# My Story Hour is over 663 pages in Word!



## el-remmen (Feb 6, 2004)

So, I was just compiling my story hour into a zipped up word document and added up the various pieces I found that not including the most recent thread (the Fearless Manticore Killers & The Necropolis of Doom!), which has yet to be compiled the whole monster is six hundred and sixty-three pages long, single-spaced and with slightly less then one inch margins.

I never realized when started the thing nearly three years ago that I would write so damn much!  

The newest thread is probably another 100 to 150 pages (or perhaps more) and I am still about 20 session behind!

Wow.

So, how long do your stories come to in Word and you ever written anything so long? (even the two novels I've written were less than 300 pages long each)


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## Piratecat (Feb 6, 2004)

You win! Mine is roughly 600 pages. I consider that terrifying.


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## el-remmen (Feb 6, 2004)

Piratecat said:
			
		

> You win! Mine is roughly 600 pages. I consider that terrifying.




Fear my geeky obsession!  I can hit you with it in the head and probably knock you out!

ROAR!


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## Softwind (Feb 6, 2004)

Wow.  Mines is only 103 pages thus far, but then again, half a score of the pages are just notes, and not really fleshed out.  I'm kinda lazy that way - I wait until I haven't posted for a week before frantically trying to remember what happened in a session 4 months past, then type up what I *think* occured, and post it.

Eventually I hope to top 150 pages!  But that will be summertime at least.  Not too bad for 2 years of gaming.  Perhaps if I put in more dialog, and less narative description of actions...

*sigh*  Maybe *that's* why I don't get posters on my link.  It reads too much like a log book, and not so much like a story...


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## Old One (Feb 6, 2004)

*Hah!*

Nemm -

Your characters talk too damn much !  If you cut out all that dialogue, your SH would be 3 pages long !

The last time I compiled mine (around Session 15), it was right around 180 pages, but I am almost done with Session 22 now, and those jumbled files contain another 125 pages, so I am up over 300.

~ Old One


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## Piratecat (Feb 6, 2004)

Old One said:
			
		

> Your characters talk too damn much !  If you cut out all that dialogue, your SH would be 3 pages long !




Phil, you shouldn't exaggerate.  I checked, and it would be 5 1/2 pages.


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## Enkhidu (Feb 6, 2004)

When Small Beginnings was still active (note to self - find the time to finish Part 3 of Small Beginnings and friggin' start on The Heroes of Icemist), we ended up with 137 pages in 10pt Verdana. With the footnotes I'm adding as I recompile it, it might grow to 140 something.

And that was for a trip through the Sunless Citadel.


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## Old One (Feb 6, 2004)

*Hah!*



			
				Piratecat said:
			
		

> Phil, you shouldn't exaggerate.  I checked, and it would be 5 1/2 pages.




You should round up and give him six !

BTW - Just to totally hijack the thread...er...nevermind, I will e-mail you !

~ Old One


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## Emperor Valerian (Feb 6, 2004)

Mine right now is likely around 150 pages... but then again thats because I'm wordy...


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## Jon Potter (Feb 6, 2004)

Mine's a little over 550 pages in 10 pt. Times New Roman.

I am the absolute King of Wordiness.


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## Len (Feb 6, 2004)

nemmerle said:
			
		

> My Story Hour is over 663 pages in Word!



My first thought was, He means it's 666 pages but he doesn't want to write that lest it attract the wrath of anti-D&D statanists.


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## Sagiro (Feb 7, 2004)

This thread made me curious about the Word length of my own Story Hour.  Although I don't have a continuous document from Post #1, the narrative just from run #100 through run #154 is 420 pages.  Extrapolation then tells me that were my entire Story Hour contained in a single word doc, it would be about 1200 pages!  

To be fair, my average words per run has increased over the years, so a more accurate estimate would only be around 1000 pages.  

-Sagiro


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## Silver Moon (Feb 7, 2004)

My longest one was for our 100th module, set in the Forgotten Realms orient I posted as the "Chinese Take-out" Story Hour.  It clocked in around 200 pages.


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## el-remmen (Feb 7, 2004)

Piratecat said:
			
		

> Phil, you shouldn't exaggerate.  I checked, and it would be 5 1/2 pages.





