I had a big realization last night. I have taken the ideal of process intensity too far. My current design attempts to address everything procedurally. That just doesn’t work. The yin of process must be matched by the yang of data. Data provides color, and my storyworlds have been starkly colorless. So I need to push more data into the storyworld. I will do that by building more text into it.
In the meantime, I realize that the squires serve no purpose. Arthur doesn’t need to interact with them. They exist only to provide names for those killed in battle. I can just as easily use “implicit fighters”, as I already have done in some of the text.