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>What wouldve had to happen to get the maximally happy-for-charlotte-and-gil ending and what that wouldve looked like
If you believe, as Gil believed, that Charlotte transcended reality instead of dying, that she worked out a way to reach out to him, and that he himself transcended and joined her, I think this was the best ending for them possible. If you believe that he was delusional and killed himself for nothing, picking memory loss and then succeeding the Recharlottizator roll probably would've been ideal (easier to come back from memory loss than full-on brain damage, but still helped enough people to not wallow forever about it). There was never any ending where they could've lived together happily with no strings attached-- that's the deal the Wyrm offered, and the Wyrm, of course, was lying. Life isn't perfect! Endings are messy. Change is inevitable. And so on.
>honestly im curious about so many of the alternate ways things couldve played out, kind of infinitely far back, if you've got notes planning for different eventualities
I don't take notes! The closest I have is a bunch of flowcharts of projected thread structures, which isn't quite the same. (See pic related for an extensive example.) It's also very difficult for me to speak to alternative routes for the quest, because I tended not to plan more than a couple threads ahead when it came to the nitty-gritty (obviously I had some broader overarching plot plots, but it wasn't at an update-by-update level). That being said, I can list a bunch of interesting pivot points, even if I can't tell you much about what would've happened otherwise:
- Giving Charlotte an interest in model-making in Thread 1: interesting mainly because the other two options (gossip columnist and stargazing) were both significantly more active, so the quest would've given them a larger focus, as opposed to the relatively modest influence model-making had.
- Failing to discover the Tom's Cave sideplot in Thread 1: this one is actually on me, because back in 2019 I hadn't quite worked out how to steer the story, so you guys skipped over a ton of content in there and left me fumbling. If you had discovered the sideplot, Margo would've been a far more significant character. As it was, I killed her off early and kind of washed my hands of the whole thing. Lessons learned!
- (Not a choice) My early players completely failing to express any interest in the mechanics, so that I scrapped almost all of them by the start of Thread 4 -- it was for the best!
- Agreeing to go find Branwen's snake in Thread 6: if you hadn't taken this quest, Namway Co, Pat, Lester, gooplicates, and Management (in their official form) wouldn't exist, because they were all invented in Thread 7. Henry also likely wouldn't exist, because he was invented in Thread 8.
(1/3ish)
