In the interactive fiction world, where a great deal of effort has been put into complex, responsive storylines, a common structure is the "branch-and-bottlenec

In the interactive fiction world, where a great deal of effort has been put into complex, responsive storylines, a common structure is the "branch-and-bottleneck" -- allowing a variety of paths through a particular area, but all of the paths bunch back together into a single path at the end, with possibly a few major flags enduring for the rest of the narrative. As this article mentions, enforcing some structure on the narrative like this not only makes implementation easier but also tends to make the story more coherent for the player: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/ https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-...