The players see a plot device

For any of you who don't know, Paizo's been holding their annual RPG Superstar competion over the past month and a bit, and the've gotten into the finals where the competitors each have to produce a full adventure proposal, the same sort you'd normally submit if you were a professional wrter.

Anyways, the idea is for the community to vote on them, based on the judges comments.

Now, I respect the judges of this competition a lot, they're industry pros, game designers, and generally awesome people. But there's one peeve of mine that cropped up a lot in the adventue proposals - 'and so the players '. Sometimes it's as simple as 'and so the players see the shadow flicker'. In fact, I'll use that exact example.

One adventure states 'the players see shadow suddenly whoosh away outside. While chasing it...' But, the players have no idea that they should chase the shadow. It could be a trick of the light, it could be a trap, and at this point, they probably don't even know that the person they're speaking to is an imposter. In fact, without knowing that fact, it seems like the shadow is more of an alarm to summon help, rather than anything else. I don't think I know anyone who, while interrogating a theif, if they saw the theif's shadow run away would follow it. Mos of them would stay there and interrogate the theif as to why, which would lose this thing.

Anything that assumes the players will act in one specific way, especially when it's an important aspect of the story (in this case it's crucial for the players to continue), is a bad idea. And I'm really surprised nobody called them on it. In the previous challenge, the judges marked down entries for saying so much as 'the cold is uncomfortable' because there might be players immune to cold effects - and here none of them notice that some of their most lauded entries use this not just once or twice, but several times each.

Perhaps I'm just picky, I mean they did have to come up with something entirely from scratch in only a week or so, but I feel they could have done a lot better in that regard, seeing how good these people all are.