Okay, so what does 'more supported options' mean and what does 'options without support' mean?
I'm going to use an analogy again, at least to get things started, but this one will at least be in the gaming sphere. Specifically how "open-world" games (be they single-player, ordinary multiplayer, or massively multiplayer) are designed...some well and some badly.
So, one of the selling points of many open-world games is the ability to, and I quote, "do whatever you want." This is a major thing that nearly all games in the genre will push, very hard, because it's such an unequivocally good thing, right? Freedom is always better than confinement, right? (Obviously being a bit facetious with this question.)
The problem is that a lot of games which pursue this perspective...
fall short, shall we say. It is difficult to become invested in a game that gives you no reason to
care about any of the things you can do. Having a central through line or clear and identifiable goals to accomplish is generally necessary in order to ground the experience and give worth and meaning to one's choices. By presenting a totally open world with no
reason to do any specific things, the player will often be left floundering and is likely to wander away rather than getting invested. It requires a careful approach, or intentionally gunning for an experience like
Minecraft, in order to give the experience enough starting purpose to make it worthwhile...and you may have noticed that even
Minecraft added the achievement/"you made X" menu thing, which provides a guideline, a purpose, a
reason to do things or seek out things.
That is very similar to the difference between
supported options and simply available ones. In a game that
supports choice, you have clear goals to pursue, but if you aren't interested in doing those things, the game is designed such that your tools actually do help you pursue other things instead. Lacking support is, well, much like how a lot of frustrated 5e DMs describe it: they have the
power to do whatever they want, but no support in actually
getting there. They can travel to any destination they can think of, but they don't know what places are
worth going to, nor how to actually
get there, nor what to
do once they arrive.
This issue was particularly exemplified in the gaming culture of 5e that rejected the notion of providing DMs guidance. One that responded to anyone seeking advice with "you're the DM,
you figure it out." It was an almost aggressively anti-advice culture of play, as though seeking advice was an error, something DMs should be taught
not to do. This has softened over time, particularly with the rise of youtube DM-advice channels, but has not disappeared by any means.
Flexibility made by becoming rules-avoidant, rather than making open-ended and supportive rules, can lead to situations where you ask, "Well...what if I want to do X?" (where "do X" might be "make an evil ritual that needs to be disrupted" or "create a creature that evolves through multiple phases" or "create a legal dispute that the players need to solve") and the system's answer is...."figure it out yourself. Just make something up." That's not helpful, and likely, at least for me and folks I've interacted with in the past, to induce frustration and feelings of being adrift.
Looks like someone's been reading
Bernstein!
Actually, I've never heard the first thing about him before today!
But yes, this is a useful analogy. That whole "you
have to control each wheel of a car individually" vs "the rear wheels are locked forward and the front wheels can rotate horizontally but do so in sync" analogy is a really good one. Being able to point the front wheels in opposite directions is, technically, "flexibility" in the sense of "more options," but it is not supported because you do that and you're going to move nowhere. More wheel options actually leads to
reduced movement, not increased.