Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
Conversely, it gives the players a way to determine "what do I do next" in a way that interfaces with their goals.

The simple example is game structures for interacting with an urban adventure. If you have a game structure that works like a dungeon, they're going to have to tell you each street they walk down, with encounter checks and distance traveled per turn being important. If you have one that instead is node-based, they can interact with the nodes by telling you which node they're transiting to next. They don't need to understand the entire structure, but they do need enough visibility into this organization to tell you what's next.

Similarly for a wilderness exploration structure, they may need to inform you of destination node and route, or they may need to tell you direction of travel and general activity within each watch (time frame).
If the game is telling the players what they should be doing next then it will likely reduce player creativity. When faced with a challenge instead of brainstorming a solution they will consult the rules which tells them what they have to do to overcome the challenge and they'll be much more likely to just do that instead of trying to come up with an out of the box solution (And depending on the rules there's a decent chance the out of the box solution will be punished in someway. See PhoenixPhyre's post about opinionated frameworks).

Now I'm not saying one type of play is better then the other, and I completely understand how not knowing what to do next because you can do anything you want can be frustrating/intimidating. But I prefer the game to encourage creativity, as a DM I like it when I create a challenge with several solutions and the players come up with something I never thought of. And as a player I like trying to come up with solutions where anything and everything is on the table. There's no perfect game that will suit everybody's tastes which is why a key part of D&D is homebrew where every table takes what they like and ignores what they don't like. And the test of a good system is that you can take out or plugin what you want and the end result actually works reasonably well.