tldr: I suggest a “taxi me there” button, that masquerades as an additional next chapter button. That you edit using the receiving chapter’s edit page, wherever it may be on “the tree”.
tlbiriaa: A major usability blockade in the branching system (in terms of writing interactives) is the inability to merge branches at a future point; the branches branch forever and you cannot funnel back to main chapters.
This problem inhibits writing interactives using the UI only (branching as well as merging was always possible using manually created hyperlinks in the story text itself; this request is not about that).
To publish fully interactive stories that use the sites own navigation tools, we’d need a merger system, i.e., a way for multiple branches to converge to one chapter, or, to appear to. (aha! hastag:sly-emoji)
I suggest the cleanest, least brainmelting way to conceptualise this is by having chapters able to “receive” chapters from any branch, by selecting them.
It wouldn’t actually matter if its systemically re-merging branches or not, but merely leaving one part of the tree to taxi immediately to “the receiving branch,” wherever it may be on the story tree.
So perhaps a system where you can edit chapter 12 to “receive” Chapter 5, 9 and 10, and the navigation bar in those chapters gains a “taxi me there” button masquerading as an additional next chapter button added to the ones already there, i.e, the branches and such.
The navigation bar will already be able to cope with several such boxes (because the branching system would need this flexibility anyways). All this would do is use some of those slots as “pretend” next chapters, but actually just be taxis to whichever arbitrary other point in the story tree.
