Osaka said:
I was looking for more of an answer to "how in ____ am I going to be able to keep track of all the little things to make sure I don't cause problems with the plot down the line"
Make one big muther-fucking flow chart. Throw in a few conditionals and wallah, a non-linear story reduced to linearity in the eyes of the maker.
If that doesn't make sense, try following a flow chart. At every path you're given options, but at the end of the day, you only get to make one choice. By the end of it, you may have had many options (non-linear) but you've only gone down "one path". A flow chart also allows you to see where certain storyline parts branch off and where significant events occur.
Also, don't worry with useless events, just track the main plot changing events. For example, if all that matters is that the King is dead and not that the player killed him, or hired an assasin to kill him or even *how* technically the player killed him (be it with poisoned knife, poisoned cup, combat etc), just have "If the King is dead..." then we have this path, but you also have "if the King is NOT dead" and your path down that way.
Keep in mind it's not perfect. Especially when a truly non-linear story should allow the player to *jump* to any part of the flow-chart food-chain. IE, They should be able to go off somewhere, get leet combat skills, then walk in and wipe out the entire palace, King, Queen and Country-men without having to get the magic flugel or do the "get rid of the rats in my basement" quest, or even join a particular faction. Of course, this changes how a faction may deal with him (if the king's already dead, they won;'t need the PC to go kill him etc..) which you have to take into consideration.
It's big, it's fucking messy and it's going to take a long time to really plan it all out. But hey, it's kinda fun.