This project isn't as bitesized as I thought
I took time out last week to talk about exploring in TTRPGs while I was planning my Midnight Editions Project. I've come to the conclusion over the last fortnight that the scope of this project in my head wasn't as simple as I'd though. I had an idea of the sorts of stories that I wanted to tell which remains clear. What I hadn't factored in was that in order to tell those stories I was planning to combine several modules to create the cast and situations. At the same time I realised that if I want this thing to be modular then I have to be really careful about making sure each one stands on its own while keeping a focus on the bigger picture. The third thing that I noticed as I started to do more practical work on the project is that the 24XX template is tiny. I'd thought that coming up from a bookmark it would feel like an ocean of space but I've started thinking about how to streamline the changes that I wanted to make to the rules column to make sure it fits. It's a lot like writing a poem in that you have to focus on the most concise and elegant way of phrasing what you want to say.
What does all this mean, firstly I've realised that I need to be more focussed and secondly I've realised that have less space. Those things work well together, it's all good; I have to re-think this first module considerably in terms of what I want to include though. The tricky part is refocusing what I want this module to do as it stands alone and I'm not there yet. The basics will stay the same but I've got more work to do in order to make sure that when I release this first module it has an opinion about what it wants to do on its own without the others. Additionally it means that I'm going to have to do more in parallel to make sure that the sorts of stories I want various combinations of modules to support have the necessary material in place. In short it means I'm working on a different project to the one I was planning a few weeks ago. I have a vision though and I don't have a time limit, so that's nice. I may need to work out interesting ways of talking about other topics on weeks where I haven't made interesting progress though.