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Basically what the title alluded to, what is your favorite way of keeping track of a larger story with interlocking branches while writing it?

On another note, after some quick procrastinating of my procrastination though dutiful searching of the forums, I came upon a review of Endmaster. He wanted more smaller choices instead of putting all of the gory description on one page.

How do you look upon 'fake' choices that only result in a slightly different scene, but come quickly together afterwards? 

Fake choices are a good way of keeping people engaged without requiring lots of writing. Furthermore, you can have "fake" choices that still hold meaning. For example: a character being introduced that can live or die depending on your choices, but who doesn't have a role to play later on either way.

I put brief descriptions in the page titles and then change them all when I'm done. So for an evil path where the player is successfully pursuing a romantic interest, for example, I'd put something like '(EVIL ROM)'.

I'm also working on a quest-style story that's gotten so big I decided to create separate chapters to order the main branches. It got way too hectic otherwise, so I'd recommend that too for anything over around 100,000 words with lots of branching or free roaming. Downside is you do have to use link scripts every time you want to go from one chapter to another (unless you link to the first page of the next chapter).

I'm not a fan of loads of fake choices, but a few are fine as long as they're minor choices. Can't really talk though- contest stress has made me churn them out left right and centre in the past.

Fake choices are something that [i]in theory[/i] you don't want to overuse, but in practice almost no one will notice and sometimes they're just necessary. People don't want 4000 words on one page but they also don't want to have to click through more than three choiceless pages in a row, so gotta break it up somehow.

And 'fake' choices can wind up important ones in their own right. They may not change the current scene, but something as simple as a conversation with another character going a different way or the choice being one tha clarifies a private opinion or motivation of the protagonists can be tracked to cast an entirely different light on future scenes, alter them completely or make new choices available.


As for keeping track of a story, I write everything in Scrivener and just break each major path into its own tree with nested docs added on whenever I need to split it up further. Everything seems to go a lot smoother with just writing out the major paths all at once as if each one were it's own story, then going back and filling in branches.

Anyway whatever method you wind up using, I HIGHLY recommend not writing on the site itself. Much better just to copy and paste it over once it's all done and add in your scripting, that way you're not juggling a thousand tiny boxes and pop ups and can just focus on writing without interruption.

I have only written one story here, and it was for a contest so I was under time constraints.  I haven't made anything so big that I needed to keep track of it.  Mostly what I did was copy my pages to word and tried to keep them in order over there.  I don't know how well the chapters work, so I don't know if they're a viable option.

As for 'fake' choices, to me it depends on the content of those choices.  Sometimes they lead to entertaining little side pockets of information or humor or drama.  That's a pretty good use.  Sometimes they let you go backwards to an older path, which is also pretty good.  I generally only really get annoyed if you give someone four choices, and three of them end up with the exact same outcome with the exact same description of that outcome.  Pretty much, whenever there is a 'choice' there should be something different, for each one, or at least a 'bridge' to another part of the story.  I've been satisfied with a 'fake' choice with even one or two lines of difference.  

Pretty much, people want to think that what they click makes a difference.