Similarly, if you're lazy or low on resources and you have a "go left or right" option in something like a maze,
My take on that is that if the narrative space is fuzzy enough to allow that, it shouldn't be granular enough that the players are blindly deciding left or right in the first place. Like I learned from experience that it's better to let someone roll a skill check to get clearer options like "find a lower level" or "track their quarry" or "opportunistically loot" and just do some PbtA style complications in the background, instead of trying to make a real map of a narrative space and letting the players flounder about trying to guess where I intended them to go.
Of course I swung pretty hard towards "let the player character's skills and dice decide what opportunities they have" in general, alongside just collaboratively riffing on plot points with them to decide what the macguffin they're chasing that week is and what their opposition is when I didn't have a good idea otherwise. Especially because that tended to make things funny and lighthearted, while my own ideas veered into psychological and body horror entirely by chance, like whenever I was writing the stories they'd just get real dark and real fucked up really fast instead of being shitposts where my shadowrun players decided the genetailored pet they've been hired to steal is a pikachu and they start calling themselves Team Rocket and quoting old pokemon episodes.
My take on that is that if the narrative space is fuzzy enough to allow that, it shouldn't be granular enough that the players are blindly deciding left or right in the first place. Like I learned from experience that it's better to let someone roll a skill check to get clearer options like "find a lower level" or "track their quarry" or "opportunistically loot" and just do some PbtA style complications in the background, instead of trying to make a real map of a narrative space and letting the players flounder about trying to guess where I intended them to go.
Of course I swung pretty hard towards "let the player character's skills and dice decide what opportunities they have" in general, alongside just collaboratively riffing on plot points with them to decide what the macguffin they're chasing that week is and what their opposition is when I didn't have a good idea otherwise. Especially because that tended to make things funny and lighthearted, while my own ideas veered into psychological and body horror entirely by chance, like whenever I was writing the stories they'd just get real dark and real fucked up really fast instead of being shitposts where my shadowrun players decided the genetailored pet they've been hired to steal is a pikachu and they start calling themselves Team Rocket and quoting old pokemon episodes.