An Analogy About Rules for Sickos

There is a concept in set theory called cardinality which refers to the number of individual objects in the set. The wrinkle is that sets with an infinite number of members still have cardinality and the size of these infinite sets can be compared. This is how you end up with those weird logic puzzles about, say, a hotel with an infinite number of filled rooms accommodating an additional infinite number of guests. Hyonklo in Jay Dragon's discord server asked this morning whether you could reasonably think of rules in a tabletop RPG as inherently subtractive, in the sense that you start from the infinite space of conversation and then "carving shape from the marble in the negative space". Earlier this month I talked about rules for Conversation Play as an act of building play, or building a central lusory project, on a foundation of conversation but today I want to experiment with an analogy using the imagery of fractals. The Mandelbrot set is a well-loved and well-studied figure in…