In the past few days I have seen a couple of video's talking about the illusion of choices that characters have in Pathfinder and D&D.

Taking20 - I'm Quitting Pathfinder 2e Because of This Issue

Dungeon Craft - The Illusion of Choice: My Reaction to Taking20 Quitting Pathfinder

Taking20 - Illusion of Choice - Breaking it Down

Perhaps a comment in one of the video has summarizes the main issue best:
if your encounter design is good and your group is putting together a good, compelling adventure then your choices in game will matter and that is ultimately what is important and what you will remember in the long run. Whether you picked a feat that gives you an extra +2 on your attack rolls isn't the sort of thing most players are going to remember and tell stories about in a ttrpg. One of things that's freeing about systems that are light on rules is that it makes you realize what your character does is up to you as a player and is not what your abilities give you permission to do. Deciding to raise your shield and distract the enemy while your rogue flanks around back to get into an ambush position are things you can just do. They don't require game mechanics to let you do them. That is one of the reasons why many groups choose games that don't require you to choose from lists of hundreds of feats and abilities to build out a mechanically optimized character that can perform exactly what you want it to within the constraints of a crunchy system like Pathfinder. This is where we get back to this discussion of the illusion of choice. The illusion is that you don't need tons of rules to do things in game and most of the time it all comes down to a single D20 roll anyway, so why burden yourself with loads of rules baggage if those rules aren't really enhancing your fun anyway? Once again though, if you are the type of player that loves crunchy, granular rules that give you tons of powers to choose from that's fine. Your fun is your fun and there is nothing wrong with that. For many of us though, those choices just amount to unnecessary book keeping and get in the way of what is actually fun about these games.

This has made me wonder, does l5r contain any illusion of choices in the way the mechanics have been build?
I think the core game of l5r is playing a character in a samurai drama. So combat isn't the only important aspect of the game of course, we also have investigations and courtroom shenanigans. But do you experience in your game (as a player or gm) that you are always are using the same loop in certain kinds of scenes, maybe because that is the most optimal option?

Perhaps linked to this discussion is the following thoughts:

I own a first edition core book and I think we can all agree, that the first edition is the most rules light edition of l5r. Comparing the 1st with the 5th edition, both games seem to have the samurai drama core gameplay. Meaning that we don't need a more rules heavier edition to play l5r. Would perhaps playing 1st edition encourage the players to come up with more creative ideas to gain any upper hand, because there aren't any kata's, shuiji, ect. to rely on.

To put in perspective, I have only played 5th edition, so any players of older editions can correct me on this thought process. One thing I do like in 5th edition is the inclusion of strife, which I think helps giving the scenes a more dramatic feeling.

Well, the maximum amount of freedom you are ever going to have in an RPG is to have no GM at all and just have players collectively make up their own setting and own NPCs and narrate what their characters and the elements of the world their characters are interacting with do. I played in such total freeform RPGs online at least back in the 1990s-- hardly any limits on what a character could be, so long as it generally fit the theme.

Every layer of control and determination you add on top of that is going to restrict freedom and choice.

And, of course, I think over the last couple decades there has been this evolution of sorts...

Like back in the day, a typical mundane guy in a fight-- he rolls one die to hit, if he hits then he rolls damage determined by what weapon he has. And people felt that was boring because all they would get to do was just swing their weapon every turn as opposed to the wizard or such who had a whole bunch of options available to them.

And so instead these "hit with your weapon" actions were replaced by very descriptive attack abilities that did quite a bit more than simply rolling an attack die-- but then such abilities became so very descriptive that your actions were now something very narrowly defined-- at least with the simple roll you could have at least potentially described using your weapon in different ways-- maybe a wide, heavy swing or maybe a lunge or maybe a parry and then knocking then in the head with the hilt... But now the action is very precisely described. And since enemy stat blocks do not vary to an extent at which one technique you have available is generally going to be any more efficient against one enemy than another enemy-- then the only comparison is between your own special techniques. And if one is just plain better than the others, it will always be the best one to use and thus will be the one you always use. And so now the character is always doing exactly the same action in combat. For the same reason, if a player has a choice between giving their character an array of techniques or just making one technique really, really good-- the most efficient way is the later because, again, its not like the enemies are built in such a way that it is best to use one sort of technique against one and a different sort of technique against another.

