This makes sense, if the old lady is an mad scientist who wants to take over the world in disguise.
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on unusual Verb/Noun, a nice touch can be pointing to the help/hint system in answering to SCRATCH HEAD… 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Typically if there’s a nice option and a mean option, I’ll pick the nice one haha (unless I really dislike the npc). In my own games, options I typically suspect will be less popular are the ones that engage less with the game world—eg:
-Approach the handsome stranger
-Ignore the handsome stranger
As I player, I’d always gravitate to the first one, and as an author I tend to assume most players would do the same.
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Some research got done on the nice/nasty question: in Mass Effect 3, two-thirds of players picked more Paragon than Renegade options. Almost three-fifths of first-and-only-time players of games generally (that were surveyed for the linked research) played what they perceived to be the “good” options exclusively (the percentage who do this on a second playthrough drops significantly).
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As other people indicated, it super depends on the situation and context. Have you flagged that the “ideal” path to the ending is to stab the old lady? Have you made the player character want to stab the old lady? Have you given other game or narrative incentives (metanarrative currency, kudos from another character, avoidance of an unpleasant situation, etc) that indicate the player is best off stabbing the old lady? Is the old lady really obnoxious? Probably players overall will not give her flowers if those are the only two options.
Absent any other indicators, just a total void of decision or context like “do you go right or left” or “pick up or down”, players will usually pick the first one or at random, so it doesn’t matter. But that’s almost never the case in choice-based games.
I should clarify my statement: if I deeply suspect a route won’t be taken and that bothers me…then I will evaluate those 3 possibilities I mentioned before, and then cut or just put less work into that option.
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To take an example from one of your games:
Of Their Shadows Deep
Winter Woods
Bare trees are tangled with greenbriar hanging in thorny curtains. Birds call. They flash bright against the naked branches: cardinal screams red; goldfinch blazes sun. The rocky path limned with ice is at the base of the winding stone steps that lead north and up to your home; or you can follow the path down and south into the ravine.There’s a torn piece of white paper caught on a low branch of a tree, fluttering in the chilly breeze.
>n
You can’t go home yet. You need to find firewood.
You have indicated already that the protagonist needs to go into the woods, wants to go into the woods (in a way), that it’s where the game happens, where the puzzles are, etc. Since you, presumably and very reasonably, didn’t want to render the PC’s home et al before everything, you cut off the ability to go north, but very few people (except me right now, to prove this point) would actually try (…unless they’re the type in a parser game to go “ooh will it actually let me do this lmao” which I guess isn’t that few).
In a hypothetical choice-based game adaptation of this, the directional verb “go north” might just be a choice, “go north”, but you’ve already heavily heavily flagged that north is not where the the interesting stuff or plot is, so very few players would pick it. Even less than who might with parsers, due to the different psychology behind “you can do anything until you can’t” [parsers] and “you can only do these things” [choice] meaning “I’m gonna try for shits and giggles” is less of a trend in choice, ime.
Therefore in a choice-based version, you might as well just not give the choice to go north at all.
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In the gamebooks of past, this was a common thing. But it’s not encouraged now, since players will pick at random. These choices I call not informative.
Indeed, I am the sort who normally tries everything in parser mode. But here the choice is obvious. Another one is when the left is completely dark and there is some light to the right- then that’s another obvious choice, since you don’t want to be eaten by a grue, right? These choices I call informative.
More often than not, you want informative choices.
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Designing branching can be pretty hard!
Choice of Games has some interesting guidelines for how to write choices - see A Taxonomy of Choices: Establishing Character and A Taxonomy of Choices: Axes of Choice. But these might be too tuned to the Choicescript house style. Also, Emily Short wrote an article about small-scale choice structure: Small-Scale Structures in CYOA – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling.
Another reference on small-scale choice design: Taxonomy of Narrative Choices by Clara F-V
On a larger scale, interactive stories might consist of many scenes and choices/branches all orchestrated together. Sam Kabo Ashwell’s article and Choice of Games’ guide to story design might be useful here.
In my experience, the best way of determining whether and how often branches are visited is via random testing (i.e., having a computer program play through and pick random options). This is what I did for balancing Pageant, NYE2019, and Archivist & Revolution. I tried to design the structure and stats so as to make all of the interesting routes about equally likely on a random playthrough.
Emily Short wrote an article about balancing the options in Bee, including with random testing: Rebalancing Bee – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
In my games, I’ve found that random testers are a good enough approximation to human players as long as there aren’t obviously wrong paths; at the very least they can show that certain paths are reachable in a structural sense. However, my games (and Bee as well) are pretty different from most branching choice-based narratives because they have floating modules rather than fixed branches, and also these games are more stats-driven than most twines.
Oh yeah, there’s also the option to add analytics onto a choice-based story so you can see what players picked, but that’s very complicated and I haven’t tried it, and there are privacy concerns. See: GitHub - ChapelR/tw-analytics: Quickly add Google analytics to Twine games (and other web apps) from the command line., Playfab-Twine
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I got defensive at this. I felt the urge to stand up and explain that trying to go against the grain of the game, against the order the author intended, to type unexpected and perhaps unwanted commands is an absolute requirement to be admitted to the Guild of Parser Testers.
Then I realised that I like testing precisely “for shits and giggles”.
(Thanks for using this phrase! It reminds me that I still have to play Yak Shaving for ShitsKicks and Giggles.
Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! - Details (ifdb.org))
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