Everything can be held, smelled, and tasted. It exists to be investigated, and destroyed, and changed. It exists and it matters – even when nobody knows why yet. Nothing is only in the background.

In the real world, we don’t call your broken ankle or an old job “flavor”. These things define our experience. These things matter. People often talk about flavor like it is something that sits outside “the rules”. But flavor defines the rules.

Flavor is everything.

If nothing is insignificant, players can engage with the whole breadth of the imagined space, guided by desire and free of the burden of expectation and assumption about what is important, about what is “breaking the rules”.

Rules can’t account for everything, or even most things, a player might do, but luckily we don’t need rules to tell us how the world works. We know when you fall feet first from a tree, you’ll break your ankle. We know when you sit on a see-saw, the other end goes up. We know the flavor of life – we’ve been tasting it our entire lives.

Rules are helpful when they describe the world consistently in areas we cannot do ourselves, but they take something away when they extend their reach. If the rules no longer describe the world in a way that feels true to us, they have failed, and need to be discarded or replaced before the game loses its flavor entirely. If the game falls apart without those rules, then the flavor needs more salt.

If nothing is insignificant, then we need to go by our own experiences. Designers have tried to edit this out of roleplaying games for years to replace it with something less messy, less soulful, less apetizing.

Trust that compass inside you; the one you were born with; the one you’ve been honing your entire life. Your imagination suits you, and its the most powerful tool in the world.

And what was once “just flavor” can become the heart of the game.