As a SH author, I find the notion of seeing my opus in print to be pretty intriguing, but I have a number of caveats and opinions. (And please, do recognize that these are just opinions; I’m not trying to present them as facts!)
For one, if I were ever to have my own SH published, I’d want to finish it first. The campaign, that is. Whether or not a SH is published as a novel or a gaming product, I think it should have narrative closure. So count me out personally for at least another couple of years.
For another, I don’t think most Story Hours (mine included), even the well-written ones (mine not necessarily included
))) would make very good novels. That’s because the
pacing of a good novel is much different than the pacing of a good D&D campaign. Almost any story hour would need some serious revision, in terms of going back and including foreshadowing, character development, breaks in the action, etc. I know mine would. Just recently I rewrote my original two-paragraph opening as an 18-page character introduction. I’d want to do something like that for the whole dang thing.
Side-adventures not connected to the main plot would want to be culled out of a novelization, but included if you were writing a gaming supplement.
In many cases, descriptions of combats would be problematic in the “novel vs. game supplement” debate. When I’m reading as a gamer, I want a sense of the action-by-action flow, so I can imagine how the combat played out at the table, get ideas about gaming tactics, etc. But If I’m reading as a novel-reader, that’s not at all how I want to read about combat. Good fight-scenes in novels tend to follow one character over several “rounds,” as it were, to give the reader a better sense of their perspective and emotions during a battle. Skipping to a new character every six seconds would make a true novel too choppy to read well.
Similarly, the way in which PCs come and go in many campaigns would seem weird in a novel format. I imagine it’s not unusual to have (for instance) a beloved character whose player moves away or drops out of the game 2/3 of the way through the story. If this were a novel, there would have be a damn good reason, from a story perspective, why that character dropped out or faded away. If in-game the DM just quietly retired the character, or had them suddenly go off to pursue some extra-campaign agenda, that wouldn’t work in a novel.
Finally, there’s the problem of the dangling plot thread. Recently Piratecat let us know that he had found no less than 30 still-dangling plots, even after the recent tumultuous conclusion of the current arc. It would not be terribly surprising if in a few years time his campaign will end without us players having followed up on every last one of these. In a game, that’s not a big deal. In a novel, if you’re going to set something up, you’d better follow it up, too. That means that when a campaign ends, it would behoove an author-to-be to go back and remove references to plots that never went anywhere.
Despite my misgivings, I think there are Story Hours out there that would make great novels, if the authors had the time to address these points. I’m thinking of Piratecat’s and Sepulchrave’s in particular, though there are certainly others.
I can imagine rewriting my Story Hour to be a pure novel someday (assuming I come across a magical djinn who grants me a life of 50 hour days so I can go back and rewrite most of it). I can also imagine writing it as a gaming supplement, with constant footnotes and annotations explaining the goings-on in the DM’s head concurrent with the action. I don’t have a good enough sense of the publishing business to know which would be more saleable, or have more demand. But I’d enjoy writing either.
-Sagiro
