I've been working on the new Encounter-based approach to interactive storytelling for more than a month and I've progressed far enough that I believe that this might actually work. I am, however, keeping the project under wraps for the foreseeable future. I feel very badly that I got so many excited about Siboot and then failed. So this time I won't reveal it to the public until I'm absolutely certain that it will work. I will probably write publicly that I am in fact working on it, but I won't reveal any significant details.
I have now written about 40 Encounter entries. These consist only of the main story and the options available to the player. I believe that I have solved the problem that killed all previous attempts. That problem is that, in order to achieve reasonable repeatability, we need hundreds of Encounters. Yet I was unable with the 1987 Siboot to come up with even 100 encounters. This same problem bedeviled me when I began working on it with the modern version of Siboot, and I eventually gave up the project because I could see no solution. I ran into much the same problem with my abortive attempt at an Encounter-based Arthurian battle scene.
The solution I found was to focus encounters on the fictional world in which the action takes place. In other words, the encounters do not serve merely to present the player with dramatically interesting choices; they ALSO serve to bring to life the universe in which the story takes place. I believe that players will find the world of sixth-century Britain intrinsically interesting. Instead of presenting that world in an academic fashion, organized by some taxonomy, I shall instead present the world in vignettes. There's a vignette about latrines. Hey, they didn't have toilets, did they? So what DID they do? There's another about a child dying; child mortality rates in those days ran up to 50%. Another vignette is about the difficulties they had keeping the thatched roofs functional. I'll be doing one on wattle-and-daub construction. That entire universe was not at all what people think, but it's fascinating. Well, it's fascinating to me. If the rest of the world doesn't find it interesting, they can go to hell.
I'm able to bring to bear my knowledge of the history of those times as well as much other history. We know so little about Britain in those days that I must exercise considerable historical interpolation. For example, how did they learn about the rest of the world without having the Internet? I think it's pretty obvious: traveling merchants provided news from afar. Of course, this news might be a year or two late, but that's the best that could be done.