Quest Length

[Chiroptera]

I have a question for the community at large, but especially for the judges and veterans. How long of a thread is too long? I've heard that in the old days people would submit quests that were around a hundred posts long, but I've been told by judges that 40-50 post quests are longer than usual. So I was curious; is there a general range for which we should aim when determining quest lengths, or is there such a thing as a quest that's too long?

[Elijah_Morendale]

I think 10-15 posts per character is a reasonable amount for a quick quest. Twenty give or take a few for something grander, and I consider anything over that to be rather... epic. But to me it would depend on the nature of the quest to begin with.

[HikariAngel]

Then you get the TRUE epics that have ~50-75 posts from everyone, and you have five people going all at once. Ah, those are the truly great threads. I pity the hopeless sap that gets stuck with it, though.

[Breaker]

I think 10-15 posts per character is a reasonable amount for a quick quest. Twenty give or take a few for something grander, and I consider anything over that to be rather... epic. But to me it would depend on the nature of the quest to begin with.

By that definition, SDV is epic :P


Your quest can be as long as it needs to be. What's important is how well it moves. If you have a 50 post quest with a long, well thought out storyline that keeps the reader guessing, so much the better. But if you're just going into unnecessary detail and turning a quest that could be 20 posts into 50 very boring ones, it's not worth it.

[Call me J]

There is no such thing as a quest that is too long, but there are quests that are too long (and too short) given the stories they contain. If you have a simple story about hunting down a goblin menace, I'd be hard pressed to imagine your quest going longer than 20 posts (if even that many). If you have a very involved plot, then perhaps 50 posts is too few.

What I would do when I started a thread is not worry about how long my thread is in terms of posts, but how elaborate my plot is. The more elaborate the plot, the more room you're going to need to take care of it.

[Saxon]

What I'm running in with my quests is that I've never really cared about the post count, just that the story is complete. My last one with Saxon was 3 pages long, it took me a year to write, and I got a JC for it. Length isn't as important as what it is your writing about and how you do it. I remember my Dad showing me some of H.P Lovecraft's stories one time, and some of his most gripping stories were only 3 or 4 pages long.

With the FQ, I've been trying to recount each scene in either quest my characters are in, and I'm predicting that Jobes will be a 3 pager and Saxon's.. Jesus.. I didn't even expect Camella and I to be halfway done with it until page 4 or 5. But with time constraints, I'm going to have to condense plotlines and leave things open for part 2 in order to finish it on time. I'd have to say one of the most important things you'll have to learn is to know how to give your posts fluidity. If they're stale and choppy, not many people are going to want to read them. ;)

[Corvus MacCallum]

Used to doing 100 post quests and stories on old forums I went to which is why when the first Lessons with Chiroptera hit 74 posts for merely the first section of the story it didn't feel overly long at all. Gave a great amount of personalities bouncing against each other.

[Sighter Tnailog]

Most 100-post stories (Althanas' record is something like 109, by AH21 in the good old days, but I can't remember the precise length) were also written with MUCH shorter posts than the ones that used to grace the forum.

In those days, STORY was about all anyone worked on. But in these days, a lot more page space is devoted to character development and writing style, making for a much more involved post.

[Cyrus the virus]

If you waste space your score is going to suffer. I've had to trudge through 50 post quests that could have easily been 20, but people often feel the need to fall into a formula of 'meet in a bar and talk for a few hours before anything happens', which is fine... As long as your characters say things that matter.

Anyway, chances are a long thread like that will suffer in score if I judge it, unless the story actually warrants such an amount of posts.

[Max Dirks]

The longest thread in Althanas' history was an 'inn' thread created by ACDragonMaster. It was 350+ posts once completed, and contained several mini-stories. There were several other general RP threads like that one which reached into the high 200's. Most posts were short, but everyone appeared to be having lots of fun.

[Sighter Tnailog]

Was that thread judged? I seem to recall the one of which you speak, but I just can't remember if EXP was eventually rewarded or if it was just one of those "a good time was had by all" deals.

[Ashiakin]

I think it was judged eventually... For some reason I remember one the rewards being some sort of magic daggers or something. If I am even remembering the right thread.

I'd say the real reason that quests have fewer posts these days is that people write longer posts. There's nothing wrong with writing a long quest with short posts, though.

[Call me J]

There was a quest not too long ago by Letho, Zantesuken, Creo Lady and someone else (sorry) that went over 100 posts with every post being the size that the posts are now. It is possible to have that titanic of a thread, you just need a good reason for it.

[Maia]

On the other hand I've seen a thread that broke 80 posts and could have EASILY been done in about 20 or so.

As they said, I've been trying to follow a little rule for posting.

"Did I advance the story in any significant way?"

Most of the time, if you look on it, some people has missed this bit. You can trim quite a bit of fluff from posts and still have a high quality thread. The writer for Portal and Pyschonaughts described it thusly.

"If you discount the purely visual pop-up parts, a book is made almost entirely of words. As a novelist, you just need to think of a few decent strings of words and then fill the other 98% of the book with more or less random descriptions of things and exclamation points."