Narrative in such games are usually a lot more modular and systemic than you think. When you're putting together a narrative for a quest, for example, it's usually [set up in the form of a flowchart] - what happens in what order, where things branch, where they converge, where decisions can be made, and so on. If narrative is a big part of our game, the team usually has some a narrative design tool to help organize all of these things so that individual contributors can all work on different parts of the same narrative at the same time, all while keeping the project stable and functional.

What we're basically thinking about is a system of beats, where the overall narrative is defined as a logical flowchart of individual beats. Each beat thus has its own pre-requisites, internal logic to track player progress and handle item and reward management, and outward-facing variables for other beats to take into consideration (e.g. any decisions made during this beat that might need to be referenced later). Each beat can be worked on separately, which allows different narrative designers to work on different parts of the narrative flow concurrently.

Within a specific beat, we apply logic to determine what happens. If condition X is met, we play this conversation. If condition X is not met, we skip the conversation or maybe play an alternative conversation. These conditions can often be internal or external (e.g. from a previously-completed quest or beat), and are usually as complicated as we have the breadth to make them. After a particular quest or subquest is ready for testing, the narrative designer writes up a test plan for QA to validate the quest - how to start it, how to proceed through it, the different variations on prerequisites, and the expected results given the different player choices and variables going into the quest.

If we didn't have the kind of technical tooling needed to keep things organized, it would probably look a lot like those conspiracy boards. As such, most of this looks a lot more like a flowchart with a lot of clickable fields that allow us to set up conditions, results, dialogues, variables, and so on.

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