Like... imagine if it went the other way. What if the damage a character dealt on any given round was in no way tied to the weapon they were using. What if you always did, for lack of a better example, D10 damage on a turn as a Fighter. Doesn't matter if your turn was swinging a giant bloody hammer as big as yourself in one mighty blow or grabbing them by the collar and repeatedly stabbing them in the throat and face or grabbing their arm, doing a judo toss and stomping on their head or holding up your large shield and barreling through them like a train or kick a table into an opponent-- all of those choices do the same D10 damage and it is up to the GM to decide if your described action will result in any additional changes in the combat state to give you or the opponent bonuses or penalties. Of course, there will be those who instead of descriptively utilizing the environment will always just imagine one attack roll equaling a single swing of the sword regardless and will feel they have less choice now because their weapon choice doesn't matter-- but I would say those same individuals were only ever choosing the weapon that gave them the best attack damage regardless and so never really had a choice anyway.

I think the sins of the previous editions of L5R RPG lay in two things.... first, the math on how rolling and keeping additional die worked didn't match up well with how gaining skills and attributes worked, particularly how much XP you were paying to raise things. It was just so much better to just raise up attributes instead of skills that it would have been worth changing what exactly determined your rolled and kept dice-- for example, reverse it so that the particular skill determined how many die on a roll you got to keep while the attributes granted you additional rolled die for all of the skills associated with that attribute. So a person with an attribute of 2 and a skill of 4 would be better at that skill than a person with an attribute of 3 and a skill of 1 rather than the reverse.

The second issue was the schools. The school techniques were often so powerful and so game-shifting that they gave way too much of an advantage while L5R fiction suggests that, while certain families may specialize in things-- it is not to such an extent that no one else who focuses their training in that thing could ever imaginably compete as the RPG mechanics were making it so. Furthermore, making dozens and dozens and dozens of schools and having it be the general policy that none of them could share mechanics was a terrible idea. It meant the schools that were designed early on were given mechanics that were basic and useful under most common circumstances while those that got designed later on had to be given far more complicated or convoluted mechanics and were highly situational. If instead there had been a "Duelist School" and noting that the Kakita School and the Mirumoto School were the two most famous but other less prominent ones among other clans, and basically all dueling specialists gained the same techniques that gave them an edge, but did not make them unbeatable, with maybe some alternates techniques at certain ranks for particular schools that maybe allowed them to be a little bit better in specific situations... that probably would have worked out better.

But, that's a defunct edition and I probably just wrote more about it than is absolutely necessary. But the current edition definitely suffers a bit from characters getting techniques that are just going to always be their 'go to' moves and really limit the narrative of how they are fighting.

To summarize, yes, in at least 2 conflicts: duels and mass battle.

In duels, 9 times out of 10, attack is the only right answer.

In mass battles, the right objective is to cut off the head and then assault the commander’s cohort.

I understand the point the youtuber is making, but I think it is less relevant to L5R.
The complaint in the Youtube video is: Players optimize their characters to have the maximally effective combination of options, and then get bored with always using the same options, but have painted themselves into that corner, because all other actions would be less effective.

That surely can happen in L5R, but is much more typical for dungeon-crawling RPGs. Because most of what these RPGs do all day is fight, so of course an effective build has very much effect. I see that as less of an issue for an RPG where an average evening is not three fights and a rest.

In my long RPG experience, it is also the players own fault, because the world reacts to them. Build powerful heroes, and you face more powerful opponents, as the GM has to scale up to present you with a challenge. So if you decide that e.g. the most powerful combination of abilities is fighting in Air stance, using Slippery Maneuvers shuji to create an improved hiding area, wearing Stealth Clothing from Courts of Stone and using the Guard Action with Crescent Moon Style kata inside (the Shugenja via Yari of Air), you certainly can do that, and the foes will have their target numbers increased by 2+1+1+Guard, so TNs somewhere between 6 and 8. Enemies with Ring values below 5 will not even affect them. But if I am a GM and have players who let their characters jump though all those hoops and then complain that they are bored, I can offer very little sympathy. You could have build all kinds of characters, and had all kind of amazing adventures. Just because you yourself decide that the most powerful way is the only right way, does not make your decisions my problem, or the problem of the game design.

I agree with @DSalazar that in Duels, that choices are a bit too limited (the idea of the one cut duel that is THE model of samurai dueling fiction is not really realistically doable), and Mass Battles are not well designed. But generally, I see this not as a problem in L5R or even D&D5. This is rather a !"Reap what you sow" kind of problem.

