I get what you're saying Grudge, but overall still makes no sense. Let's take a real life scenario that is similar.
You know you have cancer. It is going to kill you. You don't know when. You hear someone might have a cure, and they aren't that for away. You might have to take a risk to meet him and get that cure. Add to this that others are counting on you. If you don't move you butt, in a few days they are ALL going to die.
Are you going to hurry your butt up to find that healer and save those people in time, knowing if you fail you were likely going to die anyway, or are you going to sit back and chill because someone told you that's your cancer won't take hold for months? I mean, your best chance of a cure could die at any moment, so are you going to rest for days or move your booty to save that chance?
The only two plausible scenarios in early access that I accept as legit side quests are the Hag and the Githyanki creche because they are potential cures as well. Still, the point is that endless resting should have consequences, events that urge players to move faster and rest less. Tieflings report goblins preparing their invasion, the druid's stating the ritual will be ready in another day or 2, and then actually making these things happen if the player takes too long.
Either way, the point, again, is that excitement is utterly lost because there is no consequences to casually playing, and it makes no real sense. Again, we are rewarded for slowly moving through the game as opposed to challenging ourselves. That is not good RPGing.
From the very beginning, they start to dial down the urgency, with Astarion even proposing to harness the power of the tadpole in your first conversation with him. I'm not arguing the severity of having the thing in your head, but the game itself immediately starts to reduce the importance of remedying the issue ASAP. If you choose to roleplay that aspect, at that point, it's on you since the game itself is not driving that narrative as you progress in the game; the opposite actually.
That's kind of what the OP is saying; the game actively punishes you in several ways for taking the ticking clock it established vividly right at the beginning seriously. It sets up a very fast-moving ticking clock, tells you that the ticking clock isn't ticking as fast as you thought (though at no point does it tell you it's actually stopped ticking, it's just ticking more slowly by some unknown degree) and then if you try to RP the reasonable reaction a person would have to that of making fixing the problem their top priority, setting everything else aside for later, then you get punished for it.That's bad narrative design. It's also bad narrative design to establish such an urgent ticking clock and then immediately undermine that urgency. The game should lead by telling you that the tadpole SHOULD have transformed you, but it hasn't and there's no telling why or how long you have. So the player is introduced to the narrative time constraint in a manner that reflects the actual level of urgency at play in the narrative, rather than the game setting up one expectation and then immediately laying things out in a way that fights against the emotion they inspired in the player. On my first playthrough for instance, I did not pick up the clues about the tadpole not being super urgent until a fair while into things, so I spent long stretches really strapped for resources and having a very hard time, as well as skipping most story content to try and get to the Githyanki patrol, which ended with me getting TPKed.
Also on that subject, it really frustrates me how they presented the Gith patrol questline. It is one of the first pieces of clear information given to you, literally by the first person you meet in the game, who is also the first companion you get in the game. It's the first concrete lead you're given to a solution for the inciting incident of the plot, AND it's given to you by the character that gives you most of your early information on what's happening to you. It's also one of the only leads or pieces of information in general that you basically always get no matter what you do. It really FEELS like that's meant to be the main quest, right? It's given so much weight and it's presented so definitelly and clearly, while with every other possible solution you're kind of left to infer that it's worth doing. I mean in theory you could miss the druid grove and until they tell you about Halsin it seems totally extraneous to what's going on with you. I assumed that the druid grove was just an optional side quest when I first ran into it, not the main quest of the zone. It is really bizarre and this game just does not seem to know how to present information to you well a lot of the time.
