There's advice and game rules for starters. There's also campaign worlds, random tables, prebuilt NPCs, and locations.What sorts of tools?
Same.Across the board: don't like it as a player, almost never use it as a DM.
I'm lazy AF as a GM... and I don't need illusionism. I was kind of annoyed at it being baked into a few modules I've run...The key to reducing illusionism is not to label it bad; but to provide the DM with tools to not need it
That blog post has a significant amount of WTF in it. It ends with, paraphrased, "your GM-planned encounter isn't cool. But your GM-planned encounter in which the PCs got a lucky roll IS cool."I stumbled across this blog post and thought it might be fun to talk to ENWorld about Quantum Ogres and the Illusion of Choice.
If you don't want to click through, the tl;dr is that Illusionism Is Bad. The author is responding to a different blog -- one that advocated for what is being referred to as the Quantum Ogre. That is, the GM prepares an encounter with Ogres and when it comes time for the PCs to choose to go left or right on the Forest Road, the Ogre encounter is going to be placed in front of them regardless of their choice.
I haven't read the article so I can't say if I agree with it overall or not but I would say I would broadly agree with the above summary. However the topic is so broad and covers so many situations I could probably think of a bunch of exceptions.tl:dr: the GM putting planned encounters in front of PCs, regardless of their decisions, is bad. The GM putting planned encounters in front of PCs, if it doesn't nullify their decisions, is perfectly fine.