Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
And is this usual for your games? In D&D, with its default of Great Wheel cosmology? A character, and player, can, at level 1, know there are other planes outside the Prime Material and start planning whether they want to visit them or not.



You are falling prey to the presumption of predestination. Placing an element in a game as a place that can be visited, does not mean it will be visited - that choice can be left to the players. With the addition that there can be a window of opportunity for when they can make that choice - miss that window, and that place is off limits.

This starts far earlier than plane-hopping. These kind of strategic decisions begin at level 1, with mundane decisions such as which rooms of a dungeon to explore. It's neither a waste of design space nor a waste of time - a move space bigger than what a single play-through can cover is necessary for there to be choice at all and doesn't take more time to achieve than a fragile linear script. Again, consider the simple example of four encounters, played strictly in order versus played in any order.
If that point of failure is PC creation it's a big ol failure in my book. it's shifting all the decisions to non game elements and onto rules. I don't consider anything you do prior to
the point character are making in game choices as actual game play. You shouldn't exclude over half the classes from a core part of the setting just because they don't have spells.