How should I structure a Python-based procedural story generator?

Avoid creating a huge chain of if/elif statements for individual characters. Store traits in a dictionary or dataclass instead, such as a character’s style, mood, and current state. Your action logic can then look up the appropriate phrase bank with something like actions["sit"][character.style]. Changing a personality trait becomes a data update, and every action automatically uses the new style. Keeping the word banks in dictionaries or JSON files also makes it easier to add content without changing the program logic.

Look into context-free grammars. They let you define rules for expanding symbols into larger pieces of text, which is a natural fit for procedural sentence generation. A grammar-based system can handle patterns like character, action, and location without hard-coding every possible sentence. Once traits such as “brutish” or “elegant” affect which rules are valid, you’re moving toward constraint-based generation or a broader character and behavior simulation system.

Polymorphism could work if characters genuinely need different behavior. You could define a base Character class with a sit_style method, then override that method for special character types. However, if the differences are mostly combinations of traits, composition is likely simpler: keep one character object and give it properties such as style, mood, and strength. That avoids creating a separate subclass for every possible combination.

Use weighted randomness so the output doesn’t treat every phrase as equally likely. Python’s random.choices can give common phrases higher weights while still allowing unusual ones occasionally. Also give the generator a seed, or use a dedicated random.Random instance. That way you can reproduce a particular story while debugging instead of getting a different result every run.

You probably don’t need linked lists or recursion for the character system. Dictionaries are well suited to looking up actions by style and mood, while dataclasses can keep each character’s state organized. Recursion may become useful later if you represent nested grammar rules, but start with straightforward data structures and only add complexity when the story model actually requires it.