You guys are SO MEAN!  I'm complaining to the Mods!   

Either that or join in on making fun of Sagiro, if you should choose to do that.  1000 pages!  What a geek!


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## (contact) (Feb 9, 2004)

Pages, shmages.  What's the word count?  (Tools > Word Count)  My SHs clock in at:

The Risen Goddess
Wordcount: 150,441

The ToEE2 / Liberation of Tenh
Wordcount: 154,992

Definately a puny geek obsession when compared with the l33t 666 pages of Nemm's SH.


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## Lazybones (Feb 9, 2004)

nemmerle said:
			
		

> So, I was just compiling my story hour into a zipped up word document and added up the various pieces I found that not including the most recent thread (the Fearless Manticore Killers & The Necropolis of Doom!), which has yet to be compiled the whole monster is six hundred and sixty-three pages long, single-spaced and with slightly less then one inch margins.



n00b.    My old SH (_Travels through the Wild West_) is 768 pages (468,000 words), and my new one (_The Shackled City_, currently in the third mod of the series), is 271 pages thus far. 

Lazy "Tolstoy" Bones


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## el-remmen (Feb 9, 2004)

(contact) said:
			
		

> Pages, shmages.  What's the word count?  (Tools > Word Count)  My SHs clock in at:
> 
> The Risen Goddess
> Wordcount: 150,441
> ...




Interesting.  Something new to obsess about. . .

Out of the Frying Pan - Book I: Gathering Wood
Wordcount: 93,890

Out of the Frying Pan - Book II: Catching the Spark (part I)
Wordcount: 93,348

Out of the Frying Pan - Book II: Catching the Spark (part II)
Wordcount:141,311


Suddenly I feel inadequate. . .


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## Piratecat (Feb 9, 2004)

nemmerle said:
			
		

> Suddenly I feel inadequate. . .




Don't feel inadequate - BE inadequate!  

Astonishing enough, yours is 275,419 words and mine is 278,016 words. REALLY close. Lots of dialogue must add a lot of space. But (contact) beats us both, we suh-huck compared to Lazybones, and I fear Sagiro's word count.

I think this is going to have to be the new measure of my masculinity. I always knew (contact) was sexier than I was. Damn it.


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## Sagiro (Feb 9, 2004)

Piratecat said:
			
		

> ...and I fear Sagiro's word count.




You have nothing to fear but fear itself... and Lazybones.  My word count checks in at approximately 355,000 words, assuming that about 5% of StevenAC's way-cool .pdf compilations are non-story-hour content.

It will go up some if I ever get around to publishing my more detailed 3-days-to-Abernathy character intros, but not by _that_ much...

-Sagiro


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## shilsen (Feb 9, 2004)

Yeah, yeah - but what's the ratio of words/pages to sessions? That's when you really know how verbose you are. I don't have a story hour, but I've recently been writing up the sessions in my campaign (didn't do so originally). I currently have ten sessions, clocking in at 132 pages and 60,000+ words. And that's after I made the last two sessions simply narrative synopses, with no dialogue noted. So that's an average of 13 pages or 6000 words per session. How bad (or good) is everyone else?


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## (contact) (Feb 9, 2004)

Sagiro said:
			
		

> You have nothing to fear but fear itself... and Lazybones.




I think this goes without saying.

But what I want to know from you is: If you make three twenty sided rolls, what are the chances that one of those rolls will be a "1"?


-----

My word/session ratio started out in the ballpark of about 1200 per, but has since balooned to probably three to four times that amount.  This is for several reasons (IMIBAO):

1.  Better notes mean less synopsizing.
2.  As campaigns grow older, the roleplay becomes better, leading to more "talking heads."
3.  I measure my human worth by word count.


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## el-remmen (Feb 9, 2004)

Piratecat said:
			
		

> Don't feel inadequate - BE inadequate!
> 
> Astonishing enough, yours is 275,419 words and mine is 278,016 words. REALLY close. Lots of dialogue must add a lot of space. But (contact) beats us both, we suh-huck compared to Lazybones, and I fear Sagiro's word count.




You must be doing that crazy Beantowne math, because in Brooklyn 93,890 + 93,348 + 141,311 = 328,549.

