# [Meta] [Halmae] From Table to Screen: Writing the Battle of Agramount



## spyscribe (Oct 10, 2006)

Adaptation: The Fighting and Re-Writing of the Battle of Agramount

_“How do you write your story hour?”_

I’m sure there are as many answers to the above question as there are story hour authors.  This thread is designed to explore/explain my own.  The “making of” featurette, if you will, buried three menus down on the DVD.

If you find that sort of thing interesting, read on.  If you’re thinking of writing a story hour of your own and are looking for advice, I hope you find this useful.  At the very least, you’ll know how you don’t want to run the process.  Keep in mind, this is not the only, or even the best, way to write a story hour.  It’s just the way that happens to work for me and my group.

Feel free to ask questions as we go.  I’m happy to answer them if I can.  Let's face it.  This thread will be really dull if it’s just me blathering.

*Introduction*

What follows are my notes taken during, and some commentary on, two games our group played the weekend of November 13, 2004.  If you aren’t familiar with my regular story hour thread, these games eventually became Part the Two-Hundred Second through Part the Two-Hundred Eighth. 

Two nights of gaming became twelve pages of hand-written notes, which became a 26 pages of rough draft, which after revision became 32 pages (just shy of 11,000 words) in the final version.

This is how it happened.


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## spyscribe (Oct 10, 2006)

*Part 1:  From Table to Page  
(Some notes on notes)*

I am a note-taker.  I took notes before I started the story hour, before I ever thought that I would start the story hour, and take notes for games and I doubt will ever make it into a story hour.  I think this is in part because I tend to fidget, and it gives me something to do with my hands.  Also, I’m left-brained enough that I like to know where we used magic item x or picked up potion z.  

*Effect on play*

I don’t like to let taking notes get in the way of actually playing the game, and most of the time, it doesn’t.  Sometimes this means that when my character is doing a lot of talking, or is involved in an important scene, not many notes get taken.  That’s okay.  If I’m that involved in the game, I’ll probably remember what was going on without a lot of prompting.

I think it does slow me down a bit in combat.  I try to remember to prompt Fajitas to give on deck warnings as we go through the initiative, but sometimes I’m still stuck going, “um…” when we get around to me.  But I’d probably do that even if I weren’t taking notes.  I’m sometimes also asking people what they just did if I got distracted or behind.  If this has been a major impact on game play, no one has brought it up with me.

*An Aside About Story Hour Philosophy*

Since my notes mean I don’t have a complete or exact record of everything little thing that happened at the table, I’m not tempted to try to recreate the table on the page.  (If you aren’t interested in my writing philosophy, feel free to skip over this next bit to the section on how to decipher my notes.)



> There’s a reason why I call what I do when I write the story hour “adaptation.”  I start with the source material, the game as it played at the table.  The story hour is not a *record* of the game.  It is a *version* of the game translated into prose form.  I mention this explicitly because frequently, some variation on the question, “When you write the story hour, do you make things up?” comes up on the forum.  The complete answer to this is both yes and no.
> 
> Yes, I change things.  Sometimes that means embellishing Fajitas’ descriptions.  Sometimes it means glossing events.  Conversations that happened simultaneously at table might be sequential when recounted.  Or a discussion that began in one locale and continued in another is brought into one exchange for the sake of clarity, simplicity, or narrative flow.  The ingredients that make a great game are very similar to the ingredients that make a good story, but you have to put them together differently.
> 
> ...




Right, anyway.  Back to my game notes.

Attached to this post are the scanned pages of the notes I took for the session we played November 13, 2004. (My notes from the second half of the fight on the 14th are coming later.)  If you are trying to decipher them yourself, here are some things to watch for: 

The real-time date is written in the upper right-hand corner of each page. The number that comes after the hyphen is the page number.  So the first page of notes has “11/13/04 – 1” written in the corner.  I learned early on the importance of numbering pages within a session because they tend to get shuffled around with each other, my character sheet, and my spell sheet as we play.  (Playing a sorcerer/cleric, I’ve already got a lot of paper to keep track of.)

The first page of every session also has a date (month and day only) in a box on the left side of the page.  That’s the in-game date.  In this case, 4/20.  This will obviously be updated through the session if we’re covering multiple days in-game. (If you’re curious about why we use the Gregorian calendar in a fantasy world, it was discussed in the thread, here.)  Having an easily accessible record of the in-game date has turned out to be one of the handiest things about my notes.

