I really believe in cyclomatic complexity (aka cyclometric complexity) matters outside computer science. I believe that the more choices one makes the more likely one is to make mistakes.
But I also like to improvise in scenes.
I work in computer science. After a while some of the concepts start to infect the rest of your life. I look for answers by something similar to an AStar. I weigh probabilities by means like a beam search. I look for patterns as a (high-dimensional) mixture of Gaussians. Concepts from work have become the lens by which I view my life.
Cyclomatic complexity is a way to measure the complexity, so the number of possible failures, and hence the difficulty of a scenario.
A significant chunk of my career has been spent reverse engineering the abandoned work of others. A visual guess of cyclometric complexity has come to be my proxy for the "here be dragons" of old maps.
In the dungeon, I have a couple scenes that I do really well. Even for a mostly improvised scene I will set out equipment as though for one of my standard scenes, and understand where I could, if necessary, rejoin a standard scene. Even if never used, an escape hatch into a good scene is a good backup. Branches and return to known state generally has low cyclometric complexity.
But during negotiation I listen really hard, and try to figure out what really motivates a boy. And I really try to hear how I can modify a scene to match the appropriate fetishes and triggers. I try to figure out exciting branches from standard scenes. But one of the things that I keep in mind is the cyclometric complexity from a well known scene.
Planning and theory aside, I had an odd weekend. I had a scene that involved a lot of moving parts (boys). Overall the scene was pretty good, but I made a few mistakes along the way. The weekend had a couple overreaches. I got slightly off-plan. I doubt the bottoms noticed or remembered.
In retrospect I realize that part of the problem was that the cyclomatic complexity of the scene was too high for me to fully understand the dynamics. I need to build up to that from simpler scenes.
