EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Conversely, I have found exactly the opposite effect when I work with folks who know nothing about RPGing and try such "nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted" stuff.
Because when they have NO certainty at all, when there aren't any touchstones or references or concepts, "Just do what comes to mind!"...they shut down. Analysis paralysis destroys their ability to respond. They can do anything, so they end up being stuck. It's Buridan's ass (as in donkey): the animal is precisely halfway between food and water, and precisely equal in thirst and hunger, so it literally cannot decide which to go for first, except that instead of two things, it's nigh-infinitely-many things.
One of several reasons why I don't find "tactical infinity" nearly as compelling a concept as folks allege.
Some people are as you say. They're so full of instant get-to-it concepts, they need no guidance and rules cause them to trip up or shut down. But plenty of other people are exactly the reverse. It isn't a perfect unalloyed good to rip out every rule the moment it might trip anyone up ever.
Because one player's stumbling block is another player's stepping stone.
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As for my own part? Balance. Balance balance balance. I don't mean the crap-awful caricature people love to pretend "balance" is: dull, monotonous uniformity that crushes out all creativity and difference in a blind crusade against any possible form of divergence. That isn't balance, except in a trivial and bad way. Just as, for example, "difficulty" isn't really represented by just jacking up the AC and saves of a creature until it can only be hit on a nat 20 and only fails saves on a nat 1, even though that is technically a bad and trivial form of difficulty, nobody who wants a difficult game would be even remotely satisfied with such a thing.
See, the thing is, unbalance is in its own way just as trivial as the aforementioned bad balance. That is, in an unbalanced system, there is a clear correct answer. It might be obfuscated by unclear rules or the need to connect disparate parts, but that's...pretty much exactly what "unbalanced" means. Uniformity is bad because it functionally erases actual choice. Every choice is collapsed down to being the same choice with different paint. Unbalance is bad because it also functionally erases choice: the choices are different, but only one choice (or perhaps two or three, but still, very few) is actually worthwhile and all the rest are trash--almost always by making one either obviously the only productive option, or by permitting the player to calculate the valuable answer.
Real balance, balance that doesn't resort to trivial uniformity but actually makes distinct choices, is the process of making it so that you have many distinct choices and you cannot calculate which one is best. Instead, qualitative difference comes to the fore: when you know that both dual-wielding and two-handed fighting are more or less equally valuable for damage output, other considerations matter, like the risk of disarmament (it's easier to disarm a single weapon than to disarm two!), or the ease of use (it's usually more expensive to wield two magic weapons than one, even if the one magic weapon is slightly more expensive to make). In that instance, it becomes a matter of judgment and value, of qualitative reasoning, of deciding what you believe best rather than what you can calculate to be best.
Now, real balance does not require perfection--a common and annoying strawman argument against real balance. Most players will understand and accept that, for example, if you're doing 4x3.5+5 = 18.5 DPR with two daggers rapid-fire hitting vs 2x6.5+5 = 18 DPR with a slow heavy 2H weapon, that difference of 0.5 average point of damage really isn't going to be that huge in the long run, it's less than 3%. Different people may have a higher or lower breakpoint where they start caring about something like this, but the point stands, real balance gets things within a reasonable ballpark. If you know there's a weak point in one spot, you compensate somewhere else.
Even 4e had some issues with this! The edition everyone loves to smear for being "perfectly balanced" and for always pitting PCs against a lockstep-matched opposition every single time (a claim explicitly rejected by the books multiple times!!!), still struggled with some balance stuff, making some options just ludicrously powerful compared to others. We can, and should, do better. That is what actually encourages players to think qualitatively, to set aside mathematical concerns and focus on what makes sense and what fits my goals and what achieves the best ends.
