I want to give you a toy that comes apart in your hands—
Not because it’s broken,
But because it was meant for you to assemble. Together.
I want to rip holes in the parchment.
To cast spells with a missing word.
To smudge the ink before it dries.
Not to confuse.
Not to sabotage.
But to make room.
For play.
For liveness.
For the table to do what only it can do.
I live for the lurch.
Initiative seized.
The breaking of order.
To make rhytm.
A Gotcha! refuted by instinct.
Or taken to its end:
You took the coral in hand without gloves, and now the poison is in you.
The barbarian is upon you.
Gleaming axe caught in the promise of a deadly arc.
Vision blurs.
Muscles seize.
Panic bubbles.
This is really, really bad.
Everything on the character sheet leveraged in desperation.
The player stands up.
Gravity nearly seems to reverse.
Vertigo.
One swing. One plea. One declaration. One token slammed.
A player GASPS as they find their instinct can stop the blade.
They SLAM down their token.
The GM has to swallow back the spoken consequence like a ghost banished.
The clangor and physicality of BREATH, GASP, SLAM is part of play too.
And strangely it does not remove us from that other world.
But merely loads it with sheer sonic meaning from ours.
Every tooth of the fiction becomes a finger to hold onto.
Every part of the character becomes a blade to parry with.
Not once per turn.
Not once per day.
But whenever it fits. Because it must.
And for this kind of play,
Where every strike is against the fence,
Where every moment is the moment—
There must be a safety net.
The possibility of resurrection.
World and system and praxis cannot be separated.
The mutual precarity of all who stand together in the ring.
The love of those who also bleed.
This is not combat as sport.
Not combat as tactics.
Not combat as story.
It is combat as rollercoaster.
With the thrill of the hill and the pause at the top.
Where you build the tracks together as you go
So it does not feel like tickling yourself
Wait. What
The analogy does not work.
Well, it stands.
I think.
That meaning.
And so too must be haggling,
Trekking,
Helping a mother give birth.
Holding a hand as someone dies.
Each scene—not a checkpoint—
But a thunderstorm.
Each moment—art as experience, as Dewey says.
Two is always 2.
And if “this trait” always means 2—then it’s just a vessel,
a delivery system for something else.
But “this trait” must mean this trait.
It must be exactly itself.
You do not "earn effort"
You exert it
I learned that, dear bad doctor
And do whatever it needs to do, in this situation,
to the listening world.
And the response of the world must feel real.
The characters must be a part of it.
Else we never arrive at that.
I want every combat to be that combat.
Every birth to be that birth.
Every lie to sting like that first time you were betrayed.
Every breath held like something that might fall apart if you let go.
(Experience exists in potential too, y’know.)
And this is also what makes dwelling rich.
The long slowness.
The little hows and whys.
The brush of a hand over the same table day after day.
The system doesn’t demand it.
But you do.
Maybe haggard with adrenaline
Or touched by a world that responds like a world.
You, who stare at the candle as it flickers.
You, who watch your lover’s silence and wonder what it means.
You, who spend ten minutes describing the way your foot slides across marble.
We, the table, decide what deserves our gaze.
Splatter an army with a word?
Fine.
But test every inch your dagger has to crawl
On its camino toward the betrayer’s heart?
Also fine.
Infinite zoom in resolution
Detail–detail–detail.
As much as it needs.
Because it is necessary only when it is.
When the camera never pulls away unless you do.
The rules aren’t those of storygaming.
Nor trad.
Nor FKR.
Nor mechanics.
They are the rules of fictional gravity
—that tie to the players’ hearts.
Play is play.
Play is to the ability to imagine and become, freely.
And therefore, play can be a toy.
Roleplaying is a toy.
A toy for fae-people who want to drink emotion.
A toy for glass-girls who just want to feel again and be filled by another world.
A toy for monkey-hands who want to tug and twist and rewire the machine.
A toy for tables who trust each other in that symphonic difference, not just to act, but to listen.
I also live for silence
The baited breath.
The unspoken tension.
The moment when everyone knows something is about to happen
And no one dares make it happen yet.
That tight thinking.
We see the inner wheel turning.
All eyes turns towards those barely open lips.
A synthesis of threads.
The knot tightens.
And a gaze that says: Do it.
Then that shared, sacred exhalation as fiction-time resumes, but play has been going on all the while
What Is De-sign?
De-signing is not merely a resistance to mechanics or clarity—
It’s a deliberate tearing-open of space.
Not ambiguity for its own sake,
But a field of unfinished invitations.
It’s ritual sabotage of coherence
So that play can cohere, instead.
And play coheres by making space for what the players want.
By providing a delicious, but refutable, resistance
As opposed to the necessary, but fake obstacles to make games.
If design places a sign, a label, a seal—
Then de-sign smudges the ink before it dries.
Writes in breath.
Leaves corners unpinned.
It demands both interpretation and improvisation.
And by matters of speed and pseudo-material inertia sends you into delicious vertigo.
Hypnosis, even.
Not story—but meaning in contact.
Not crystallized completion—but rhizomatic unfinishedness.
Every unfinished mechanic a hook.
Every undefined rule a blank margin.
Every contradiction a place for breath.
For the eye to look inside.
You are not solving the game.
You are assembling it.
You are stitching with others.
And figuring out—together—
How to deal with a mechanic,
Interpret a trait,
Understand what “accept-but-change” means this time—
That is the game.
That is the play.
It is a mirror of your table’s context,
And it’s different every time.
What De-sign Affords
Liveness.
Not narrative coherence, but felt improvisation.
The truth of what happens isn’t in outcome or plot—
It's in sudden alignment of emotion and fiction.
World as Toy.
Not story-first, but toybox-first.
The world should come apart in your hands.
Be tasted, smelled, flipped.
It’s remixable. Sensual. Alive.
Consent and Clarity by Necessity.
The gaps don’t confuse.
They compel.
The text doesn’t offer full clarity.
So the players must find it.
Together.
This is not failure—it’s de-sign.
Velocity and Viscosity.
You can move with breakneck speed.
You can spend an hour on one gesture.
Both feel real. Both are holy.
Both are held in the same looseness.
Gravity Without Grid.
There are no coordinate systems.
Only emotional mass.
If your want is heavy enough, it will bend the world.
If your pain is sharp enough, someone will hand you a knife or a kiss.
It demands introspection.
And because it’s trust-based, that introspection is validated.
Roleplay as Ritual, Not Story.
There is no plot.
Only truth and mask.
Only softness and slash.
The roles are masks to wear with reverence or delight.
Never irony. Never fake adult seriousness.
Start in reverence or joy—but start in something real.
Like a child who has not learned irony yet.
The game is a shrine.
The table is a chorus.
And sheer sincerity and experimentation is the only offering accepted.
I don’t want to design.
I want to de-sign.
I want to give you rituals that mean nothing without your aid.
Mechanics that blur.
Rules that quiver and buckle under desire.
Too little time, or too much.
Things happening around the table.
Tokens slammed
Baited Breath
Emotions heard
Play that breathes through the holes we leave unpatched.
I want you to look at my work and say—
"Yes, yes
I see.
This is nonsense
But it is nonsense to such a degree
That i can allow myself to go where I must enter.
I see where I must make it mine."
A dragon of de-sign. Bebop.genesis
Because this is play.
Not game.
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