(no subject)
It's been a while. facebook kind of ate me; at the very least, ate the parts of me responsible for wanting to write about my life instead of working or sleeping or entertaining myself.
my life suddenly strikes me as a very strange word. so very fucking intangible, but something that virtually all of us understand - like god or retail markup. jesus, i need to start this post over.
still working on my rpg. it's going well, but slowly. nearly done, to the point where i'm tentatively scheduling a playtest session for next week. that's neat, i like it.
wha
i keep thinking about this picture i want to draw -a poor, aproned dragon; towering over the mewling humanfolk around him, who flock toward his bulk to gape in awe and challenge him to make war. but he is no epic, dangerous dragon: merely a great, fearsome beast who has the unfortunate urge and aspiration to be a grocer.
That sucked. I was working on a post a couple weeks ago and the internet went out, and - well, thanks to web 2.0 that ate a lot of it instead of letting me reconnect and click POST.
I don't remember where the fuck my angst was coming from at the time but it's over now. I'm here to talk to you about the game.
We finished the D&D campaign last night - December 20th, 2006 through April 24th, 2009. That's 877 days since we started, and well over a third of those saw play - actually, half would not be a crazy suggestion at all. It's kind of a staggering number, and one which is kind of scary - because most of these sessions are five hours or longer, at least once you reach late 2007. The writing is - well, it's mostly very good; some is amazingly apt, and in our IRC channel we've seen a lot of fucking magic happen. Over the course of the game we've generated three point three million words, in a little more than 200,000 posts - and that's amazing. I have a lot more data available to me than most RPGers - but it's still apparent that this is just a ludicrous body of work, especially given that the average novel is somewhere on the order of fifty thousand words long.
I must stress that I'm something of a statistics nerd, so I'm going to pause before I crunch the numbers again with you to talk about the work itself. It's definitely a living thing, to invoke a very pleasant sort of metaphor - our story is long, and winding; and has many characters. I am continually impressed by just how human they are, and how very much of each author they manage to represent - and equally often, the stark contrast between writer and creation, which makes it all so good. I abandoned setting down plans properly long ago; preparing for the game involves thinking about the situation at length, and figuring out what interesting stuff is going to happen as consequences of different actions by the players. As a result, it's all very organic; with a lot of getting into trouble that manages to resolve naturally and satisfyingly.
The story itself is kind of hard to describe; because many events occur, which change and alter the world in which the game is set in drastic and dramatic ways. Indeed, the Anoth - for that is what the world is called - of 1402, the year after the end of the game - is markedly different from the Anoth of 1399, the year in which it began. And yet, this part of the story is clearly only useful as justification for the characters; for them to strive or better themselves, for others to run for their lives, to protect the ones they love or save their hides. I understand that it's a fairly basic literary technique, but what I'd absolutely like to stress is that very little of this was the result of any sort of plan - we're making it up as we go along, and although I am the architect of the piece it is not the sort of production which responds directly to a guiding hand.
It is a tale of romance, first and foremost; of love, and what is done to protect and keep it. It is also the most gloriously dialogue-laden epic in the history of everything.
In any case - a very, very high word count. I'm imagining that the actual amount of content is lower, somewhere around the 2,500,000-word mark; in order to arrive at the 3,300,000 figure I took the original number (which was around 3.7 million,) then counted the number of posts made - doubling that, and subtracting the result from the word-count in order to correct for IRC metadata like poster nick and timestamps. I took another hundred thousand-odd off to account for dice rolled, mis-targeted messages and other errata. And finally, the main reason I think the number is lower than 3.3 mil is out-of-character talk - which exists in the logs in nearly equal proportion to the actual writing, but since about half the out-of-character material is merely making note of story information that we can't work into the narrative cleanly I can't easily discard all of it from the calculation.
And so that brings me to 2,500,000 words - a number that is completely ridiculous, and awesome - as well as an extremely conservative result, all things considered. I don't mean that it's cool, I mean that it inspires awe in me - and that I look forward to tearing into it again to convert into book to a high degree. It's admittedly kind of shaky at the very beginning, but - hell. The great thing about first-season woes is getting them before you've actually published anything and can polish some more.
Finally, I'd like to mention that a lot of people made this possible; and to mention that the next game is starting right away on the new system. We're all excited, I think, and I think that we have every right.
