Choose your own adventure books

[monele]

Hey everyone!
I've been sick for a week now and am finally recovering enough to touch the computer for more than a few minutes ^^. What happened during this time off/out is that I looked at very old magazines... and finally rediscovered my very old CYOA books. To avoid confusion, I'm talking about the Fighting Fantasy types (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy) dealing with typical roleplay settings and not other book series that might actually be labelled CYOA . These books were *very* popular when I was a teenager so I have a lot of them from various sub-series.

(actually, I'm discovering all the books released under the same label in France were released in more distinct labels in the UK/US ô_o...)



Anyway, let's put down one of my main questions first (and put it in bold just in case ^^) :
Is anyone here with a good grasp of litterature, and having played one of these books, able to give an approximate word count for them?

I know they have varying length, some often doubling in size compared to others (at least it appears so when looking at the book depth), but I'm curious as to wether these books would make huge VNs, medium VNs, or rather short VNs finished in 10 or 15 minutes.
Currently, I find most of them rather short (that is, ignoring the fact you usually die a lot if you don't know how to solve them) but I might have missed the fact I spend an hour reading one maybe.


Now that this comparison question is out of the way, I'm also looking for any sort of comments about the series if you've ever gone through them. Do you have good memories of them? What was good, what was annoying? Did you play with dice or did you skip skill tests and fights assuming you won? Did you play it fair or did you keep fingers between pages to be able to... rollback? :3 (or "reload" for a more videogame-generic term ).

Did you have favourite series maybe? A few english names I can recall are Fighting Fantasy (the biggest and most diverse one), Lone Wolf, Virtual Realities, Blood Sword, Dragon Warriors (well this one was actually a RPG), Grailquest...
Heck, here's the Wikipedia list of series : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gamebooks
Have you picked one of these recently and what did you think of it then? Did it shatter the good memories or reinforced them?

My own favourite from all the ones I retried so far (about 10 from various series) was Dead Among the Dead Men by Dave Morris from the Virtual Reality series (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Virtual-Reality ... 0749714859)
(funnily, the french cover is flipped... go figure XD). This particular series does away with one thing I found annoying in the other series : dice. Oh gosh, losing just because of a bad dice roll gets annoying very quickly ^^;... And I never really enjoyed the regular fights where you pretty much put the book down, launch dice forever and finally are able to go on with the story..... or not! Geh, stupid death ^^;... I remember I hated that even as a kid. Okay... the fact I played during pauses at school probably also meant I couldn't go throwing dice, but hey :p... I remember definitely cheating and going back if a choice proved to be immediately bad (sometimes you went through 3 paragraphs before dying so I still got tricked...).

Anyway, as an adult with its fair share of arbitrary deaths in many games, I just couldn't stomach the format of most of the books... let's not even talk about having to draw maps ^^;...
But this particular book? Well, first it's a pirate adventure, which I'm clearly partial to ^^;... and it uses no dice. Instead, you build a character with 4 abilities (among Sailing, Marksmanship, Fencing, Brawl, Mythology, Survival, etc...) and these abilities will often lead to specific bits of story, if you have them, depending on the situation. Sometimes, you can even choose wether to use them or not, which means you need to think about the best course of action. There's still fighting but it's very simple : you lose a predetermined amount of HP depending on equipment (magical stuff most of the time) and sometimes abilities (Marksmanship and Fencing help a lot to reduce damage).
Let's just say that I felt it was fair. Death felt a lot more like something I brought upon myself or the result of utter bad luck.
With all the annoying rules out of the way, it made me want to explore what the book had to offer a lot more... and it did deliver on alternate paths and little secrets (with a lot of epic magic objects as rewards).


Of course, I can't help but make a link with VNs ... or videogames at least : gamebooks definitely follow the main concepts of programming (goto, if then else) and would be totally adaptable in a Ren'Py environment for example (probably in NVL mode).
The biggest difference is probably the gaming aspect : gamebooks are a lot more difficult (death abounds!) and have actual rules apart from the paragraph jumping (though most of these, annoying on paper, would be mostly automated in a virtual environment)... and choices are a lot more numerous! Even though gamebooks are written like novels, VNs feel a lot wordier .
As for my favourite one, I realize the diceless approach actually makes it the closest one to VNs from all the series... maybe the reason why I liked it so much?

PS : I'm putting this in the Game Makers' Corner because there's an emphasis on the link between old gamebooks and more modern game making... but this is also for nostalgia which has nothing to do with game making

[Jake]

Is anyone here with a good grasp of litterature, and having played one of these books, able to give an approximate word count for them?

I don't have any to hand, I think all mine are still in my parents' attic (I don't dare go up there looking for my old books, 'cause I know they'll insist I take all of the stuff I have stored up there, and I'm not sure I have enough space for it!), so this is just guesswork, but:

- Paperbacks tend to have 300-400 words per full page of print
- FF books I'd estimate from memory probably have 100-150 pages
- probably about half of these have prose on, the other half being the gaps at the end of segments, the frequent illustrations, and the game stats and directions.

