Everything is Parfait: A Macguyver Manual

HOW TO IMPROVISE (MACGUYVER, NOT ACTING) IN TABLETOP RPGS:

I used to play a lot of Team Fortress 2, and I think one of the images that will always stick with me about that game is the health pickups. They come in small, medium, and large sizes, and I've included the large size below.

What strikes me about this health kit is that it is a lie. That is, in the game, like in all video games, you use the healthkit by touching it, and then it vanishes along with your injuries. For all intents and purposes, this friendly cooler is actually just a cloud of positive energy, a platonic ideal of what it means to be healthy. Often, they hover and rotate gently, even glow. 

Health is probably the most egregious example, but almost everything in video games works like this. Most things in video games work in an abstract, simplified way, because no game dev wants to spend time coding a stitching mechanic. Let's call this first layer their PURPOSE, the one thing that they should be doing, were designed to do, the thing that happens when you left-click. 

It's tempting to fall into this mindset of thinking of healthkits as a way to restore health for obvious reasons- That is what they're for, after all. But underneath their purpose is almost always a seething broth of secondary properties that add up to their purpose. That health kit is, in fact, a cooler full of interesting and useful objects in their own right. 

Consider the flamethrower for a moment. It shoots fire. But how? Answer: It sprays a flammable fluid, and it has a built in lighter that ignites the fluid that it sprays. So then, beneath the obvious PURPOSE of "Throw some flames" there's the second tier, the PRACTICAL tier, of "Fluid Sprayer" combined with "Lighter" and "Fluid Tank." This is useful and important because now we've unlocked a bunch of new powers and abilities that wouldn't be in TF2. We can replace the fluid in the tank and spray anything (holy water? acid? nerve gas?), disregarding the lighter. We can disconnect the tank and just throw it as a very bad grenade. We can disregard all the other parts and just use the lighter at the end of the pole to light things on high shelves. 

Then, once you get past all the sub-tiers within PRACTICAL, we arrive at the bottom-most layer of useful options: the MATERIAL, the list of traits and abilities an object has by mere virtue of existing and being made of matter. This is where I remind you to consider conductivity, aerodynamics, flammability, weight: Remember that if you don't want an explosion, a grenade can be thrown unarmed as a blunt projectile. 

Now, generally, a mirror is best for reflecting, and has limited utility as a throwing disc, and it's better to cut things with knives, or bring jagged shards of glass from home, than to shatter a mirror and use a jagged shard of glass to saw through the bonds of your captors, but on days when you don't have a perfectly obvious tool, drill down into the second and third layers of your inventory and see if you can't find something that just might work.