name clearly once when it first comes up. Invented names are where every transcriber stumbles, and one clean pronunciation gives it a fair chance.

Leave the recording running through the breaks rather than stopping and starting. One long file is easier to handle than five fragments, and the tangent about pizza is easy to skip later.

A recording nobody opens is a backup, not notes. The useful step is turning it into text, and then into something shorter than the text. Our guide to transcribing a D&D session covers the free and paid ways to do the first half yourself.

RollSummary does both halves. You upload the audio or video from the night you played: MP3, WAV, OGG, M4A, MP4, MKV, MOV, or WebM, up to 1 GB, converted to a compact audio format in your browser before it leaves your machine. Back comes a transcript with speaker labels and timestamps, a structured recap, and a wiki note for each person, place, and plot thread, all of it waiting for your approval before anything becomes canon. A four hour session takes about ten minutes.

One practical note for Discord tables. Craig gives you one track per speaker and RollSummary takes one file per session, so mix the tracks down first. Opening Craig's Audacity project and exporting a single MP3 or M4A is the quickest way.