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As a tangent (or to rope it back to the central point), if you really wanted to find the dead body in the stairwell, make it happen, don't leave it up to chance. I'm sure if most creative writers tried hard enough, they could introduce the body in the stairwell and still offer up other the options, or even allow the players to develop the character and evolve the story by acting upon the knowledge of the body in the stairwell before doing the other stuff. Or maybe you have him find the body when he's not being chased by Puerto Rican gang members.
A lot of people like to fight all the time in quests, because MANLINESS! Nothing wrong with that but people usually want to roleplay certain set ways if you give them all the freedom (some will play it straight or try to develop something out of nothing, some go full macho meathead, some go humorous or weird in an over-the-top, on-the-nose, self-aware type of way). But if you establish that your MC has certain traits, like being cowardly, you may not even want to include a fight option, or make it much more difficult to succeed at, or make it an immense challenge for him to overcome if he ever wants to change his ways.
The more serious you take your writing, a higher percentage of people will also take it seriously. There's no point in trolling and farting around in a quest that's not goofy or poorly constructed, everyone will tell that person to fuck off, and rightly so. But if the quest is so open-ended that asses and elbows are beginning to look the same, then how can you expect a reader to care about, or even know what's going on? They may really like your idea(s) and want to be a part of it but you just didn't give them enough, so they're telling you to name your character Bread Toes the Jewish Negro, and guess what? Bread Toes loves raping the homeless and eating Bugles chips off of his fingers, but only the original flavor. As amusing as chaos can be, things devolve rapidly if there is no order. And after a while, we understand why an infinite amount of monkeys with an infinite amount of typewriters would likely never ever write Hamlet, even if given an infinite amount of time.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