_Technical note: the contrast on the first couple of pages is kind of light.  It took me a little work to get my scanning technique down.  It does get better._

*Non-Combat*

Unless we’re in combat (which we weren’t at the beginning of this game), my notes tend to be pretty general (page 11-13-04 a and b, attached).  I will write down particularly good quotes I don’t want to forget, although not all of these will make it into the story hour.

Looking at the first page of notes now, (11-13-04 a and b), I notice that most of the page is taken up with random lines with very little context.  If you haven’t read the story hour, I doubt they make much sense.  Actually, I don’t know if they make a lot of sense to people who were there _at the game_.  To me, they basically act as broad memory cues when I go back to write up the game (sometimes months after the fact).



			
				example 1 said:
			
		

> In my notes this line appears: “Yes… Well let’s dwell on irony!” –Bar
> 
> This was the cue for a 313 word section of my first draft.  It shows up in the thread near the end of Part the Two-Hundred Second.
> 
> This helps to explain why this page and a half of non-combat notes makes up more than half of my eventual write-up of the session.




I’ll also make general notes about who does what and conversations that seem important.  Though I tend to trust my memory for a lot of this kind of thing. 

Often specific non-combat notes aren’t really made with the story hour in mind.  Most often, I’m jotting down things that we’ll want to check later (frequently record keeping stuff, like using one-use magic items, or dividing loot), or things that I think will be important for the party to know.  The reason why I started taking notes was to help us out *in the game* and I try to make sure I’m not falling down on that job.



			
				example 2 said:
			
		

> Yeah yeah, if I’m such a great note-taker, how come there is not a word in the write up about what came out of Barnabus’ bag of holding?  Two reasons: first, Fajitas (the DM) had that list on a handout, which I knew I could get a copy of.  Second, anything off that list was going to get noted on the character sheet of the person who took it.  No worries that anyone was going to forget about that kind of loot!




*Combat*

By contrast, once we get into combat time, I take pretty exhaustive round-by-round notes.  In the 11-13 session I took six pages of notes, five and a half of which are concerned with combat.  I didn’t always do this, but I started and now can’t seem to kick the habit.

Reason one:  As our combats get more complex, it’s useful for us to be able to go back and check details like how long a given spell has been running as we play.

Reason two: It saves me from having to decide on the fly what’s important in the combat and what isn’t.  A missed shot might not seem to be worth noting, three missed shots in a row by the same character suddenly becomes a moment that will probably make it into the story hour.  If I wrote down the first miss anyway, I don’t have to go back and annotate on the fly when I’m also trying to follow the battle generally, and plan what my own character is supposed to be doing next.

Reason three: I’m kind of compulsive.

Reason four: I find it does actually make the write-up a little easier.  

*Shorthand*

I do try to streamline my notes, especially in combat, as much as possible.  PCs are usually designated by their first initial, or first two if there’s potential for confusion (Anvil and Annika are their own special brand of fun).  It doesn’t come up much in this battle because my regular character is dead, but ordinarily my combat notes are littered with notations similar to:  “L mm, 7 on _____.”  This translates, “Lira casts magic missile for seven points of damage to _____.”  Although I usually don’t write exact damage figures on attacks, and instead indicate “tink,” “ouch,” or just “_______ hits _______.”

If we’re in a complex venue, I try to make sketches because it’s easier to draw a room than to write down a description, but it doesn’t always happen.  And ultimately in the story hour I generally rely on memory and don’t sweat the details of tactical positioning.

And in case you were wondering, no, I can’t always read my own writing after the fact.


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## el-remmen (Oct 10, 2006)

Thanks for posting this!

It is interesting to look at the notes you are essentially writing for yourself and what they look like.

In my game, two of the players take notes (one does quotes, the other does round by round combat) and then I need to interpret and align and decipher the two sets of notes into a coherent whole.

As the make-up of the group changed over the years different people took up the note-taking, so I had new idiosyncracies to deal with when converting notes to prose.


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## PieAndDragon (Oct 10, 2006)

I have to do it mostly from memory. Which is why I try to write up my story hour accounts within a day or two of the session where they happened. As DM I obviously have access to all the adventure notes, but only get time to make basic notes on what happens during actual play. Notes such as "Reach fishing village. Get to mercenaries square. Sleep one - taken down by rapier" Thats notes for about an hour from Sunday's session .


