What to write down in session zero

Session zero is the one session that is entirely about establishing shared understanding, and it is the session most groups take no notes on at all. Everyone agrees to things, everyone remembers them slightly differently, and four months later there is a disagreement nobody can resolve because there is no record.

The fix is small: write down the agreements, put them somewhere the whole table can read, and make it clear which parts can change.

Write the agreements, not the vibes

Most of session zero is tone-setting, and that does not need recording. What does need recording is anything a future disagreement could turn on.

Lines and veils. What is off the table entirely, and what happens off-screen. This is the single most important thing to have in writing, because it is the thing most costly to misremember, and because someone should be able to add to it later without having to raise it in front of everyone.

Scheduling reality. How often you are playing, what quorum you need, and what happens when someone cannot make it. "We play when everyone's free" is not an agreement, it is how campaigns quietly end.

Absent characters. Whether an absent player's character is run by someone else, faded out, or the session is cancelled. Decide it once, in advance, when nobody is annoyed.

House rules. Every table has them and every table forgets which ones they agreed to. A short list settles arguments in seconds.

Character-creation constraints. Sources allowed, starting level, stat generation, anything banned. Write it down so the person who joins in session eight gets the same rules.

The pitch. Two or three sentences on what the campaign is about and what kind of characters fit. This is the thing that drifts most, and having the original wording is genuinely useful a year in.

What the party already shares. How they know each other and why they travel together. Groups that skip this spend the first four sessions explaining why the paladin tolerates the rogue.

Put it where people will find it

A session zero record in the DM's private notes is not much better than no record. It belongs in the shared campaign, as a note the whole table can open, because its entire purpose is being a common reference.

Some of it should be editable by everyone. Lines and veils in particular should be something a player can add to quietly, without a conversation — the friction of having to bring it up in front of the group is exactly what stops people doing it.

The rest is usually better as shared-but-DM-edited: the pitch, the house rules, the scheduling agreement. Readable by all, changed deliberately. That split is easy when visibility and editing are set per note rather than per document.

Say which parts are provisional

Some session zero decisions are permanent and some are a first attempt. Marking which is which prevents both of the failure modes — people treating a provisional rule as sacred, and people treating a genuine boundary as negotiable.

A one-line note at the top of each section is enough. "Fixed" or "revisit after session five" saves a surprising number of arguments.

Revisit it once, early

Put a reminder at around session five to reread the session zero note as a group. Ten minutes, usually. What it catches: house rules that turned out to be annoying, a schedule nobody is actually keeping, and a campaign pitch that has drifted somewhere more interesting than where it started.

That last one is worth noticing rather than resisting. Campaigns drift, and the useful response is updating the note to describe what the game has become, not steering back toward a document.

Keeping the record in the same place as the rest of your campaign notes means it is still there to update — rather than in a chat message from March that nobody can find.