Way to go, guys. We've done something that's completely fucking great.
my life suddenly strikes me as a very strange word. so very fucking intangible, but something that virtually all of us understand - like god or retail markup. jesus, i need to start this post over.
still working on my rpg. it's going well, but slowly. nearly done, to the point where i'm tentatively scheduling a playtest session for next week. that's neat, i like it.
wha
i keep thinking about this picture i want to draw -a poor, aproned dragon; towering over the mewling humanfolk around him, who flock toward his bulk to gape in awe and challenge him to make war. but he is no epic, dangerous dragon: merely a great, fearsome beast who has the unfortunate urge and aspiration to be a grocer.
That sucked. I was working on a post a couple weeks ago and the internet went out, and - well, thanks to web 2.0 that ate a lot of it instead of letting me reconnect and click POST.
I don't remember where the fuck my angst was coming from at the time but it's over now. I'm here to talk to you about the game.
We finished the D&D campaign last night - December 20th, 2006 through April 24th, 2009. That's 877 days since we started, and well over a third of those saw play - actually, half would not be a crazy suggestion at all. It's kind of a staggering number, and one which is kind of scary - because most of these sessions are five hours or longer, at least once you reach late 2007. The writing is - well, it's mostly very good; some is amazingly apt, and in our IRC channel we've seen a lot of fucking magic happen. Over the course of the game we've generated three point three million words, in a little more than 200,000 posts - and that's amazing. I have a lot more data available to me than most RPGers - but it's still apparent that this is just a ludicrous body of work, especially given that the average novel is somewhere on the order of fifty thousand words long.
I must stress that I'm something of a statistics nerd, so I'm going to pause before I crunch the numbers again with you to talk about the work itself. It's definitely a living thing, to invoke a very pleasant sort of metaphor - our story is long, and winding; and has many characters. I am continually impressed by just how human they are, and how very much of each author they manage to represent - and equally often, the stark contrast between writer and creation, which makes it all so good. I abandoned setting down plans properly long ago; preparing for the game involves thinking about the situation at length, and figuring out what interesting stuff is going to happen as consequences of different actions by the players. As a result, it's all very organic; with a lot of getting into trouble that manages to resolve naturally and satisfyingly.
The story itself is kind of hard to describe; because many events occur, which change and alter the world in which the game is set in drastic and dramatic ways. Indeed, the Anoth - for that is what the world is called - of 1402, the year after the end of the game - is markedly different from the Anoth of 1399, the year in which it began. And yet, this part of the story is clearly only useful as justification for the characters; for them to strive or better themselves, for others to run for their lives, to protect the ones they love or save their hides. I understand that it's a fairly basic literary technique, but what I'd absolutely like to stress is that very little of this was the result of any sort of plan - we're making it up as we go along, and although I am the architect of the piece it is not the sort of production which responds directly to a guiding hand.
It is a tale of romance, first and foremost; of love, and what is done to protect and keep it. It is also the most gloriously dialogue-laden epic in the history of everything.
In any case - a very, very high word count. I'm imagining that the actual amount of content is lower, somewhere around the 2,500,000-word mark; in order to arrive at the 3,300,000 figure I took the original number (which was around 3.7 million,) then counted the number of posts made - doubling that, and subtracting the result from the word-count in order to correct for IRC metadata like poster nick and timestamps. I took another hundred thousand-odd off to account for dice rolled, mis-targeted messages and other errata. And finally, the main reason I think the number is lower than 3.3 mil is out-of-character talk - which exists in the logs in nearly equal proportion to the actual writing, but since about half the out-of-character material is merely making note of story information that we can't work into the narrative cleanly I can't easily discard all of it from the calculation.
And so that brings me to 2,500,000 words - a number that is completely ridiculous, and awesome - as well as an extremely conservative result, all things considered. I don't mean that it's cool, I mean that it inspires awe in me - and that I look forward to tearing into it again to convert into book to a high degree. It's admittedly kind of shaky at the very beginning, but - hell. The great thing about first-season woes is getting them before you've actually published anything and can polish some more.
Finally, I'd like to mention that a lot of people made this possible; and to mention that the next game is starting right away on the new system. We're all excited, I think, and I think that we have every right.
Way to go, guys. We've done something that's completely fucking great.