In the tradition of a great many games, I’m going to include bits of game fiction to introduce each chapter of the Kalyr RPG. I’m tempted to recycle some of the introductory vignettes I wrote ten years ago when I first started the online campaign, but I’m also intending to use some ‘actual play’ examples extracted from ten year’s worth of game logs.
Most of them will be short, just a page or so, but for the introduction I’ve looking at an recent thread involving MikeD’s and Nicki Jett’s characters, Marlith and Hollis, which culminates in Hollis using her telekinetic powers to fly across the city, while the Academy of Knowledge tries to shoot her down with a laser artillery piece.
It’s reminding me how hard work it is editing game logs to read like fiction, and why I stopped doing it. The whole thing is a mix of different tenses, mixed British and US spelling, and conflicting POVs.
The Point of View issue is the knottiest one. I’d like tell the whole story from a single POV, but I keep running into sub-scenes that only make sense from the other POV from the previous bit. While third-person-omniscient is the default for online message gaming, it feels awkward in fiction. I think I’m stuck with the POV moving back and forth.
Other issue is the length. I’d originally intended to include just the dramatic action scene at the end. But there were two many references back to the previous scene, an information-gathering scene set in a gambling house. That’s actually quite a entertaining colour scene in it’s own right, but it results in the whole thing running to about eight pages. Is this too long?
The length at which gamefic becomes “too long” is pretty much proportional to its quality. As long as you stop before it sucks, you’re okay.
(Wasn’t *that* helpful?)
You mean, the same as a guitar solo? It depends on whether you are Dave Gilmour or Paul Weller….