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## spyscribe (Oct 11, 2006)

detmo: Yeah, clearly from the state of my notes, memory plays quite a role in reconstruction for me as well.  Unfortunately, since I started writing after the game had been running for more than a year, being up-to-date has never really been feasible.

el-remmen: Glad you're enjoying!  Hard enough to integrate into a story from my own notes, let alone two different sets from two different people.

I'm attaching the notes for the 11-14-04 game to this post.  There's a good example here of the pitfalls of writing a story hour as a player, instead of as a DM.  Notice on the "a" page, near the bottom there's a reference to the Duke having a _globe of invulnerability_ to match Barnabus's.

It wasn't until I ran the rough draft to Fajitas that I found out it was actually an _antimagic field_.  One of several reasons why Fajitas and I worked out our revision system.


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## Shieldhaven (Oct 11, 2006)

Uh, Spyscribe?  11-14-06?  Does Fajitas know about your amazing powers of precognition?  

Haven


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## Piratecat (Oct 11, 2006)

She must have grabbed his notes!


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## KidCthulhu (Oct 11, 2006)

Piratecat said:
			
		

> She must have grabbed his notes!




I'm grabbing his notes right now, IYKWIMITYD.


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## spyscribe (Oct 11, 2006)

Shieldhaven said:
			
		

> Uh, Spyscribe?  11-14-06?  Does Fajitas know about your amazing powers of precognition?
> 
> Haven



He does.  He just doesn't usually spread it around.


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## StevenAC (Oct 22, 2006)

Thanks a lot for this thread, spyscribe.  Fascinating stuff!


			
				spyscribe said:
			
		

> In the meantime, see if you can get Fajitas to explain the "crazed weasel of death" mechanic over in the adaptation thread. It was a great bit that we never (alas) got to see in action.



So Fajitas, what's this about?   I see in the first page of spyscribe's notes that "The crazed weasel of death will operate by committee"... I'm intrigued.

Also, spyscribe, I can't quite read the last word in Jeff's quote in the next line, "It is important to me that he be known as the C-_?????_ -- care to fill in the blank?


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## Fajitas (Oct 22, 2006)

StevenAC said:
			
		

> So Fajitas, what's this about?



Gosh, Steven, thanks for asking... 

Figuring that a) while playing Testy was probably fun and all, I should give Spyscribe a little something to compensate her for the long delay in getting Lira raised, b) Spyscribe loves Euro, and c) Euro was one mightily pissed off weasel, I created the Crazed Weasel of Death rules (or C-WOD, pronounced C-Wad, as Bad Monkey Jeff insisted on calling them).

To my consternation, I can't seem to find where, if anywhere, I actually recorded the C-WOD Rules, but I'm fairly certain the gist was this: at the party's discretion, one mightily pissed off weasel would charge forward into combat, jump on a targetted NPC, and proceed to bite them about the head and face.  While this would not inflict any meaningful damage, it would force a Concentration Check for the target, which, if failed, would cause them to lose their spell or allow anyone threatening them to take an Attack of Opportunity.

The power of an angry weasel lies not in hit point damage alone...


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## spyscribe (Oct 22, 2006)

Oh, so *that's* why it was so important to BadMonkeyJeff that he be known at the C-wad.  Penny just dropped.  That's even more awesome than I thought it was.  



			
				Fajitas said:
			
		

> To my consternation, I can't seem to find where, if anywhere, I actually recorded the C-WOD Rules...




According to what I scrawled on Euro's character sheet when I got back to the game.  Euro got a +4 to his attack while raging, and on a successful attack he would trigger a DC 20 concentration check to the target.

Beyond that, I don't have any information.  It was my impression that it was an ability designed to be useful during that fight on the barge after Lady Tempeste, but before the party reached Barnabus, and I wasn't there for that game.


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## StevenAC (Oct 23, 2006)

Thanks for the C-WOD info, Fajitas.  Although, for some reason when I saw this:


			
				Fajitas said:
			
		

> While this would not inflict any meaningful damage, it would force a Concentration Check for the target, which, if failed, would cause them to lose their spell or allow anyone threatening them to take an Attack of Opportunity.



...I misread it as forcing a "Consternation check" -- which, come to think of it, is probably appropriate when you're being ravaged by a berserker weasel...


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