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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7788168" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Agreed, and to add to that, what "a manageable few" means will differ. To me there's a range of sweet spots between "essentially no choices, or at least no interesting ones" and "so many choices I can't keep them all straight." This is going to be quite group-dependent as well and also depends enormously on the players as well. Gotta know your table. A group with a relatively new DM and many new players probably should not try to run a really heavily sandbox campaign and high level characters with all the trimmings. It's just going to be too complicated. Stick to lower levels with fewer choices and expand out over time. By contrast, a very experienced group who's not unhappy trying various things out can usually manage more unstructured choices, but even then it depends a lot on the players and, even more so, on the DM's available prep time and ability to improvise. Principles of video game design can really help keep even a fairly narrative story type campaign feeling open: Give a set of meaningful branches. Even two or three different possible pathways that test the characters in different ways helps a lot. (It wouldn't seem to keep [USER=30518]@lewpuls[/USER] happy, but many folks are pleased by it.) Some players may not care for character types that involve a lot of choices. Some people I play with are cognitively capable of playing a character like a monk, paladin, or sorcerer, but they don't enjoy characters with those kinds of choices in the game. In general I encourage them to play characters with fewer choice points and less resource management. In one case, two of us were helping design a fighter PC for one of these players. Arguably, the Battlemaster fighter with Lucky was more potent but I pushed for Champion with Mobile, because that player doesn't like resource management. Might he do somewhat more damage as a Battlemaster with Lucky? Sure. But the player gets to make choices he enjoys: Deciding who to attack, where to go, etc., without having to make ones he doesn't. The Fighter is a very good example of one where there are more or less complicated builds that are still effective. I do wish WotC had made more or less complicated builds possible for more classes.</blockquote>

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