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Just something I've been pondering on. I know our mantra is always 'more details' but I'm wondering whether a story deliberately limited to like, 300 words per page, max, wouldn't be more comfortable to read on mobile or by people just casually browsing.

By necessity it would meaning having to gloss over a lot of details and just summarize things that aren't major plot moments. For example: 'You spend some time negotiating with the guards. Your appeals to common decency and the urgency of your quest get you nowhere, but finally the short one with the scar takes you aside and offers to sell you a key to one of the side gates for 100 gold, no questions asked.'

Normally that would be an entire scene, maybe 1000 words, but here we've got two sentences and to be fair the plot DID get moved along. Anything meant to have emotional impact would need a lot more work put in, of course.

Though I feel like to not be a completely forgettable piece of fluff, the shortcut of short pages would have to be made up with by having a lot more of them and a wide variety of choices that significantly change things or let the character directly explore or interact with the environment. So not quite flash CYOA, but maybe ideal for a sprawling game about traveling and adventuring, for instance.

Sort of depends on the story.

I mean there are stories on here that have pages that aren't sprawling and they're fine. If anything there's just as many people that complain about pages being too long.

I'd still say you'd have to make the pages at least somewhat memorable, you just do it in less words. (Like making one of the guards doing something that stands out in the example above, just so it isn't too generic)

That's pretty much the Fallen London philosophy, make scenes in as few words as possible (though still content heavy), mentioned somewhere in their blog. In any case, pacing would be one of the challenges of meeting an arbitrary 300 word count or the like.

Being succinct is as valid an approach as being verbose. It all depends on the story-feel that you are going for.

If you can read what you've written and honestly say to yourself - 'this works, I like it!' then you are doing it right (regardless of feckless commentary spewed from unwashed plebeians barely worthy the discarded crumbs of your creative genius). ^v^