Originally published July 17, 2013
Last month I finished my Hunter the Vigil game: Corrupted Transmission. But the work for completing the game as a whole took a lot longer because I decided to do an Actual Play (AP) thread. AP means that I wrote up a transcription of each session and posted them over at RPG.net.
This was a huge amount of work. Each session ran about 4 hours. I had to listen to the recordings and write it down at the same time each week. If we were doing combat this wasn't so bad and I could often keep in real-time. But for dialog this involved frequent stops and starts. Worse if they ended up arguing about what direction to take in-game. Often this required picking the best lines and boiling the argument down. This could take 8 or more hours to complete.
When I was done with the initial transcript it was still a jumble to incomplete sentences and often misspelled words. Then came the task of turning it into a readable narrative for others. This included links to the character and location pages as well as making sure the dates lined up in the story. However this took a lot less time in general, perhaps only 2 hours per session.
Finally I would post the final result, adding some comments about rolls and mechanics, or little funny things that happened during the session. You can read those on the AP thread.
In general I used a Mac Laptop to record the sessions using Audacity. I use the same set up for my podcast Myriad Plots. It worked pretty well as long as only one person was talking.
For a 4 hour game, I would spend 10 or more hours just writing up it up. This was a huge time sink. I really respect people who continue to do this for their games and understand why it can lead to months-long delays between postings. While I don't regret doing it once, I don't expect I will do it again. I could do much more productive things with that time. Like writing more blogs.
From here out I expect to be posting more often to the blog, at least once a week. I have a lot of reviews coming as well as the Campaign Journal for my Changeling game. There is still more for variant vampires and material from the cutting room floor for my space game. It is going to be an exciting year.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
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