Feh. What do expect in a town that has the Red Sox for a team.  

You couldn't do simple addition if it were a routine ground ball passing first base in the 6th game of the world series.


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## el-remmen (Feb 9, 2004)

Oh and my words / session ratio for those three threads is 8424.3, buck-o!


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## shilsen (Feb 9, 2004)

(contact) said:
			
		

> 3.  I measure my human worth by word count.






			
				nemmerle said:
			
		

> Oh and my words / session ratio for those three threads is 8424.3, buck-o!




Aha! Just as I thought! 

*Goes off to beat Polonius with a stick*

Brevity is the soul of wit, my sainted ass!


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## StevenAC (Feb 9, 2004)

Sagiro said:
			
		

> It will go up some if I ever get around to publishing my more detailed 3-days-to-Abernathy character intros, but not by _that_ much...





As for your 1000-page estimate above, I'm afraid you're going to have to write a bit more to achieve that...  Currently, the Story Hour covers 414 pages on my site, although I haven't updated it in a while (it stops just before the infamous "throw the bread rolls at the DM" session.  ).  There must be somewhere between 40 and 50 pages of stuff since then, so I'll have to start considering thinking about getting ready to do an update fairly soon...


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## Piratecat (Feb 9, 2004)

Hmmm. Apparently Excel has thwarted me. That's what I get for not doing addition in my head.

Well, fine. You're sexier than me, too.  Bastard.


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## Sagiro (Feb 9, 2004)

StevenAC said:
			
		

> As for your 1000-page estimate above, I'm afraid you're going to have to write a bit more to achieve that...  Currently, the Story Hour covers 414 pages on my site, although I haven't updated it in a while (it stops just before the infamous "throw the bread rolls at the DM" session.  ).  There must be somewhere between 40 and 50 pages of stuff since then, so I'll have to start considering thinking about getting ready to do an update fairly soon...




I assume that's because of the difference between Word pages and .PDF pages.  I started keeping my story hour content in a single Word doc at my run 100, and that doc (which now chronicles runs 100-154) is itself 420 pages long (Times New Roman 10 point font).  

It's definitely true that my posts have grown wordier over time -- thus, I culled back the straight extrapolation from 1200 to an estimated 1000 pages.

-Sagiro


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## Lazybones (Feb 9, 2004)

Any way you slice it, clearly there's a lot of great content here.  I hope people will continue to post their compilations; I have converted several from .doc to .lit (Microsoft Reader) format for my Pocket PC, which along with the free fantasy titles that Baen Books has been releasing on its Web site, means that I am never without something good to read, wherever I go.

Several of the story hours here have been more entertaining than some of the hardcover fantasy I've bought in the last few years.  I think that's great; as a writer who's had virtually no success breaking into the insanely competitive world of fiction publishing, I think that places like ENWorld offer a great opportunity to share your work with a like-minded audience.  To me an ENWorld story hour is to a "standard" piece of fiction what live, improv humor is to a scripted sitcom.  The latter has more polish, but you're more likely to get great, unexpected moments in the former.  Perhaps it's because most story hours are collaborative, with a DM and players who each bring something different to the story.  After all, Wulf wouldn't have been Wulf without the halfling and his player, and (contact's) ToEE wouldn't have been such a guilty pleasure if there hadn't been real players behind all those characters that got slaughtered. 

/end hijack, continue with your regularly scheduled boasting


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## el-remmen (Feb 9, 2004)

My hope is that when the campaign is done - I will be soon after be able to give each of my players an edited and fully annotated hard-copy version of the story hour to keep as a memento or our collaboration.

Though I guess it is going to have to be several binders for each - at the rate this thing is going. . .


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## Lela (Feb 9, 2004)

Emperor Valerian said:
			
		

> Mine right now is likely around 150 pages... but then again thats because I'm wordy...



 And EV, how many sessions have you typed up so far?  You can't leave that one out. 

 This guy, here, is the wordi one.  He beats you all, hands down.

 Of course, it _is _worth it.


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## MavrickWeirdo (Feb 9, 2004)

*Hijacking the thread*



			
				(contact) said:
			
		

> I think this goes without saying.
> 
> But what I want to know from you is: If you make three twenty sided rolls, what are the chances that one of those rolls will be a "1"?




