I’ve been told, rightly, several times that using “stop the action” is a, potentially dangerous maneuver.
In my game I want to describe a location when the character moves in a certain direction, move the character there, but stop the existing description of that location happening in addition to the modified description.
I can think of several ways to not use it, but there are, presumably, times when it is appropriate.
Is this one of them?
instead of going north when the player is in the carpark:
say "You squeeze back behind the dumpster but all you find is a vaguely you-shaped depression in the snow.";
move the player to the dumpster.
When you use “instead of” you don’t need to “stop the action.” The “instead of” will do that for you. If you are checking an action, and under certain “if” conditions you want to prevent the action from happening, follow your new instruction with “stop the action.”
I’ve never had any trouble with “stop the action” causing problems. “Instead of” is very perilous, though, although if you never want the player to go north from the carpark, it will be fine here.
Instead rules stop the action by default, so unless you deliberately write ‘continue the action’ the action will go no further (and will be recorded by Inform as having not succeeded- to succeed, an action must clear the Check stage).
This is really the purpose of Instead rules: to deal with situations when you don’t want any of the usual action machinery to run because your special situation supersedes all of it (in particular any standard Check rules for that action).