Adventure Gamebooks Question

The Lone Wolf books are great. A nice compromise between a table top RPG and a "Choose your own Adventure" book. My one quibble with the Lone Wolf books, is that the Summersword can take much of the challenge out of the books once you acquire it. Some people have suggested that in order to keep the series a challenge, that you "lose" it, or nerf it a bit. That being said, they have all of the things I like in solo games: Deep story, character advancement, hair raising thrills. Definately classic.

So the first time you play the book, you reach the end of the maze to realise that you need 3 gem. The next time you play, you must find where are these gems located. And then you must find, what is the path I must use to make sure I end up with the 3 gems at the end of the maze. And finaly, you must find the right combination. (6 possible permutation).

I think that this is a great idea - requiring specific objects to succeed. That delays the "critical path" behavior that can develop, where the players quickly learn the minimum they need to do in order to win. It can still happen, but what you mentioned forces them to take at least a minimum amount of risks. Decisions and risks form the backbone of solo games. (As opposed to just throwing dice) Player advancement or death should be an equal consequence of decisions and planning rather than just hurling the dice. Throwing dice is fun, but decisions and resource management add more complexity and replay value. (Resource management is where you must choose which thing or companion to take with you, which influences how the game will progress)

I also like the idea of scoring - getting points for how well you do. That way you can try to beat previous scores.

Sincerely,
Falloutfan

I sort of wanted to just lurk for awhile, but I couldn't read this thread without posting in it. Gamebooks have long been a great love of mine, and though I haven't played any in a long time, I would say that some of my biggest literary influences growing up were gamebooks. Which, I know, is a weird thing to say, but I just have such fond memories of them and have yet to come across anything with the same combination of narrative and immersive non-linearity - except maybe for interactive fiction computer games (another great love of mine).

This thread has really inspired me, and made me kind of want to give creating my own gamebooks a shot. Though, as mentioned, the buying market is slim. There's always just approaching it as a hobby, for the fun of it, but putting all that work into something that basically only I and maybe a handful of other people would ever see isn't so appealing. But it's something to mull over.

Good luck to Trollbasher and anyone else doing or considering this. I'd love to see gamebooks make a comeback with the buying public again, but even in spite of all that I'd just love some new quality gamebooks to play. If anyone here gets to the point of having a book to sell, you can bet I'll buy one.

Thanks for the welcome, falloutfan! It's weird that I just discovered this place a few days ago, having been interested in game design for most of my life, though mostly preoccupied with writing the last few years. That's why the idea of working on gamebooks is so appealing - it basically combines two things I really love.

We can do this for fun, and as a hobby, but also maybe make a tiny bit of money at little to no risk. Assuming I had a product, I'd be delighted to sell even just a few.

The exposure to other gamers is one of the great things about this board.

That's so true, and you've pretty much convinced me to give it a go. Even if only a handful of people ever saw the finished product, if that handful of people like it, well, that's reward enough.

PDF is a good idea. Though I like the idea of having an actual physical book too, maybe through using something like a print on demand service. It's stuff I'll have to think over. First and foremost I should probably think of ideas. I never saw enough science fiction gamebooks as I would have liked, so maybe something along those lines.

On the subject of really good gamebooks - did anyone ever play any of the Fabled Lands books? I have the first one. It was really, really non-linear - from what I can tell, you couldn't even really finish it, you could just do everything you could do in the book and then you'd get to references where if you wanted to go to a certain place you'd have to turn to a reference in another book in the series. It had no real overarching plot, there was just tons of subplots and things you could get involved in, like you could pick sides in the war, and there were all sorts of nifty class-specific subquests. It's definitely one of the best gamebooks I ever played.

I dug out my copy of the first Fabled Lands book, and it actually appears they were printed under the title Quest in North America.

I'll have to check out Tunnels and Trolls. Spiral-sound does sound like a good way to go. I'll have to check out various print on demand services and see what their cheapest options are. But before I worry too much about that, I have to actually start writing the damn thing.

Anyone here started working on one who would like to share how they're going about it? I think I may employ the method detailed in this article:

http://gamebooks.mantikora.com/howto.html

In addition, there are some great resources at http://www.advancedfightingfantasy.com.

I think the hardest thing is the planning. The articles on that site and others I've read suggest against just jumping in and writing the thing, but rather to plan out thoroughly by drawing a map or making a flowchart, that details locations and choices that can be made at each.

There's also a lot of decisions to be made. Do I, for example, write a connected series, where you carry your character and his stats and items over from book to book, or a series of standalone books, the way Fighting Fantasy worked? Probably a connected series would work best initially, the logic being if the first book is well-recieved, people will want to play the second, and so on. But the disadvantage there is that if I ever got to the point where I had a number of books in the series, newcomers might be discouraged with the prospect of starting a whole series of gamebooks, where a series of standalone gamebooks means they could pick the ones that interest them to play in any order and any length apart from each other. Trollbasher's trilogy concept seems like a very good way to get around some of the connected series problems, as does the Fabled Lands method of each book representing an area of the world and all the quests available in it, rather than representing a single quest to be completed.

It's all stuff to consider. Replayability and character advancement seem to be pretty important to most who've posted in this thread. I think replayability is important, though I can't say I was ever particularly bummed out that my characters in Fighting Fantasy books didn't advance. As long as I was getting to new areas and unravelling more of the story, in addition to collecting new items and occasionally replenishing my Luck score, I felt like I was advancing, though compared to other gamebooks with levels and accumulated skill points, I really wasn't. I guess I played gamebooks more for an engaging story told in a non-linear fashion than I did for building my character - honestly, some of my favourite gamebooks were ones with a more clearly defined character whose role you take on, than the vague "This is YOU, develop yourself how YOU want to be." I like the characters in books I read to be well-developed and have personalities, even if the character is being controlled by and in a sense is me. If the character is well-defined, that character develops as I advance through more of the story. If I wanted to focus on character development through stats, I'd play an RPG.

Sorry for the long post. It's just nice to find somewhere where I can actually talk about this stuff. Pretty much no one I know even knows what gamebooks are, let alone would ever play one.