@clarity Making these "you lost" branches out-of-scope makes it much easier to write the story for the remaining branches. (See, e.g., https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Essential_NPCs.)
Naïvely, if there are ten fights, and the game has to cope with you winning or losing each of them, that's 1024 possibilities. The combinatorial explosion is huge! I've got a few Clever™ things in mind (e.g. modelling character decision-making in software to see whether I can re-use dialogue), but it's still really hard.