Ask The Readers RPG

Ask The Readers: Option Paralysis

For years I have been dealing with a rather severe case of option or rather decision paralysis. As you probably know I own way too many roleplaying games. I love reading new games and checking out the classics. In a way collecting roleplaying game books is as much a hobby for me as running or playing them. Unfortunately this comes with a heavy price: I can’t make up my mind!

Regardless of the genre I want to run a game in I have at least a dozen viable choices. In addition to that I own countless genre-agnostic games like GURPS, Cypher System and others. For each and every game I own I can easily list a number of pros and cons why it fits or doesn’t fit my ideas, but in most cases I still end up with at least two options.

Since I often can’t make up my mind, I usually ask my players for help. Unfortunately most of them don’t really care about mechanics. They are basically happy with everything I throw at them. I should be happy that my players are that open and trusting, but alas it doesn’t help to solve my problem.

How do you deal with option paralysis? Or do you have some tips on how to get your players make a choice? Any advice is highly appreciated!
Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

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2 comments

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Russell

Same problem. But what I do is try to match the best system with the setting. If there are more than one system, do a pro and con analysis, and choose the better.
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do32

Same here. I don’t think we can get to answer (on a topic such as this) objectively. And I think your shared experience agrees with that statement because we can go down any analyzed list of pros and cons no matter how exhaustive on any game system and it doesn’t resolve the “which do i pick?” question. So i have settled on the most subjective criteria one could have to resolve the crisis. The solution for me is the answer to following singular question: “Which of all these systems, game scenarios (or whatever) make ME say right now “Fuck yeah! I want to throw THIS ___(fill in blank) at my players?” The loudest one to my mind gets selected.
Thus far, in every case I have done this, it has been successful including trying totally new systems that I only had a basic grasp on and was initially terrified of screwing up.
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