[Story Hour Authors] How Far Behind Are You From Current Action in your Story Hour?

[el-remmen]

So, two questions really. ..

1) How far behind are you from the current goings-on in your campaign are you in your writing of your story hour?

2) Whether behind or not, what methods do you use to keep things fresh in your mind for recording the whole thing? (But I am most interested in those that are very far behind). And what kind of routine do you follow when you write it up? Do you do it all in one shot, or do you write a little at a time as the mood hits you, etc. . .?

As for my own "Out of the Frying Pan/Fearless Manticore Killers" Story Hour is about 20 sessions behind (about a year), and I try to updaye every two weeks, but the average is more like 3 weeks to a month. . . I have taken off a month or two at least twice, which explains the long delay, but also it takes me hours (broken up over days) to write up an installment and two to three installments to do one session.

 

[Piratecat]

I'm about a year behind, with the game ongoing. Almost every game is saved on tape, though. I have mixed feelings about that; it's a better record, but dramatically increases the time that it takes me to write the story hour updates.

I tend to write in three-four hours bursts, which is about two updates worth.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Mine's a mix of two...its a completed campaign, but the PCs are still going strong at this point.

I'm just so insanely far behind(since I decided to start it now) that it isn't funny at all. Luckily, when we first started the game we would put it together as a story type thing afterwards anyway, so I've got that to work with. It isn't very coherent, and a lot of the things in it contradict each other...so it also gives me room to get the general idea of things and play around with it some.

 

[Morte]

About 3-4 sessions behind, but the campaign finished a year ago.

 

[Droid101]

Many many sessions behind, but that's because I didn't start writing the story hour until about a month ago. The campaign has been going on for three years. I think I'm about a year behind the action now.

The campaign right at this point is about to draw to a close.

I update every weekday. Usually takes me from 1-3 hours to write an update, which range from three to six pages (12 point font in a Word document).

I never thought I was going to record my campaign, so I never really recorded anything. I go off my vague notes and memory, which has served me well. Some parts are more difficult to piece together than others, due to having only a sheet with hit points marked off on it. "Hm, that must have been a critical hit. Or maybe it was a fireball. What had 80 hit points? A gorgon? A wraith? I can't remember..."

My second story hour is my friend's campaign. I'm all caught up there, and I post the day after our session every time.

 

[spyscribe]

In terms of what has been posted, Welcome to the Halmae is close to two years behind where the campaign is in real time. (One of the other players once remarked to me that we must be the only story hour that updates weekly, and still manages to fall behind). To be fair, when I started, I was about a year and a half behind, so it's not as dire as all that.

I'm almost always working off of a backlog of written updates that haven't been posted yet, so that the thread keeps going even when we don't play for a while or I don't have time to write much.

For writing up sessions that happened so long ago, I rely on a combination of memory and extensive notes. When I can't quite remember how something went, I'll check in with the DM and we'll come up with something that seems right for what we know about the characters and what the scene has to accomplish.

We tried tape-recording a session once. None of the PCs rolled more than a 10 all night. We decided not to do that anymore.

I write when I can find the time. It's hard to give a good estimate for how long an update takes because I'll write the rough version of a session, then send it to the DM who gives his notes. (Are there details that weren't important to me but will be crucial later? Are there parts that could be improved/made clearer?) Based on that I do another pass and polish and only then does it go up.

I also don't necessarily write in order. We had a big session a couple of weeks ago, and I wrote it up over the next two days. Having bits already done to "catch up to" makes the whole deficit much less duanting.

 

[EternalNewbie]

Well, now I don't feel so bad. I'm about a year behind, and fading fast. I started about 3-4 months behind, and it's gotten worse, although since Galeman (our DM) returned to school in a different city, I should theoretically be able to get caught up now. What's worse is that I don't have any real method of keeping track of what happened, save for discussions with the other party members and a few scattered notes, so I suspect that when I resume writing it'll probably start looking a little more cinematic, and a little less mechanical.

When I do write, I tend to write updates in one or two big chunks, in about 6-8 hours. When I get stuck (like I am now) I try to keep moving things along, a paragraph at a time if necessary, until I can get back into it. I also spend a fair bit of time re-reading and editing when I get stuck, which is why the beginning of my updates always reads better than the end.

 

[Boojum]

I marked "more than 10 sessions behind and still playing", but in reality I haven't even started yet, although I keep meaning to. My notes are pretty fragmentary from the first year of the campaign (I run the game at my college, so we had a hiatus for the summer and just picked up again a month ago), so I will probably write up a relatively short summary for that whole span and then start writing session-by-session updates for what happens this year.

 

[Morte]

I tend to write in three-four hours bursts, which is about two updates worth.

I tend to write in three-four hour bursts, which give me about half an update, and my updates are shorter than Piratecat's.

Damn these people who can write...

 

[Angcuru]

Well, since my story hour is more of a story than a campaign summation (for lack of a better phrase), I'd say I'm as caught up as I'll ever be.