16 minutes ago, Harzerkatze said:

That surely can happen in L5R, but is much more typical for dungeon-crawling RPGs. Because most of what these RPGs do all day is fight, so of course an effective build has very much effect. I see that as less of an issue for an RPG where an average evening is not three fights and a rest.

This. Even if a player has a 'best' fighting technique, mixing and matching different conflict types helps a lot.

2 hours ago, Harzerkatze said:

I understand the point the youtuber is making, but I think it is less relevant to L5R.
The complaint in the Youtube video is: Players optimize their characters to have the maximally effective combination of options, and then get bored with always using the same options, but have painted themselves into that corner, because all other actions would be less effective.

In the follow up video, linked above, he explains that, at least within Pathfinder 2, it doesn't come so much from players scouring the book to see for powers that stack optimally so much as it just comes from making the choice that simply contributes to your concept (i.e. choose the archer options for an archer character) which leads them always doing the same series of actions because they are the obvious series of actions to take. That anything else the character even could imaginably do, they would end up doing it very, very badly in comparison.

He showed that even compared to D&D, where there was still some actions that were far better for a similarly built character to take, they weren't so bad at the options outside of the obvious choice.

Also, given the use of the term "rotation", I suppose that means Pathfinder 2 actually grants you bonuses on certain actions if you choose those as the next action to take... or maybe it means that certain abilities simply hit harder but can only be used once in however many turns and so it is always best to use those whenever the chance to do so arises.

Although within L5R 5E, characters are generally only going to have a couple battle techniques and the techniques are virtually always going to be better to use than doing a standard attack. So its not all that different-- and it has nothing to do with "painting oneself into a corner"

But even the techniques might require a particular Ring and depending on the conditions of the battles, certain Rings might be better than others.

I didn’t watch the videos to see what exactly it was talking about, but yes, considering that L5R is not exactly a dungeon crawler. You don’t have to worry about creating the perfect build all the time.

There is one thing I'd consider for such a game-warper:

Heartpiercing Strike. Once it becomes available, it changes the dynamic of any fight in which a critical isn't explicitly not the goal. There are schools which can easily get TN 1 HPS at least every other turn, and everyone else also has ways to at least get the TN down. It's the easiest and most reliable way to inflict strong crits and if that can end a fight - it's the best option.

Oh, mind, this is easy to fix by moving it out of Fire stance into another stance, because then it stops double-dipping and making every symbol on the dice increase DLS or capping Fire stance at 2 bonuses, for example. At that point it becomes less game-warpingly strong.

And of course, that's only in fights.

Thinking about it, I would say that L5R is very much the opposite of an "illusion-of-choice" RPG:
- The Rings mean that you are less locked into one style. In D&D5, every barbarian is strength-based. By contrast, in L5R, you can play most schools focused on one or another ring. That is a contrast to the archer mentioned above that has to be DEX-based because archer and take this or that feat because archer. (That goes so far that it can produce the opposite problem: That the shugenja may be a better swordfighter than the bushi, by making more optimized choices.)
- The Opportunity mechanic means that even when I do the exact same things in two battles, it may play very differently, because the number of Opportunities leads to different outcomes. Summon a weapon, and one or two opportunities give you a totally different weapon. Make an attack, and having a Crit or enough Opportunities to activate a Kata or not can change the fight. It is much different from roll - deal damage - roll - deal damage of most RPGs.

The "Illusion of choice" is a dangerous concept, because you can throw it at any RPG, depending on the point of view. I have played Dungeon World, and that is the very opposite of Pathfinder 2 or L5R: Everything is VERY open. If you are a fighter, your attack will deal 1d10 damage, no matter if you attack with a fist or a greatsword. So you have the choice to play a fighter armed with a pogo stick and still be relevant in combat. CHOICES!!! Only that you know that your choice of weapon didn't matter.
So an RPG has to either offer relevant rules, which leads to optimisation and thus to the possibility of "illusion of choice", or be very free-form, in which case it is "throw words at the GM until he lets you pass", which is an illusion of choice from a different point of view.
I have not played Pathfinder 2, so I can't comment on the veracity of the problem there. But I do not see it in L5R. Some rules that could be better? Sure. But you are not forced into one way of building your character, nor are combats always the same, no matter whom you are fighting.