Purposeful Session Reports
Play reports are a vital part of the TTRPG hobby but there is a lot of unclear communication around the purpose of the play report. If you understand why you're writing play reports, you can write a better, more useful play report that accomplishes the stated goal. Here are a few purposes for play reports that answer the question "Why would I write a play report?" alongside some advice towards writing with this goal in mind:
To Remember The Game: Writing a play report which includes a play-by-play of the game aids in solidifying and reinforcing the collective memory of the group. This is one function of a play report that allows them to be written by a player and not a referee, since everyone at the table should be able to relate what happened during the session. The only caveat to this is that a player might not know everything that happens, since the referee could have hidden information that the players don't have (though in my experience recording the public information makes it easier to recall the private information). To write well in this mode, consider the 5 "Ws" (Who, What, When, Where, Why) and try to summarize instead of repeating blow for agonizing blow what happened at the table.
Note that writing in this mode is centered toward the table and not the wider community of play; it is a tool for playing the game first and foremost.
To Create a Work of Art: As in the vein of Record of Lodoss War. I'm not going to talk about this one because it mirrors more the craft of writing write large than it does a play report; you can find advice for writing in general elsewhere.
To Record Observations, to Document a Change: Every good scientist keeps a lab notebook; session reports function in a similar way for tabletop games. This function is centered around tinkering, usually (but not always) with systems and procedures, and how they felt at the table and any observations that came out of it. To write well in this mode, it is useful to adopt a "Setup -> Aftermath" structure, where you first explain the goal of the system/procedure/technique, describe the thing in itself, and then record your observations on how the thing performed at the table. Typically, the actual play-by-play of a session isn't so important in this mode unless its an illustrative example of the observations you made. Including feedback from players is important here too; this is a referee-only function of the play report, but player feedback is crucial. Something can be exhilarating as a referee and bore players to death!
More importantly, standardizing your writing in this way makes it easier to parse in the future. A predictable structure lets knowledgeable readers get to the good part, or lets you quickly find a detail you had forgotten the place of.
These observations can be referee-facing or community-facing; it is nice to work through your thoughts about a system in longform and play reports are a good medium for that working, regardless of whether or not they end up on a a blog.
To Be Remembered, To Create History: Play reports are nice in that they present an artifact that (usually, though not always) says some combination of "here is how we played, here is what happened in the game we played, and here is how we felt about what happened!" These are all useful artifacts and are part of hobby best practices. Jenx says it best:
[play reports are] what lets others understand how you practice your hobby. If you’re a referee, talk about your decision making and the process through which you organise or run your game. How do you stock dungeons? If you only run existing modules, how do you pick which ones to use? How do you keep track of your NPCs? What about keeping track of time in the game?
Are you a player? How did you handle a certain situation that the GM presented in your latest session? What long term plans do you have for your character(s) in the campaign, should they survive to see them come to fruition? Are you playing using a more complex system involving a lot of moving parts - how do you navigate it? Do you have any “builds” that you think have worked in the game? Any curious or clever ways in which you or your fellow players solved a situation in the game?
"Mr. Mann, how does this differ from the previous one?" Audience, mostly. If you're writing for an outside audience, i.e. someone who is not the referee or the players at the table, the way you approach the play report ought to be different. To write well in this mode, try to document things that are important to how you play and your priorities, as well as why you're doing such a thing. "I like to use side-based initiative because it lets the players synergize with one another, which I got to see in this session!" is exactly the type of thing that's useful for future generations of gamers! It's also the type of thing that might get overlooked while writing in the previous modes, since you're probably thinking only about notes for yourself or your game and not to a broader audience who isn't familiar with your priorities.
Whether you like it or not, if you put your play report on a blog, you should probably keep this goal in mind. Why share it if you aren't thinking about your audience?
To Have an Artifact of Play: There are a lot of reasons to write a play report, but creating an artifact of play is probably tantamount among them in my mind. Having character sheets, battle plans, play reports, all these things create a physical record of the game you played, which is cool in its own right! To write well in this mode, literally just do the play report. Many a gamer has fallen by the wayside on this goal.
To... Do Something Else!: I think I've got a fairly exhaustive list here, but there's a possibility that I've missed something. Shoot me a message and I'll add it, if I deem it truly necessary in my infinite and all-encompassing wisdom.
Why this all matters/What This Adds to the Discussion
Idraluna and Jenx in the aforementioned Hobby Best practices have advocated for doing play reports. I wanted to take the conversation a step forward to instead focus on the mechanical goals the prospective report-writer might have and how best they should go about them. Making sure your priorities are understood and in order before you sit down to write will mean you are a more direct communicator and overall you'll have an easier time. If you don't really care about using the play report as a game aid, maybe you can skip the play-by-play. If you don't really want to contribute to the history of the hobby, maybe you don't need to publish them to your blog and can adopt a less prosaic style for your session reports/notes, leaning on flow charts or illustrations or whatever.
Understanding your goals for making session reports before you make them will lead to better and more effective writing for the goal you're trying to accomplish.