"Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine"

all known brains are pretty small compared to the milky way tbh

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For what it's worth, I think the main thing you need for RPG writing is not brain but impishness. Gremlinity. You have to be poking your tongue into the side of your cheek at least metaphorically and smiling with your eyes and thinking about things you can do that will be fun and clever. Fluff, mechanics, whatever, you need to be delighted and sometimes just a bit wicked with it.

Then you get the editing. That's where the brain comes in, and yeah, it's 90% of the process. Maybe 99%. But it's also the part of the process that's easiest to just grind through. It's the part of the process where you can always just keep moving forward at a crawl if you lose the light in your eyes or have construction workers hanging out in your room with jackhammers just being a percussion band or whatever. The part that you can eventually finish as long as you have anything left.

But more than that, the thing is, you don't write AND THEN edit. At least I don't. Probably some people do. But personally, I have tossed out and rewritten at least 250% of any given section by the time I hit the end. I don't think I've gotten more than three paragraphs in a row before going back to revise like ever. The good bits stay, the rough bits go, the whole thing gets rephrased trying to keep the good bits, and that's just the rough draft, that's just the part where I don't know what I'm doing yet, so there has to be another four or five full-body edits after, and often closer to thirty, and in each of those, you have more insights, you make more fixes, you make it closer to a thematic whole. And the way it works is, when your eyes light up with glee, you write a bit, and then it fades and you edit a bunch, and if you're mostly dead when you're writing then you edit that section a lot as you go and if you're unusually alive when doing the first non-rough draft through thirtieth drafts you wind up doing unnecessary rewriting to make it better.

I don't know how much that helps. But I do think that if you feel insufficiently brained for RPG writing you may be comparing the first hesitant paragraphs when you barely have any ideas yet to stuff that's been pruned back to just the inspired bits when possible---

(Sometimes it's not possible, because a structural section on I dunno environmental damage or whatever never inspires you more than "it flows okay now")---

pruned back to just the inspired bits and edited and polished and edited and polished and edited and polished and edited and polished

And that's not a fair comparison!

This is literally a quick casual tumblr post and it's like draft six? nine?

It's also really helpful if you can bounce a few projects off of someone with professional experience putting words out there. It doesn't have to be RPG writing and it's possible that it doesn't have to be professional publishing, but you want to take a small project and have them do a practically sentence-by-sentence critique while pretending or having it actually be true that you can't just blow them off, you have to sell them your revised version. Just going back and forth a couple of times on a 5k word project like that---or longer, but keeping it to 5k words helps if you wind up having to pay them for their time---can really help you get started. It really helps if they're actually kind of frustrating about some bits as long as you can get the gremlin/imp part of you on the side of working around that, and it also really helps if they're insightful on other bits. I don't know.

I know other writers work different ways. There are probably people out there who just write, and then edit twice, or whatever, and they're done. But I don't think that can possibly change what's important, which is that glee in what you're doing and then being willing to grind through what it takes to make it all work together.

Other bits of advice:

Find a place where you can share little bits of writing as you work. It does not take much positive feedback AT ALL to help keep your brain in gear.

If you're editing in circles you're probably either not in physical/mental condition to work right then or you're trying to say something you don't actually want to say. Sometimes something seems perfectly sensible when you blur past it on an early draft and then you edit it for clarity and you suddenly discover there wasn't any clarity there to edit for, as it were, and that just means you need to take a step back and go "wait, how does this actually work?"

If you delete a bunch of text keep it around in another file. You will probably only look at it a couple of times ever but once it'll save your life because you deleted the wrong thing and a couple more times you'll find it useful and the rest of the time you'll know it's there so you can delete with confidence.