Planes, and where are the threes?

[Eloel]

I have been reading Planescape and I ran into the "Rule of 3", where everything supposedly exists in 3s. I love the idea, but I'm having trouble actually imagining the planes in 3s. I feel like like there are more 4s than 3s in the planes. 4 elemental planes, 4 para-elemental planes, 4 each in the 2 quasi-elemental sets, 4 main alignment planes (good/lawful/chaotic/evil), 4 combinations of those (lg,le,cg,ce), and 8 more filling in-between. How do you handle this in your games? Are there maybe not 3s? Is the rule-of-three just abandoned after some point?

[DrMotives]

The threes are sets of plane sets (Inner, Outer, Prime), the transitive planes (Astral, Ethereal, Shadow), Moral Axis of the Great Wheel (Good, Neutral, Evil), Ethical Axis of the Great Wheel (Law, Neutral, Chaos). I'm sure there's more, but those are the big ones.

[afroakuma]

I don't tend to check other threads; if you have questions about the planes, a lot of useful discussion often happens here.

[Ramza00]

Here is some wikipedia articles that talk about the rule of threes in philosphy, rhetoric, language, how the brain process information, and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotomy_(philosophy) This link has a wonderful table. You need to click this link and read the table.

The rest of the links are explanations of why human cognition likes 3s. Helps you understand the underlying principles instead of just assembling lists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing) This is because having three entities combines both brevity and rhythm, for 3 is the smallest amount of information to create a pattern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendiatris (using 3 descriptors to explain one idea)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic (think venn diagram, two different people with different points of view use dialogue to come to a partial agreed upon point of view.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds (divide a picture into 3x3 box with the lines being equally spaced apart. You get more tension when you do not place the focus object in the center or the outside box but instead put it on one of the intersection lines on the middle box. Why this occurs is the human eye naturally wants to put things into the center box, but by forcing the focus of a picture or painting near the center but not in the center you force a higher arrousal state inside the viewer of the picture / painting and they must use other processes such as other senses, pattern recognition, etc to "center the thought" inside the mind. Aka you are forcing perceptual dissonance just like cognitive dissonance, and thus the brain through motivated reasoning / perception recruits other brain areas in order to lessen the perceptual dissonance for both perceptual dissonance and cognitive dissonance are painful, they cause a mental discomfort, but this same pain may cause a transformational change where you recruit a better form of understanding via viewing reality in a new way.)

And not really about 3rds but let me elaborate on my description I just posted about cognitive / perceptual dissonance and motivated reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

And splitting (black and white thinking)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)