The Cracks Are Where The Light Gets In

Blow holes in your thinking, and your systems. 

Force imagination, consideration, and asking “Why” to fill those gaps.

Life is like a nest of birds, Evangeline Gallagher

Let's exemplify:

A trait stolen from a stolen world and remade to fit my purpose as an expertise - a character defining term with multiple actions beneath it:

SISTER

“Who is family to you, and why are they that? Ask/answer when apparent, when unclear, or state when it feels necessary."

As part of saving, when saving for someone else, you may as part of the action freely act, save or attack independently as governed by this or another expertise, resolved in the same compromise or test.

Actions: All with either words, kind gestures, or closeness and time: Comfort someone. Intuit intention. Find courage. Reprimand. 

Attack: Any type of retaliation possible for you

Save: Any type of physical or emotional interposing possible for you. Failure will always include that you suffer the impact.

What makes all witches sisters? I ask Rosaleen Norton

Like, one can easily spot the apparent "flaw": Anyone willing to power game this would just change up who is family to them, to be able to use the sister action combination, whenever it is fit for them. At the very same time, that they do this reveals that the player is not the right type for the table.

The power lies in that which constitutes "ask when apparent" is unexplained, including who can invoke it. It makes for a powerful ritual, pointing to the moment it is invoked being important. 

Lastly, as long as the answer to the "who is family to you and why" is not made in bade faith, it gives all other players plenty of tools to make the situation in the fictional world super juicy: It will be a character that constantly redefines what family is to them. What then happens when the family begins to demand obligations. They will have to deal with emotions of jealosy, envy. Suddenly that family is a bag of birds carried up-hill. Decisions and consequences multiply and drive the game forward.

Evangeline Gallagher at it again!

I want actionability, color, meaning - both in procedures and in my system. I don’t want stability: What does SISTER mean to this character? I want the system to resist your hands, like the material push-back when molding clay. But i do want it malleable. If we make this malleability subject to some mathematical or logical predefined system, it breaks that nice, nearly physical feeling: If we make SISTER always SISTER, its boring - dead even. If SISTER can (only) become MOTHER because thats written, it is the predetermined growth that only happens in spreadsheets for terminally capitalistic companies. I want the growth of vines and tumours and mycelium, of hands grasping tenously - poetic association:

If SISTER can from the fiction become MOTHER / BROTHER / LONER / WIDOW / DEATH KNIGHT / FLUKING / BATTLE / STUDIED it is interesting.  When sister becomes Loner, what do we do with the changing "who is family to you question?"... Does the question remain the same, or does it need to change and “Who is no longer family to you?”. That is up to the player(s).

Only if the specific actions beneath can also change in any way, do we paradoxically get the feeling of material resistance. A maybe too cogent example: If SISTER adds a new attack to their list “attack: any attack against family” .... Then we can ask what is that for a type of sister, why did that action become important. Why did the player write that on the sheet? What does it mean? What prompted the change. Ask, ask ask - Why? Why? Why? WHY?! + Use the goddamn answers. Weave them into the fictional world, how other characters relate to them, how you as a character relate to them. You don't need to be a GM to be interested.

Why do they only dance around big sis when its the full moon? Sarcoma

... But now the fingers obscure the moon that they point at ...

... Atleast they did for me, after years of indoctrination into feedback-looping between the circlejerk of digital rpgs and physical rpgs. I used to evaluate systems like numerical, logical systems, where the output must be immediately parseable. and that parsability was how i evalutated if a design was "good". we fear breakdowns in communication. 

FUCK THAT.

We should not (necesarilly) imprison imagination with numbers: That imagination is already governed by a shared imagined world. When we can introduce "errors", we should say Why Not! to ourselves and introduce them - because nothing crashes. These moments of being stumped are the dearest invitations to investigate - the momentary suspension of the game is not a suspension of play, or of the fictional world, its a moment of introspection, sense-making, empathy, immersion. Say a player writes SISTER + attack family example above, it already makes sense to them. Trust them. But ask why:

Empathy creates interest.

Interest turns the error into a hook and the unparsable into a why? 

Imagination bites onto the hook and resolves those faults, those errors.

Together interest and imagination allow for a unity of opposites. Like poetry working with association, “SISTER” can work with new actions - “attack: kill indiscriminately and with great force" or "action: call on the legions of the fay". SISTER can become MOTHER, or it can become CAMOUFLAGE, and two people that have just met can become SISTERs. Because the words exist in relation to another, either a new tenuous connection is made, or we just ask...

Look what i found sisters! Yan Kyohara sure draws up a mean family

... Why?

This way of playing is for the people who are ready to bash in those vases, jump those gaps, and fill in those cracks, not with solid gold, but with the fluid light of their shared imagination and interest in one another.