So this is killing me. How do some of you come up with estimates on word counts for your proposals? I sit here and fiddle around with my ideas, but I have no clue how to guess the length in words. My biggest fear with a proposal is I end up way over my estimate and have to cut out some cool stuff. My second biggest fear is that I'm way under and have to find ways to fluff up the adventure, weakening it overall.
Any tips, or do most of you just guess?
So this is killing me. How do some of you come up with estimates on word counts for your proposals? I sit here and fiddle around with my ideas, but I have no clue how to guess the length in words. My biggest fear with a proposal is I end up way over my estimate and have to cut out some cool stuff. My second biggest fear is that I'm way under and have to find ways to fluff up the adventure, weakening it overall.
Any tips, or do most of you just guess?
I'm terrible at estimating word count, so I actually write out a full, rough draft of my adventures before I submit a query. It may not be for everyone, but I don't mind, as I actually enjoy the writing process. Over time, I have found that I'm getting better and better at estimating roughly how many words my adventure will require.
It has also taught me some adventure design discipline; lots of templated monsters and NPCs may sound neat, but their stat blocks eat up a lot of word count, so I have to be judicious in my usage. For example, I wrote a jungle adventure for 1st level characters, so I went through the MM, MMII, MIII, and the FF and collected all of the monsters that would fit into the setting, but which had a CR of 3 or less. Then I made a conscious decision to keep only a handful of the monsters from books other than the MM. In the end, the adventure included one monster from MMII, one from FF, and one from the Oriental Adventures book; everything else was a standard monster from the MM. It cut down on a lot of space, and I was able to make my pre-set goal.
So this is killing me. How do some of you come up with estimates on word counts for your proposals? I sit here and fiddle around with my ideas, but I have no clue how to guess the length in words. My biggest fear with a proposal is I end up way over my estimate and have to cut out some cool stuff. My second biggest fear is that I'm way under and have to find ways to fluff up the adventure, weakening it overall.
Any tips, or do most of you just guess?
I have difficulty with this one too. I try to write up the base of the adventure: the primary NPC, the adventure backgroun, and the adventure synopsis, word count that, and then estimate for the rest. Sometimes it works really well, and others it doesn't. My biggest culprit in word count woes is using monsters from outside the MM, and using advanced or templated creatures. These are major word hogs, so my best advice is to plan for them. The other option... write up a typical small, medium, and long encounter, word count each, and then figure out how many such encounters you intend on having in the adventure (then add that to the bits I listed above). Don't forget to add some words for the Concluding the Adventure and Scaling the Adventure pieces as well!
- Ashavan
Creative Director
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We're averaging around 850 words a page in Dungeon these days.
Here's some tips on how to estimate a typical adventure's length before it's written.
First, figure out how many encounters the adventure's going to have (it helps to sketch out maps here, or at least have an idea of how many maps the adventure's going to have). By encounters, I mean events, BBEG battles, traps, or pretty much any keyed location on a map. Take that number and multiply by 500 (a rough average for an encounter's word length). Add another 1500 for extra stuff (scaling the adventure sidebars, the author bio, intro text, miscellaneous sidebars, and tables). The result is by no means exact, but it's close enough at the proposal stage to work.
For example, say I want to propose an adventure where the PCs are hired by the mayor of Thimbletown to deal with a plague of kobolds that have tunneled into the town well and stole the town's water supply. I want to have a map of Thimbletown, a map of the kobold warren below Thimbletown, and a map of the ancient genie's workshop below the kobold warren where the exiled janni who organized the kobolds in an attempt to gain revenge against the founders of Thimbletown dwells.
I want 4 in-town encounters to give Thimbletown a personality and to get the PCs invested in defending it from the kobolds. The kobold warren's the biggest part of the adventure, and I decide to make it 10 encounter areas. The genie's workshop is smaller, and has only 4 encounters. Applying the formula above, we get 4+4+10= 18 encounters x 500 = 9000 words + 1500 for the rest of it = 10,500 words total.
It's probably best to round up to the nearest increment of 1000, so I'd estimate "Trouble Under Thimbletown" would be an 11,000 word adventure. If it gets accepted, and if once I start writing it I find out it's going to be shorter or longer than 11,000 words by more than 1,000 words, I'd drop an email to the editor to let them know and ask if the new length will be a problem. Most times, it won't be, since we operate fairly far out ahead of any given issue's print date.
I'm one of the oddballs that usually writes his modules first or already wrote it a long time ago and simply estimates what a few modifications will run and set the word count along those lines. As James Sutter said in his tips thread, you get rockstar points for having your manuscript ready to roll as soon as they say go.
For what it's worth, I'm usually off by about 1,000 words from what I estimate in my proposals and the actual finished product. The staff at Paizo seem to be fairly lenient with that, but too much of a discrepancy would probably warrant letting them know in advance as Mr. Jacobs has pointed out.
If it gets accepted, and if once I start writing it I find out it's going to be shorter or longer than 11,000 words by more than 1,000 words, I'd drop an email to the editor to let them know and ask if the new length will be a problem.
Along with the numerical tips, this is really good to know. I know I've had this once with the guys over on the Dragon side of things, and Jason B was really cool about helping me out with getting a new estimate to work with.
Your formula is extremely useful, though - thanks bunches!