Even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Have you ever had a moment in D&D, whether you’re a player or the DM, where you were frozen with indecision? I have and I’d almost be willing to bet a dollar you have, too. There are some people who have the personality type to never question or doubt their decisions and they just boldly go forward always confident they’re doing the right thing, but for the other 98% of us, there are definitely times in the game of D&D when we suffer from choice paralysis.
In this article, I’m going to describe three types of choice paralysis that afflict D&D players, and three types that afflict DMs. Most of my examples in this article share something in common, fear of making the wrong choice, but another one has more to do with the pursuit of perfection when the option of “good enough” is staring you right in the face.
Character Creation Choice Paralysis
The first of three examples of D&D player choice paralysis have to do with something that happens before the game. It’s time to create a character and you get a bad case of blank-character-sheet-syndrome.
You flip through the Players Handbook and review the different ancestries and classes, and like that meme where the math symbols are floating around in space like Greek mosquitos, your brain spins around all the possible options and never seems to make up its mind.
Picking your class and ancestry combination is probably the most frequent example of choice paralysis experienced when creating your new character, with choosing how to allocate your six ability scores being a close second.
If you’re a fighter, it’s easy. Dump the biggest score in STR and your second biggest in DEX and move on. But if you’re a bard or ranger or some other versatile class, it can be a challenge figuring out which stat gets which score.
I wish I had some really good advice for how to overcome this, but I don’t. All I have is sympathy and the explanation that it’s alright. You’ll get through this.
Which Spell?
When you are creating a spell caster type of character, you can experience yet another type of choice paralysis. This comes up when trying to pick the spells your character takes with them at the beginning of an adventure. It’s like first level wizards wondering if they should take Sleep or Magic Missile.
I’ve seen newbie players opt for some pretty bizarre choices in their first and only spell, but I try as a DM to guide them in a more useful direction. Admittedly, I know what kind of situations are likely to come up in the adventure, so it’s kind of like insider trading.
When the DM asks, “Are you really sure you want to take Comprehend Languages?” you’ve got a pretty good indicator there won’t be any unusual languages you’ll need to comprehend.
Combat Choice Paralysis
The most common example of player choice paralysis I’ve seen takes place during the game and impacts all classes. It’s that situation where combat has begun and you’re frozen with trying to decide what to do during your turn in the round.
The DM says, “It’s your turn,” and now you’ve got a half dozen people staring at you and their headlights are on high-beam. You’ve either got a selection of movement options, weapon choices, which monster to attack, or a selection of spells to cast and you can’t decide.
This one is a classic example of the fear people have of making the wrong decision. Combat can be hard, especially when the party’s hit points are low, but ironically that can actually make decisions slightly easier, especially if you have fewer spells to choose from or you’re all out of arrows and the only real choice you have is to either bash the dragon again with your mace or cast Cure Light Wounds on the wounded Barbarian — or yourself. Crap, there’s yet another choice to make.
DM Choice Paralysis
Choice paralysis is a very real issue for DMs, too. Like character creation for players, the first example occurs before the game. This is more of an issue where a DM doesn’t know when to stop than it is about being unable to decide between multiple options.
There are a lot of DMs who will spend weeks or even months with world-building and prep, sometimes going down to the smallest level of detail, without knowing when enough is enough. I’ve done this many times during my career as a DM, but I will provide a caveat that “over-prep” isn’t necessarily a bad thing if two conditions exist:
First, the DM is heavy-prepping because they enjoy it. Prep is a joy for many DMs and they love every minute spend doing it, no matter how detailed.
Second, the DM does it with full understanding and acknowledgement that only a small percentage of what they create will ever be discovered by the players. In fact, I’ve learned that in my career as a DM, only about 30% of what I create, on average, gets explored. If that seems low to you, I’ve got another article that talks about how to mine that other 70% so your prep time isn’t wasted.
Encounter Difficulty Paralysis
I’ve seen other DMs fret over how to structure an encounter so that it’s challenging for the players without being too easy or too difficult. I used to worry about this issue a bit more back in the day than I do now, because I’ve learned some ways to dynamically adjust the combat as it’s happening.
There are some formulas that use 5e’s Challenge Rating for monsters into account that are a good ballpark, but each encounter still needs a DM’s discerning eye and judgment to shape appropriately.
The fear of a TPK can make DMs design encounters that are too weak, and I’ve seen DMs create encounters that start wiping out player characters one per round because they underestimated the strength of the monsters. This circumstance isn’t so much choice paralysis as it’s anxiety about outcomes, but that paralysis can definitely come into play during the design phase, more so than during the combat itself.
Session Choice Paralysis
This last example of choice paralysis for DMs is by far the most common.
It’s that old chestnut, “What am I going to run during tonight’s session?”
This generally applies to encounters and session-level choices, not adventure-level or campaign-level choices. I face this all the time, even now after running D&D games for four decades, and it comes down to the worry that the players won’t have a good time. What I’ve realized, though, is that the players always have a good time to one degree or another because they enjoy what you present to them without ever having knowledge or awareness of the ideas you discarded or postponed.
Here’s a little insider secret about smart DMs that players shouldn’t read. A good DM preps it all, even if it’s just in brief outline format, and keeps track of what the players use and what to keep in reserve. The DM knows that if they can’t decide between three different adventure choices, they can just pick one knowing the other two can always be used down the road.
Freewill
In the Rush song, Freewill, Neil Peart’s lyrics tell us, “Even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” And the cool thing is, pretty much no matter what choice you go with, you will almost always have the opportunity to use your other options later on.
See the video:
