A fair trick tells you it is a trick
Mechanics communicate morality at thirty frames a second. This page is for designers who are willing to say 'this is where we are asking for trust'.
A cancel window is a social contract. If it widens in patch two without a teachable callout, you have changed the law while wearing the same flag. The Frame Theory test is: can a returning player re-learn the rule in a single, explicit beat—not in a video hosted off-client?
We separate stunt design (delight for stream viewers) from transit design (delight for thumbs on a moving train). The same mechanic can be both if the staging adapts, but the team must not pretend they are the same without translation.
Frame Theory uses a failure taxonomy for feel: misread (I did not know the rule), mistimed (I knew, but the window lied), and mis-scaled (the rule is legible but the consequence is humiliating). Each class needs a different fix; a patch that only tunes numbers often repairs the wrong category.