It has become obvious to me that this series is not going quite the way I’d planned. Instead of distilling game rules down to their basics and building back up, it appears I’m mostly going through and deciding which elements, or what approaches to those elements, I plan to use.
The ‘distill to basics and build up’ part will just have to come later, I suppose. I’m quite okay with that, though. At that point I’ll have a road map of which parts I will need to gather and refine for purpose. This is a much easier way to go about it, in the long run.