Not sure if this should be a different topic (I can branch it off into one of its own) but I’m also wondering how authors making multi game continuing (rather than modular contained/semi contained) book series manage built up stats and delayed action stats and use ported over character saves. Or do you just try not to use anything that gets carried over wherever possible/or make it easy to swing about from high to low, and how do players feel about it?
I know stat building is definitely a thing in many games, if someone decides they actually do want to have a better relationship with someone in book 3 they tanked by being super mean to them in book one, do they need to restart from the beginning? If you didn’t collect an item or have already used it so it’s no longer available for book four, do you need to redo your earlier game from a book or two back. If you’ve generalised your fighting/intellect etc stats and find your really need something maxed out to succeed at a particular task but can’t, again do you restart? I do see some books do give the option for a character set up (like from memory hero or villain you can rechoose all your powers etc if you don’t want to use a previous character save, but the first one tends to wrap up the “earth module” before moving to the “outer space module” which resets much of the NPC cast and other things like fame levels etc which I think was a wise decision in many ways.)
Also looking at delayed stats. I don’t know how much people tend to use them. I actually do and it’s causing me headaches even to try and add some checkpoints in because earlier choices change the later options or endings. (I’m almost thinking I need to manually add options like- Hey, before you return to that save, do you want to add any items? Change what you did in x/y/z? Although that seems very immersion breaking.) For example in Oedipus, there are multiple decisions you can make throughout the game which combine to strongly effect a ruling on one of the endings. In Phantas there are choices very early game which become very relevant at the end game. I can only imagine that would be worse over a multi game without giving “settings options” at the start to prevent having to replay a previous game to port the new save over. Alternatively you’d need to try and keep any delayed action stats self contained within the book. And how much does that effect the meaningfulness of the choices you’re making? (Perhaps not so much though if use of much delayed actions from earlier choices is uncommon anyway.)