You See Two Doors: What do you do?

I go left... no, right!

The question posed in the title is essentially meaningless. I imagine we've all been in this situation though, whether as a player or a Judge. Which door do you take? Well, what's the difference between a door and a door? You might as well flip a coin. The result will be the same, as far as you know. This isn't a choice, it's the illusion of one.

This isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes it's just a symptom of a freely explorable environment. If you're in a large enough dungeon, there are bound to be choices of which direction you will explore next, and you're not likely to have information about those choices until you explore them. That's kind of why you're exploring.

The problem of Quantum Ogres is well known and much discussed. These are related problems, because in order to have Quantum Ogres you must first give the players a decision they don't have the information to answer. If you want the ogre to be behind whichever door they choose first, you can't tell them the left door has ogre-prints leading up to it or they'll feel cheated when the right door has an ogre behind it. No, you have to have presented them with two seemingly ogre-less doors.

I would suggest that, wherever possible, you shouldn't pose a question like the title's to begin with. Now, this isn't always reasonable; sometimes there really are just two doors. But as Judges we generally have the capacity to make something known about those doors before you open them.

The Swamp in the Portal

The Portal Under The Stars presents exactly this kind of choice (don't get me wrong, the module is a great start and this really is a nitpick). After making it through the traps guarding the entrance, the players are literally faced with a choice between three doors. Yes, the module has determined what is behind each of those doors, but the players don't know anything about any of them. It may not be a Quantum Ogre behind those doors, but it's the perfect habitat for a Quantum Ogre - which I suppose would be a Vacuum Swamp.

The point is, the players wouldn't notice if you shuffled all three of those doors' destinations around as they opened them. You could easily decide on the fly that they will explore the other two rooms before heading to the final chamber, because you don't want them to miss that content.

I don't think you should even give yourself that opportunity.

When I ran The Portal Under The Stars for my group, I figured I should give the players something to base their decision on. I didn't give them much, just this: 

• The door to the burial chamber had a funeral mask mounted on it to match the ones inside.
• The door to the gazing pool had a faint blue glow shining through the crack underneath.
• The door to the hallway leading to the scrying chamber was left just slightly ajar letting them see the hallway into the darkness beyond.

The ajar door was intended to be tempting - both because I wanted the players to go there and because the demon-snake did too. He's a cheeky li'l fella. It worked, but it would've been totally fine if it hadn't too.

None of this was much information to go by. The players still aren't completely deciding "do I go to the burial chamber, or do I go to the chamber guarded by a demonic snake?" - they don't know that yet. There's still discovery involved, now with the possibility of a minor "aha!" moment when the players find out where that blue glow came from, or realize they were led down the dark hallway as a trap.

Why does it matter?

This is a totally different experience than just being given three doors to the Vacuum Swamp. There's now a real decision being made (if still an uncertain one) and a connective thread linking the decision to the consequential discovery. Comparatively, choosing a door at random (and if you have no information, it is random) might as well be drawing from some sort of location lootbox at best, and indeed, Quantum Ogres at worst.

And the worst thing is, players cannot tell the difference. Some Judges see this as a good thing, an opportunity to direct the journey.

After all, why shouldn't I use all my prepared content?

Well, for one, they can totally tell the difference. They can also reason that there is no purpose to giving them a meaningless choice unless you are trying to sell them an illusion. Realizing this kills not only the illusion you were attempting to sell, but the entire illusion that this game matters in the first place.

Some players don't mind, but for others the game means nothing when you do this. I like to foster trust between my players and myself, such that when I do need to do something sneaky in the interest of a fun surprise or reveal they know I'm not doing it to be unfair. They know I'm not just choosing the path for them in advance. And for that trust to grow, I need to be honest.

Not only do I need to let their decisions matter, but I need to make sure the information they have allows for decision-making in the first place. That way they know in advance that their decision matters. They know I follow rules too. These tiny hints and connective threads are proof that their decision mattered all along. It may seem like I'm taking this too seriously, and maybe I am, but nobody can come out of one of my sessions wondering whether I pulled a switcheroo behind the screen. I like that. It makes me feel like I'm playing fair.

Sometimes there are just two doors.

The more complex the layout of an environment, the harder this will be. A dungeon with multiple entrances makes this pretty difficult; now you have twice as many clues to lay out for rooms you can hit from multiple directions. Does every entrance to every room need a hint as to what the room is? Does a hallway with 6 doors lined down the sides need something special for every single door, to give a choice to make?

No. These aren't Vacuum Swamps, for a few reasons.

The more complex the layout of the dungeon, the more expected it is that there will be some meandering around and creeping into unknown rooms to progress. The layout of the dungeon will be informed by its purpose and its place in the world. If your game involves drawing or revealing a map as you go, the world itself provides clues. If you've got a map of the place, it becomes harder - but not impossible - to fake it. And on top of that, if the players have a ton of options, it becomes overwhelming quickly. Those 6 doors will just end up being opened sequentially no matter what you do, because nobody is weighing up that many options before deciding where to go. Either that, or the players will convince themselves it must be a puzzle, there's no way you'd give them something that complicated otherwise!

The Portal Under The Stars is an example of a tightly controlled space. This is what makes it stand out to me. The intention is clearly to give players a choice after reaching this room (up until then it has been linear) and yet the choice they are given is not a choice at all. It's not an open-ended question like exploring a megadungeon, it's a multiple-choice question that simply asks you "1, 2, or 3?". You might as well just roll a d3.