Do people like Story Hours with lots of dialogue?

[ReeboKesh]

Hey guys,
Started a new campaign last weekend and I bought myself a Digital Recorder to record the session and basically transcribe it into a Story Hour. A great investment if you can afford one and if your group are naturally funny it's hilarous to listen to it after the game and catch the one liners you may have missed during the session.

Anyway my dilemma is, do I just generally summarize the encounters and events from the session like Sagiro used to do in his Story Hour when he started or do I do that AND transcribe down all the character dialogue as well?

My players love to roleplay, the dialogue is banter between the characters themselves and with the NPCs. Naturally any non-character dialogue will be omitted.

So do people like reading in game dialogue or do they prefer summaries?
(Note: As I will be writing it I won't be doing it in journal form naturally).

Thanks in advance
Reebo

 

[Antithetist]

Transcribing all the dialogue sounds a bit much. But edited highlights, including the quality one-liners and any crucial plot stuff, sounds pretty good. The total lack of dialogue in the early days was actually one of the things that put me off of Sagiro's Story Hour for a long time - these days I'm a devoted fan, but I remember the first time I tried to read it I really struggled with the low-level stuff. It just felt very dry to me without any dialogue and with such limited character interaction. I really like the balance that it has these days, where we get enough dialogue to bring the characters to life but not so much that the action gets bogged down.

 

[ReeboKesh]

Yeah I am concerned that it may be too much too. I've done it though and had a laugh doing it but there are a lot of short sentences between characters which really don't add much to the story. I'll probably take the opportunity to edit it before posting.
Thanks
Reebo

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

What makes a Story Hour stand out is GOOD dialogue, rather than lots. If your players are witty and entertaining (preferably in-character) then yeah, put loads of it down.

If it's just lots of mumbling along, cut it and focus on the good stuff.

 

[Moleculo]

It goes without saying, but: only if it's good dialog.

One of my favorite techniques is Sepulchraves, where he's definitely not transcribing the players, rather writing the dialog the characters themselves would have said if you had a video camera inside the game world watching them. (Or at least that's my take on what he's doing. Otherwise his PCs are some eloquent MFs.)

 

[TarionzCousin]

What qualifies as "good" dialogue?

What should he transcribe word-for-word and what should Reebo summarize?

I am looking forward to reading some of these story hours. It sounds like it will be interesting.

 

[hippie2049]

I've played in several campaigns detailed in The Jesters story hours. The Jester seldom incorporates in-game dialogue verbatim, but, much like Sepulchraves story hours, he uses dialogue that captures the essence of his players characters to such an extent that any sh dialogue could have been said by any given character.

We took notes, for both combat and role playing, in spiral bound notebooks. The aforementioned method of note taking was effective for capturing combat, the gist of role playing, and some specific dialogue. Drawbacks include that the note taker could not as effectively contribute to the game due to multitasking, the speed of conversation exceeds that of writing (hence effective for capturing the mood but not specific dialogue), and our group was large, 8-10 players with a full house, so at any given time several engaging conversations could be happening simultaneously. The Jester provided incentive to negate the multitasking distraction his players experienced for taking notes in two ways: the first is he offered bonus xp for taking notes and more importantly he wrote story hours chronicling our adventures. One method that never took effect while I played in his group regularly was to switch from pen and paper to recording electronically, ie laptop and ms word, which may have enabled us to get more snippets of conversation verbatim.

Recording seems like it would take too long to sort through. I recommend you get a sense of your players characters and use that as a basis for sh dialogue except for dialogue that greatly displays character development, instances of character alignment, witty ripostes, and exchanges that are too personalized to paraphrase. Sometimes Jester would ask the players how they remembered events unfolding for the sake of accuracy, and you should feel free to consult your players.

I look forward to your story hour.

 

[Rackhir]

What qualifies as "good" dialogue?

What should he transcribe word-for-word and what should Reebo summarize?

Unfortunately, anyone who could answer these questions would be acclaimed as one of the greatest literary analysts of all time.

For Shilsen's story hour, Shil writes up the events and dialogue (he has a phenomenal memory) with the aid of some notes. Then he'll toss it over to me for some proofreading (mostly just a double check) and I'll offer some corrections based on what my memories of the session are or on things I do/don't think the characters would have said/done (or should have done).

So my suggestions are these.

1) Write it for yourself and your players.

Odds are that nobody is going to read it and if you do this for acclaim and praise from other people, you won't be doing it very long.

Mind you if you can keep it going long enough, you may develop an audience through sheer persistence. But hey you could always turn out to be the next Sepulchrave, his story hour seemed to hook people from even just the first few posts describing his dilemma as to if a Succubus could be truly repentant and desiring to change.

2) Build up a decent amount of material before you start posting.

Even if you have the next great story hour, if you only post updates every month or two, you drastically lower the odds that anybody is going to see it often enough to get hooked on it.

If you can post, at least once a week (or even every couple of days), for an extended period of time (preferably at least a two months) the odds that people will check out your SH and come back for it, increase dramatically.

3) Get someone to proofread your work before you post it. Shilsen is an english teacher and has a grasp of minutia that boggles my mind at times. Yet I still find stuff in posts that needs to be fixed or corrected (and grammar + spelling are NOT my strong points).

Professional writers have editors for a reason and you only need to read "The Wheel of Time" books to see what happens when the author's wife starts taking over the editing duties.

It's always a good idea to have a second set of eyes and point of view, to read over something.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Professional writers have editors for a reason and you only need to read "The Wheel of Time" books to see what happens when the author's wife starts taking over the editing duties.

Yeah, and Stephen King writes some pretty good SHORT stories, too--IYKWIMAITYD!

 

[Azgulor]

I'll put it to you this way:

Story Hours with dialogue allow me to invest in the story in the way I would a novel or short story. I've read good story hours that are comprised solely of summaries, but all of the GREAT story hours I've read had dialogue.