{"id":541,"date":"2017-02-16T01:24:06","date_gmt":"2017-02-16T01:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/idea-to-thing-4-work-in-progress\/"},"modified":"2023-02-23T04:09:22","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T04:09:22","slug":"idea-to-thing-4-work-in-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/idea-to-thing-4-work-in-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Idea to Thing 4: Work In Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

So you\u2019ve got this Thing I\u2019m Working On<\/a>, which means that sometime in the very near future you\u2019re going to become a miserable bastard. It might not happen right away, but it\u2019s going to happen. During those early stages when the theoretical project is just an idea, it\u2019s lots of fun to think about and tell people about and make plans about. Thinking about an idea is exciting, mainly because you only have to think about the fun stuff. Those Books of Lore that are so often a sign of Idea Debt usually just contain the lore that the creator enjoys coming up with. If you want to turn the thing into an actual product, eventually you\u2019ll have to do actual work, and work is unpleasant and difficult and not very much fun.<\/p>\n

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A lot of people will tell you that if you love what you\u2019re doing, it doesn\u2019t feel like work. These people are full of shit. Once you move from \u201ctalking about the idea to your friends\u201d to \u201cmaking the idea something you can share with complete strangers,\u201d things get a lot more complicated, because you don\u2019t get to just stop at the premise and whatever cool additions to that premise popped into your mind when you had the idea. Even a high-concept premise is going to take a lot of clarification before people who aren\u2019t familiar with how your brain works are on the same page as you, and even the parts that are fun to explain are going to require a lot of sentences that do boring but structurally important things like making transitions or setting tone or defining terms.<\/p>\n

One of the first things I discovered when I first started writing games was that explaining game rules requires a lot more text than I ever imagined. No matter how simple your dice mechanic seems or how easy it is to explain through demonstration, explaining it in writing to an invisible audience who can\u2019t ask for clarification requires a ridiculous amount of text, even if you assume your audience is made up of gamers. What we usually think of as a single action often turns out to be half a dozen steps, each of which has to be clearly explained. You don\u2019t just make your roll, you determine what ability governs the roll, then use that to figure out what dice to use or what modifiers to apply, then roll the dice, and there still may be other steps before you end up with your final roll, much less the outcome of that roll.<\/p>\n

Oh, and remember all those cool ideas you have that build on the core premise and help better define the game? It\u2019s not like you can just list them all out. You\u2019re going to have to find some coherent way to organize them, which usually means you\u2019re going to have to expand upon them or add some similar ideas to the mix. Some of this new material will be fun, but some of it will be less fun but necessary. You don\u2019t get to write up three Hogwart\u2019s houses and leave out the fourth because you don\u2019t think Hufflepuffs are cool. After that, you\u2019re going to realize that there are a bunch of other things the game needs to work, and some of them are going to be tedious as hell to write. Depending on the game, the boring but necessary stuff can include anything from rules to setting information to equipment or monster lists to GM information. And every one of those things is going to need sentences and paragraphs full of unsexy words that do the work of turning the text from a pile of random ideas to an actual product.<\/p>\n

When a Thing I\u2019m Working On becomes Work, procrastination gets a lot easier, and you\u2019re once again in danger of leaving a big pile of abandoned Idea Debt sitting on your computer. Sometimes going back over or talking about the fun parts can inspire you to work your way through the parts that aren\u2019t fun, but a lot of people get hung up on focusing on the fun stuff and never get around to putting in the work. I have a feeling that\u2019s what the author who inspired this series<\/a> of posts was talking about when she talked about Idea Debt. If you\u2019re not willing to do the hard part, dwelling on all the fun ideas in your Book of Lore is taking time you could be using to work on an idea you enjoy enough to power through the dull but necessary parts.<\/p>\n

Hunkering down and doing the work is an important step, but you\u2019re not out of the woods yet. In fact, you\u2019re not even in the woods. You\u2019re in an amusement park, and you\u2019re about to ride a roller coaster that doesn\u2019t even take you into the D&D cartoon. From now until the project\u2019s over, you\u2019re going to alternate between loving it and hating it, thinking it\u2019s brilliant and thinking it\u2019s shit, and occasionally deciding that you should just give up and binge watch Fuller House. Eventually you\u2019ll get to the point where you\u2019ll experience all of those things at once. We\u2019ll talk about that next week.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So you\u2019ve got this Thing I\u2019m Working On, which means that sometime in the very near future you\u2019re going to become a miserable bastard. It might not happen right away, but it\u2019s going to happen. During those early stages when the theoretical project is just an idea, it\u2019s lots of fun to think about and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2000],"tags":[62,1749,1750,1791,1793,1794,2127],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-design-ramblings","tag-game-design","tag-writing","tag-publishing","tag-creativity","tag-idea-debt","tag-work","tag-creative-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3331,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/3331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}