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This is something I've encountered here and here. These are stories that are intended to be part of a larger, continuing storyline, and so each story has to end in a way that sets up the next. With the first, I wrote four different threads that led to that one main ending... although I found it ironic that after going to all the trouble of writing all those branches, I then had to unwind them to create that shared ending. In the second story, I tried the opposite approach: writing just one "canon" ending out of a maze of 45 branches. Neither approach was completely satisfactory, and thus I have been hesitating to do a Part III.

A few months ago I started another serial, the first of what may be a four-parter. Here my approach is not to worry at all about continuity, and just let the readers decide what they think is the "best" ending. The main character winds up in a completely different situation in most of the endings, and as mizal remarked in her review it's hard to see how a Part 2 could continue the story, but my solution in this case will be to focus on a completely different character for each story.

And both sets of stories are in the same "universe" so to speak, although that's mostly to save myself from having to reinvent a new backstory each time.

Basically as the author, you're God and can do what you want.

If you want to pick one path as the "official" ending to start the sequel from, just go ahead and do it. They do it in video games all the time.

There was a CoG thread bitching about this once and they all sounded like a bunch of entitled faggots saying "Oh well the author shouldn't make a sequel if they aren't going to account for every possibility. That's just lazy, because my character did this, blah blah blah..."

It's like fuck you, I'll do what the fuck I want. Besides, in the scheme of things, it doesn't really invalidate the other endings anyway. I've personally said on multiple occasions, a reader is perfectly able to consider ANY ending to be their own "winning ending" if they like it better than any official epilogue or whatever.

Every branch is a possibility since it's an imaginary story anyway. All of them AND none of them are what "really happened." You're just continuing the tale that you found the most interesting to explore.

I assume with all the fancy CoG coding they have it so each ending has a password or something to continue the game based on the choices though.

I still point to video game developers essentially doing what they want with sequels and will go so far as to disregard most of what you did in the last game even if playing as the same character.

From a CYOA standpoint, you can make things vague if you're using the same protagonist and want to maintain some sort of continuity but still want to do your own thing and not be a slave to the readers.

I was thinking about this recently. Obviously you don't want to accommodate bad endings in sequels, but you could accommodate possibly 2 or 3 different good endings.

In the sequel there could be some choices that basically allow the player to chose how the previous part ended. This can probably done elegantly as an introduction.

“We can't let just anybody in,” the guard says. “Did you hear that the orcs attacked Northwatch?”

• Attacked is a nice word, they overran the place, but you are not going to tell him that.
• Of course, they were slain but not before stealing the Aegis, that is precisely why you are here.
• Yes, you had a pretty good view of the orcs while you slew the hordes. It was your actions that saved the Aegis.