One of those rolls will be a "1" 1141 times out of 8000; or slightly more often than a getting a "1" on a single roll of a D8.

Now

What are the chances that one of those rolls will be a "20"?

(Sorry for the hijack, but I don't even have a pagecount   )


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## el-remmen (Feb 9, 2004)

MavrickWeirdo said:
			
		

> (Sorry for the hijack, but I don't even have a pagecount   )




MAV!!

Where ya been?  We've missed you!  Did you read about Finn's adventures?


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## MavrickWeirdo (Feb 10, 2004)

nemmerle said:
			
		

> MAV!!
> 
> Where ya been?  We've missed you!  Did you read about Finn's adventures?




To answer your first question, I moved last summer, and was without a computer for months. 

Of course once I had the computer back again, it was easier to get caught up on the other story hours that yours, because they had fewer pages.   
For some SH's there was only 1 update over those months.  

So no, I am not up to date on FMK&TNoD, and I have not read about Finn (Yet).


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## Old One (Feb 10, 2004)

*Holy Cow!*



			
				MavrickWeirdo said:
			
		

> To answer your first question, I moved last summer, and was without a computer for months.
> 
> Of course once I had the computer back again, it was easier to get caught up on the other story hours that yours, because they had fewer pages.
> For some SH's there was only 1 update over those months.
> ...




Mav,

Good to see you! Glad you are computerized again !

~ Old One


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## arwink (Feb 10, 2004)

Storyhour Pages in word: 132
Length in Words : 97 760
Words per Session: 12 220

Number of Pages of Thesis Notes done in roughly the same timespan: a little over 30.

Man, I wish this thread hadn't made me think about this


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## Emperor Valerian (Feb 10, 2004)

Lela said:
			
		

> And EV, how many sessions have you typed up so far?  You can't leave that one out.
> 
> This guy, here, is the wordi one.  He beats you all, hands down.
> 
> Of course, it _is _worth it.




Nine sessions... not counting the one I'm updating right now...


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## Piratecat (Feb 10, 2004)

arwink said:
			
		

> Number of Pages of Thesis Notes done in roughly the same timespan: a little over 30.




Clearly, you need to change the topic of your thesis to "dynamic interactions in a controlled fantasy fiction."  I have it on good authority that thesis commitees _love_ fireballs.


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## Kid Charlemagne (Feb 10, 2004)

The first part of my story hour is 164 pages in word (Verdana 10 pt), and just under 91,000 words.  The second part is about as long, but I don't have it on the computer I'm using right now.  So roughly 320 pages - and I haven't updated in over a year!  I need to get to work, man...


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## Softwind (Feb 10, 2004)

*The secret is mine!*

A-ha! I've discovered the secret to high word count!

/whisper "Conversation," he says.

"Conversation? Not just uneventful retelling of events?" Much like what the majority of his story hour posts have been like. Glossing over discussion, or at most, refering to its outcome without resorting to identifying the participants therein. Factual, but uninteresting, or perhaps tedious would be a better description. 

"Ahem. As I was saying, the secret to achieving high word count is conversations! Since I have changed my format to include the conversations, word count has soared."

Well, not really _soared_ per se. More like, flapped harder. In just 2 new episode write-ups, I've increased page count by 13 (33 sessions taking up 103 pages, sessions 34 and 35 adding the next 13 pages) Does this mean I'm artificially puffing my stories? Or, that I need now go back and re-write and re-post the first 30-odd sessions?

Perhaps the latter, maybe someday the former. Suffice it to say, total words used thus far is 72,863. And I have 10 more sessions to go before catching up with where the players are now at. Whoo, I got chills. This is more fun, and more work, than the previous way I was writing. I'm excited now!


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## Emperor Valerian (Feb 10, 2004)

thats how mine have gotten so long... character dialogue.  That, and players who like roleplaying alot, so there's alot of dialogue to type up


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## arwink (Feb 11, 2004)

Piratecat said:
			
		

> Clearly, you need to change the topic of your thesis to "dynamic interactions in a controlled fantasy fiction."  I have it on good authority that thesis commitees _love_ fireballs.




You know, that's already frightening close to my thesis topic anyway 

It still doesn't help.


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