As a group of folks who tend to share and read actual plays more regularly, what are your thoughts on post length?
Originally shared by Spencer Salyer
Greetings, all. I'm curious as to everyone's opinion on blog post length. I know there's likely minimums as far as usefulness and SEO, but is their a ceiling? I ask this as I approach 8k words on an "actual play" / tutorial style article -- is this length too extreme, or to be expected for something more prose-like, for an audience that perhaps tends towards reading lengthy works? Thanks for your help!
It depends? If posts are for posterity and events chronicled for personal use to jog the memory perhaps for later continuation, they needn't be long. The shorter, the better.
ReplyDeleteIf, however, there is some novel things happening mechanically, or for reasons of tutorial and demo (step by step walk throughs and the like), they can be very lengthy. I think people like a good example of interesting uses of mechanics with context.
Purely prosaic novelettes are probably not so useful or oft-read (unless they're really good).
I write prose in between mechanics, in general. Looking at my past APs, I tend to post them in four to five thousand word chunks, which includes prose, mechanics, and often introductory paragraph. Sometimes half that, sometimes up to 6K.
ReplyDeleteI would imagine there's widely varying preferred levels of prose and mechanic inclusion out there.
I don't measure by word count as much as scene and chapter length. For example, Quill, Eerie England, Six Hours to Midnight, and Zero Tarot all use various scene mechanics to create a fixed length.
ReplyDeleteI went back and counted a number of my posts. Tephra Falls (free form) tended to be under 1K, but there are like 70+ scenes. Eerie and Zero Tarot are one shots that go for about 1.5K words. And, SHtoM is a one shot that for ran 3.6K. So, 8k is a stretch by my count (heh) but you also said that it was a tutorial and that can easily double the size.
My opinion is that there's no wrong way to do it. Solo role-playing is a personal thing, as is how we choose to share those adventures with others.
ReplyDeleteIt's been forever since I published actual plays, but when I did in the past I used to sit down in front of a blank blog post and play out the game as I wrote it down. I included IC descriptions, mechanics and my own OOC thoughts and explanations about what I was doing as I went. Needless to say many of my posts were long winded and only covered a scene or two at a time.
Other people like to sit down and play and then blog a few paragraphs of highlights later, and that's cool, too. Really, it comes down to whatever method gives you the most enjoyment. If you enjoy writing blog posts of 8k words or more, that's perfectly awesome!
As a reader of APs, when I see something that long in a single webpage, my eyes glaze over. I prefer smaller chunks, where the smaller chunks are linked together and each one is a scene or chapter (in agreement with Todd Zircher). Because of my life, I can read something short whenever, but won't really have the time to read something long until the weekend (if I remember).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback, everyone. I think I'll split it into 2 or 3 parts and just push them out at the same time since they're already written up. I, too, tend to balk at longer reads but then can't stop myself from spewing them out!
ReplyDeleteI prefer short story length posts. Kind of makes sense considering my own posts. Curious myself if I should just split each scene into its own post: a scene, for me, is around five to ten paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteIf a short story works for you, by all means keep it. Most of TF was a series of 5-10 paragraph scenes, but then I wanted something episodic and that felt right.
ReplyDeleteMy posts tend to be in the 1500-2500 word range. Lots of mechanics, explanation, and ad hoc random tables bump it up pretty quickly. I mostly let the flow of the narrative detemine where to end a post so it ends on a downbeat or (preferably) a cliffhanger, giving the illusion of an actual plot or structure. Sometimes I break a post in the middle of a Scene to make for a better ending.
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