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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8647824" data-attributes="member: 6790260">What differentiates "craftsmanship" from aesthetics and/or suitability?I absolutely think diversity vs focus is extremely important because this is something that ruins a LOT of attempted projects, particularly in the game-design space. Many people try to make a game (often a computer game, but it's hardly rare in the TTRPG space) that is everything to everyone, "focused" on literally everything. And that's exactly where things go wrong. You can't put the level of time--of craftsmanship, you might say--into that many things. Having enough tactical richness to satisfy 4e fans and enough build diversity to satisfy 3e fans and enough pick-up-and-go simplicity to satisfy 1e fans and enough storytelling oomph to satisfy PbtA fans and enough random risk to satisfy poker fans and enough rich and detailed backstory to bring in ALL the fans of ALL the different settings out there...it's just not feasible on the kind of budget and resources (including human resources) typically available to TTRPG designers, not even WotC.Suitability is absolutely an important factor in quality because it's one of the main reasons "fast food" is recognized as being "bad" and yet also "tasty." We know that it's not good food. We know that eating three double cheeseburgers and a large fry is a really bad dietary decision, one that can lead to legitimate health problems if you do it too often. We also know that truly rich, knock-your-socks-off flavor can't come from this kind of cooking. That these foods are not delicious, not true delights to eat, but they are quick-and-dirty satisfying flavors precision-tuned for average human preferences in various areas of food chemistry (fats, sugars, salt, heavily-processed grains and meats, synthetic flavors). That's what suitability measures. We intuitively understand that some foods are more suitable than others for both objective reasons (superior nutrition, maintaining healthy weight and lifestyle, avoiding dehydration, etc.) and subjective ones (superior vs inferior flavor even when both are flavorful, higher-quality ingredients, greater satiation as a result of eating, etc.) Now, obviously, I have given a long example of food suitability, but suitability can apply in all sorts of other places. A watch that is perfectly accurate but weighs three pounds is not, generally speaking, particularly suitable for the function of being a watch, while a laptop that weighs three pounds (such as the MacBook Air) can be extremely suitable.All of these things contain both some objective components (e.g. your "craftsmanship" surely must include objective elements like the technical skill required to create the object or devise the procedure in question) and some subjective ones (e.g. whether the result of that craft reflects a keenness of understanding, or cleverness, or resourcefulness, etc.) That this is true is no reason we cannot do further analysis. It just means we must recognize what kind of analysis we use, and that different things require different forms of analysis.</blockquote>

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