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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9043548" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Oh, rules-design choices that are purely driven by rules aesthetics are a huge 2000s thing; that's like 90% of the design of 3e, particularly the problematic design.The idea of building all enemies with identical rules to what you use to build a player character? That is driven by rules aesthetics, not by other concerns. Specifically, it is the rules aesthetic of symmetry. All entities--player or non-player--function exactly the same way (up to differences that would already potentially exist between any two PCs, I mean.)The idea of à la carte multiclassing is another rule used for is aesthetic value, not its mechanical value, because mechanically it's a nightmare and I've never seen it work properly. Likewise, most "skill point" systems have similar issues and share the same rules-aesthetic motive. Different people will probably refer to this by different terms, but the rules-aesthetic going on there is (more or less) "growth realism": the idea that real people do not rigidly adhere to one track/pursuing absolute mastery/etc., but instead grow in diverse and sprawling ways that shift and change over time. This aesthetic is extremely compelling for a lot of people, despite frequently leading to both reduced fun (see: how many people hate the fact that you need to plan out builds in 3e super far in advance or else you'll probably suck) and reduced practical effectiveness of the rules (it takes forever to build characters, you have to be a precise bean-counter for tons of things, etc.)But there are many others. Parsimony, for example. I have seen many, many posters on this forum explicitly advocate for doing fewer things, not because doing fewer things is necessarily more fun, but because it is simply seen as better design to make fewer things. Fewer classes, fewer races, fewer spells, etc., etc. "Less is more" is a practical concern, in that it claims (rightly or wrongly) that a smaller commitment/smaller toolset not only covers everything the larger one can, but gives additional benefits besides. But "less is more" is not the reason why many folks advocate cutting D&D down to only 4 classes or whatever, because they openly recognize that it would in fact be "less is less" in many cases. Instead, they see "less" as inherently valuable in its own right, which is clearly a design aesthetic motivation, irrespective of entertainment value or practical function.[USER=6690965]@Pedantic[/USER] here is an excellent example of someone I would consider driven very heavily by rules aesthetic concerns, and who would (rightly!) take the preceding paragraphs to task for conflating the specific 3e attempt at those aesthetics for the fundamental aesthetic itself. That's a disagreement I believe the two of us have had for several years now and I doubt we're going to come to a neat agreement in this thread, but I can at least recognize that there is a vital difference between the reason why something is done and the actual attempt to do that something.Another example of a hybrid aesthetic-practical concern is "make it usable." One of the criticisms I've long levied at 3e is that it just wastes a ton of design space and time on things almost no one will ever use. Scads of planes with little to no value other than the knowledge that they exist--purely aesthetic there (in this case, symmetry applied to cosmology/locations, rather than to classes/races/etc.) So-called "NPC classes," combat stats for completely ordinary housecats, reams of garbage feats, etc. A huge amount of both 3e and its descendants (e.g. PF1e) is about making a ruleset that reads beautifully, even if half or more of it will literally never matter at most tables. 4e counters this purely-aesthetic motivation with a mixed aesthetic-practical one, "make it usable." If you describe a location as part of the cosmology, you'd better make sure that it could, in fact, actually support adventure in some way, because adventure is what the game is about (with a reasonably broad definition of "adventure.") If you include combat stats for a creature, it better be because combat with that creature is actually plausible, even if it might not necessarily actually happen (e.g., stats for combat against angels)--and for creatures that are less-likely but plausible, it's okay to put them on a lower priority than ones that are very likely to get into fights with player characters. Etc.This "make it usable" thing is in part aesthetic, because it is passing judgment on things like the infinite Plane of Fire that doesn't actually contain any landmarks or points of interest or anything other than infinite fire and more fire and also some fire, and all of that fire is also on fire. But it's also practical, because...that's kind of the point, you're trying to ensure that there's a clear, definite use for the things you put in.As stated, the 2000s saw the rise of rules-aesthetics as a major motivation for people to buy and play games. Part of the negative reaction to 4e was that it was not designed--in the graphical or writing sense--to appeal to people who love rules-aesthetics. This is partly for reasons I consider good (namely, the 4e team actually put the methods of pursuing various design aesthetics to the test and found them very wanting), but also for reasons I recognize as very poor (too caught up in the sacred barbecue, as it were; not paying enough attention to important aesthetic considerations that weren't affecting mechanics; etc.)</blockquote>

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