This is the main reason I’ve gravitated to a choice engine. So much more control over when and where stuff happens. The player clicks the door hyperlink. Do they have the key? If so, add a choice link to unlock the door with that key… If it’s a game with lots of keys, I can add options to try wrong keys if necessary. The player is never allowed to cover the key in toothpaste so I don’t have to account for that remote possibility.
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But you are missing out on the excitement of players running all over your game with toothpaste covered keys!
Yes. Indeed. The excitement. 
If it is a brass key, this could be the first step to polish it.
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>UNLOCK DOOR WITH TARNISHED BRASS KEYHm. The door won’t unlock. Perhaps this key is too dirty. You’ll probably need to clean it first.
>RAGEQUITI’m sorry, I don’t understand that.
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In my experience people will never try anything but the most obvious use for anything. Say you give them a loo brush: everyone will brush the loo with it, alright. A very select few people might try to use it to brush their teeth but literally no one will try to lead the carnival parade with it.
For a few real-life examples which I gleaned from reading many transcripts of people playing my games (shameless self-advertising following):
In my last game there was a public phone. You had to use it once to make a single emergency call using a single coin. Do you think anyone tried to set the police on someone’s deserving sit-me-down? Or to phreak the phone? They never even tried dialling any other number than the one they needed to win the game, and thereby also missed out on prank-calling random people.
In an older game, literally everyone reloaded/restarted/rage quit the game when they got thrown out of a night club for dealing drugs, because they saw no other way of getting enough money. In this way they missed selling the stuff to the passers-by in the streets, in the process of which perhaps getting caught by the roaming police patrol, which would confiscate the drugs, leaving the PC empty handed…even though if they asked the right NPC for help afterwards and worked shifts in a factory they could still win the game.
So don’t bother including these kinds of things.
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It sounds like this could have been hinted at better to make them realize they didn’t actually hit a fail state.
The stuff with the extra calls that you could make is exactly what I was talking about for easter eggs. If you expected people to find them, they wouldn’t be hidden. They would be obvious options.
As a related example in a different genre, a couple months ago a code was discovered to play Akuma in Street Fighter Alpha 2 for Super Nintendo. The game is 25 years old and they just found the code. It was newsworthy enough to hit nearly every video game news site I frequent, even though it’s the worst port of SFA2 thanks to the limited power of the SNES.
In other words, please put easter eggs in. They bring enjoyment when you replay the game and find something you didn’t realize existed.
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One of the skills you need to learn as a parser author is deciding which extra implementation work is worth the effort, and which is not. Of course this depends on implementation goals – deep implementation can really work in one game while being a harmful distraction in another – and also on how likely players are to try something. My flowers example, for instance: one of the reasons I decided it made sense was that players are quite like to try
>take flowers
because after examining, taking is basically the thing you would try most often. Now in this game the player also has a bottle of water, but I’m not really tempted to implement a response for
>pour water on flowers
even though it makes some sense. I can see how you might want to do that in an even more relaxed, experiential game – especially if gardening is something it’s interested in. The game will also have scissors, but I’m not even fro a second contemplate implementing a response to
>cut flowers with scissors
because it’s exceedingly unlikely anyone will try this, and if you go that way, you’re going to have to write a scissors response for basically every object in your game. Nope.
One final consideration is how much time it will take to implement it. I just now realise that it would take me ten seconds to write a response to
>smell flowers
so why not?
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That’s why I find the best thing to do is to have a lot of testers (10-20) and implement everything they try. That covers most reasonable things people attempt.
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Phones are kind of a give and take. If the player can specify a phone number, you want 911, 0 to give some response. The rest should probably go to a “number is not in service” recording by default. If you want to include an easter egg number, it should be findable in the game - either scrawled on the wall as graffiti or on a sign or otherwise.
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I disagree. The easter egg number should obviously be 0118 999 881 999 119 7253 and every player should be expected to try it.
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I really love the idea for this thread - I’ve been wanting something like this since I started working on my first games (and I didn’t know we had a discord, either!)
I’m at the point now where the sandbox test game I was making to learn the language started to take on an actually interesting (hopefully) scenario, so I’ve restarted coding with a clearer sense of tone and intention this time.
After playing The Wizard Sniffer, which was one of the games that got me back into IF, I’ve been really interested in the concept of a heavily NPC-driven puzzler; that is, an adventure game with a traditional puzzle-solving structure but in which active, mobile NPCs drive the better part of the narrative.
I’ll have more to report as I go, but I really like what I’ve cooked up so far.
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That and 867 5309.
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Ugh. Whyyy?! Now that song is stuck in my head. 
I swear that phone number is like a landmine.
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Every other number should have De La Soul’s “Me, myself and I” blasting through the computer’s speakers.
On a practical level, yes. But where does it say a hobby project needs to satisfy any requirements as regards rational process and efficiency of effort?
Hopefully an easter egg or a dozen that don’t inhibit the ignorant player’s experience are permissible either way?
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I have two pretty solid game ideas I’d like to be able to work on, I’ll get round to them eventually.
I’m not much of a narrative game author, but I think I have a few puzzle designs left in me yet.
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Nowhere! Nobody is paying off their mortgage by writing these things (unless I’ve seriously overlooked something), so you can indeed proceed as you see fit with nothing to lose, except the approbation of your peers (which might well be a big deal to some).
You’re too modest Chris. I’m sure there is a narrative puzzle game in there somewhere, just bursting to come out.
I’m as narratively creative as an office calculator.
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