How to Write an AAR?

[Finbar800]

Hello everyone. As you can probably tell from my feeble post count, I'm a bit new here. I recently got Victoria II, and I've been playing around with it. One day, while exploring the caverns of the interweb, I discovered these AARs. I've been forum role playing for a couple of years now, so this looks very interesting to me. I'd love to jump in to making these, but I can't find any tutorial or even a thread of suggestions or methods. So, I thought I would ask it directly here.

If you could share your methods and suggestions to making AARs, that would be swell.

Thanks,
Finbar800

[loki100]

One good source is the AARland FAQ, stickied on this page or you can follow the link in my signature

[Saithis]

Welcome to the forum!

Loki already covered the basics, but for any extra you can also check out this thread in which various AAR writers explain what methods they use to undertake the process of playing their game and turning it into an AAR.

[Alfred Packer]

I'd recommend reading a few AARs, find a style you particularly enjoy and then use it to launch your own AAR. If you want advice and feedback from your readers on how to improve what you're doing, just ask for it. This has to be the most helpful, friendly and pleasant message board I've ever been part of (thanks to the great moderating team) and you can expect others to treat you politely and offer real useful feedback.

Even if you decide your first AAR is horrible (god knows my first few were atrocious!) don't give up...do another one...you learn a lot even with the ones that fail.

[Wave]

Basically the answer to "how to write an AAR?" is "Write what happened in your game."

However here are some writers who can make it a real art so reading (not fully but enough to find the idea) a few AARs can help alot.
For me it was pretty difficult in the beginning because I'm not a native english speaker so if I was doing narrative AAR I kinda lacked the ability to find "good enough" words to give the story some feeling.

If you don't like writing very long stuff you can also do something fully different, there has been comic AARs and I'm doing one that is based on letters and diary page pictures so only your own imagination is the limit!

Good luck for writing
- Wave