Length Limit to Battle Reports?

[Chris]

Hi,

Just wondering if there is a length limit to battle reports? Not that I'm going to try and write a Proustian (sp?) kind of report or anything. I am just curious.

Thanks.

Chris

[Mark]

On this forum? No, I don't think so.

[Patrick Waterson]

Mark is right (he should be - he made the rules for this forum!)  The one thing to watch when posting on the forum is that there is a limit of (I think) 20,000 characters.

But Chris, did you mean a limit for articles submitted to Slingshot?

[Justin Swanton]

These are the guidelines in the Advice to Contributors page of the website. I don't know if they still apply:

Article Length

Up to about 9000 words is OK for a historical article, over that length the article may be cut into two or more episodes and serialised

Gaming articles should run to about 5000 words maximum, same rules apply.

But in both cases I'm happy to make exceptions.

The page count for Slingshot is generally between 850 and 950 words per page, excepting the two boilerplate pages which we include and the contents page. The difference between 850 and 950 can be considerable when thinking about an overall issue, but I would assume about 900 words per page.

[Mark]

Well, I wrote that. My issues over the last year were about 950 words per page (I could give you the exact number but it's on a spreadsheet on a computer at home); the difference between 850 and 1000 is really a function of how many pictures are in there.

I think Richard Taylor ran at a lower word count because he used a different typeface (I used Baskerville for body text, the mac version is in my opinion the densest book font known to man) and you can move a lot around with white space and margins. My general interest was in packing as much in as possible. When Nik (as an example) edited Slingshot there was a lot more white space, in particular for titles (Nik didn't do the layout though).

It's significant because the real measure is how many pages an article takes up, and what percentage of the issue that makes. This last year I had far too many long articles (some of which were highly painful to edit as well). What you really want is a few 4-6000 word articles and variety (my opinion at least). What I would get were 20000 word articles to be broken up (and into which the authors had put a heck of a lot of work) and a number of 1-2000 word articles to fit onto 1-2 pages, and nothing in between. So in my view, if you want to *really* help, write for that sweet spot.

[Chris]

Thanks to all who replied.

I have copied and pasted for future reference.

Regards,

Chris

[aligern]

Hi Chris,  A lot depends on how interesting the battle report is. If it is a cracking good read, well illustrated that says lots of pertinent things about ancient warfare then taking four pages of Slingshot would be fine. If the article is just a record of a game that makes few points and does not please the eye then the shorter the better.
Something Mark was keen on when he was editor was to have some lighter and more entertaining articles. Perhaps a battle report that was entertaining and engaging would be more interesting than one too concerned with the minutiae of a particular set of rules, especially if the set concerned is obscure.

Roy