Okay my guy you're thinking way too into my example. lol. I said a cage not a prison, and you don't know if the person has been there for 3 days already with no water or food.
I'm just saying if something is time sensitive, then show that on the quest list as urgent or immediate.
You literally shot your own argument in the foot because guards feeding the prisoners was the only way for it to make sense. Because it is a flimsy and inconsistent mechanic. If you rest outside of the invisible lines that separate quest skipping rests there are no consequences...you could leave the place alone for in-game years and nothing would happen...which by your logic the prisoners should die of dehydration or starvation...but they don't. That only happens if you rest after you crossed some invisible and unknowable line that means if you rest the game skips the quest...a line that is never communicated. So in your attempt to come up with very tortured and contrived reasonings for a bad mechanic you invalidated your own point. The ONLY hope you had for your argument to hold water was to say: guards feed prisoners but if you go in and kill the guards then nobody feeds them anymore so if you then take too long the prisoners would eventually die.
Okay you're getting heated for all the wrong reasons.
I think there are two scenarios going on.
1) A quest that you found and made active, which is what I'm talking about. If you have a quest that is active and urgent and you mess around for too long, then the quest ends and you fail the mission.
2) Which I think you are referencing, is a quest that you miss completely because you triggered some "Invisible line" and do something that ends the quest before you see it. Which literally happens all the time in games. It's a butterfly effect and it's done all the time. Like the Cat in Divinity. You reach this certain area in the map and the cat follows you till you get to another certain point and keep it or the cat dies. Elden ring did this too. It's an invisible line, but was impacted by your choice. There are giant games like this where tons of people miss something which is the point. It makes everybody's experience different based on your play style without min-maxing.
As someone who plays DnD irl, our DM has told us after campaigns sometime that we missed hours of story he made because we chose a different path in the story. Are we mad? No. And that's content that we will literally never see.
This is a reloadable/replayable video game. Don't wanna miss something from an invisible trigger? Get a guide book.
