Some Points In Favor Of Incoherence

Fellow RPG creator Snow posted BULLET POINTS LIKE DUST IN THE EYE OF GOD, a discussion of whether or not editing and layout in standards in tabletop roleplaying are strangling possible expressions of the medium. I'd recommend reading that piece before continuing with this one. It certainly gets a feeling across, even if I personally find the point to be lost a bit under a few too many layers of bile.

In ensuing discussion on the Prismatic Wasteland server, Valeria Loves, Binary and I joked about the idea of making similar points using an orderly bulleted list (to quote Valeria, "I don’t think it’s possible to have a coherent point railing against the value of coherence.." to which I responded "Bet.") What follows is my best attempt to argue against objectivity and in favor of the vibes of the maelstrom.

This is foreshadowing for later, I promise.

• Those vibes can be immaculate, and help push things forward. Mork Borg is obviously the most famous example, with its mechanical chassis being uplifted a lot by the wonderful graphical design work the book has, as well as the art of the thing. If what you're doing is vibes, coherence becomes less important. 
• Snow's own graphic design work is fantastic, and perfectly sells what each game is trying to do (they're great, give her money and buy her stuff.)
• Some players enjoy playing around in negative space: large swathes of modern OSR play takes place in fuzzy mechanical grey areas, where player creativity is not just encouraged but mandated by a rules system that is unreliable at best and deadly at worst. 
• I'm not the best person to sing its virtues, but fortunately you don't have to look long in the blog scene to find someone who can do it better than I.
• Less-coherent or concrete worlds open themselves up to "writer's room" style approaches, where the table collectively decides the fiction as they go, ensuring no two version of the setting are exactly alike.
• Similarly, this can also lead to greater comfort on the part of the players in doing so. I feel like people would be more comfortable making up details about a messy and purposefully incomplete world like Doskvol than, say, Faerun.
• It can also inspire a sense of wonder in those reading it: reading through descriptions of other planes in the Pathfinder 1E Core Rulebook as a kid, I was starstruck by how many possibilities there were. I doubt that happened as much with the 2E Core Rulebook, which explicitly includes bits of worldbuilding within its text. 
• Hostile layout or text conveys feelings. Reading through Snow's post, I found myself struck with a palpable anger, to the point where I said out loud "Do you need a biscuit or something? Because I only talk like this when I'm really hungry." and that is an artistic success! What is art, after all, except transferring your feelings from one person to another?

Ultimately, I'm probably not the best person to be making these kinds of cases; my therapist calls me a concrete thinker, and games like Pathfinder 2nd Edition give me the same feeling as when you perfectly pull a piece of paper out of a notebook. But that doesn't mean that ambiguity and incoherence and difficulty and incompleteness aren't worth exploring. Far from it.