So that adds up to about 15-30k words in a book. I seem to recall paperback novels usually being in the 40-80k word range, so that probably more or less fits. And of course, remember that you're only seeing a fraction of the events in a single run through the book.

Now that this comparison question is out of the way, I'm also looking for any sort of comments about the series if you've ever gone through them. Do you have good memories of them? What was good, what was annoying? Did you play with dice or did you skip skill tests and fights assuming you won? Did you play it fair or did you keep fingers between pages to be able to... rollback? :3 (or "reload" for a more videogame-generic term ).

I tended to ignore the game parts most of the time. Mostly 'cause I know I'd be really annoyed if I thought I was doing well story-wise and got let down by bad dice rolls (and the FF system in particular was fairly random) so elected to forego that whole thing.

I was mostly a fan of the Lone Wolf series, I think. I certainly remember reading several of the novel versions at some point...

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Virtual-Reality ... 0749714859)
(funnily, the french cover is flipped... go figure XD).

Probably to avoid the crass bigotry demonstrated by the English-language publisher in making the overtly-evil skeletal pirate figure left-handed, when statistically speaking he's far more likely not to be!

[Nafai]

Before I discovered video game RPGs, the choose your own adventure type books were my primary means of interactive entertainment.

Like Jake I grew very partial to the Lone Wolf series - although I actually stopped when I discovered the novelizations, as I enjoyed the novelizations more (even with all the Deus Ex Machinas) because these allowed character development and, lo and behold, romance

I found equally enjoyable the Way of the Tiger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Tiger) which had the worst ending of any choose your own series I have ever read, but was a fun ride while it lasted.

There was this series of books as well that allowed you to play as a party of characters, and had different events that depended not just on stats, but on profession and gender as well. Can't recall the name but I remember really loving these.

I actually read that VR book Moni ^_^ as well as a couple of others in the series, all well done.

I think the ones I was most obsessed with though were the Wizards, Warriors and You series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_Warriors_&_You

The best CYOA I ever read though, hands down, were the two Lost Jedi Adventure Game Books: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Lost ... _Game_Book.

Havet Storm was the first CYOA protagonist - perhaps the only one - I have ever read who actually had a personality of his own. I would have paid astronomical amounts for a third book to that series ^_^

P.S. Glad you're recovering Moni!

[chronoluminaire]

Hee. I remember these. The actual original "Choose Your Own Adventure" series are the "purest" and the most like VNs; other styles are kind of like... hybrid VNs I remember the Warlock of Firetop Mountain series were very long and very difficult, compared to most other gamebooks; but I also played Way of the Tiger, Lone Wolf, and many others including some franchise-specific ones like Doctor Who, Spiderman, Knightmare, and several Transformers gamebooks. I have particularly fond memories of the Interplanetary Spy series and the Seven Serpents ("Sorcery!") set, with their three-letter spells like ZAP, and the very clever secrets that get revealed, like "You've prevented the members of the town from finding out about you. Any time anyone refers to you as "the Analander", you may subtract 100 from the number of that entry to indicate that they're unaware of your coming."

For the most part, yes, I played with a finger in the pages to dodge instant death, and after my initial dabblings, tended not to bother with the actual dice-rolling combat. But I would respect the other limits, like only saying "I've got the rope" if I did actually choose to spend my limited resources on that rope rather than something else.

A similar series that I loved were the Usborne Puzzle Adventures. Recently (a few years back, as an adult) I went through ordering and getting them all from my local library... the "Advanced level" puzzle adventures are very good challenge even to an adult ^^;; They're not so VN-style, as the story's linear, but you have puzzles to solve on each page.

[F.I.A]

Anyway, let's put down one of my main questions first (and put it in bold just in case ^^) :
Is anyone here with a good grasp of litterature, and having played one of these books, able to give an approximate word count for them?

From the very book(The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) in my hand, it's around 2.5 to 3.0 k 25k to 30k words. I think it took me around 1 hour playtime to get to the warlock, because I am a sucker for bad-end choices.

Now that this comparison question is out of the way, I'm also looking for any sort of comments about the series if you've ever gone through them. Do you have good memories of them? What was good, what was annoying? Did you play with dice or did you skip skill tests and fights assuming you won? Did you play it fair or did you keep fingers between pages to be able to... rollback? :3 (or "reload" for a more videogame-generic term ).

In general, I try to do with dice unless I just want to skim through.

Sorcery! series is my favourite for the spell casting.

As for annoyance, I recalled how a bad luck against a boss tends to kill you, or that it is rather hard to jot down some of the items for the inventory. And it is hard to backtrack to a few choices back to prevent some bad-ends.

Side: Oh, it's sad to hear that you have been ill for the past week. Get well soon.

[EDIT: Oh snaps, I meant 25k - 30k words.]

[Jake]

From the very book(The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) in my hand, it's around 2.5 to 3.0 k words.

Do you mean for a single-branch playthrough? I'd have trouble believing that the book was only that long in total!

(One thing I didn't think of yesterday from the estimating point of view was looking on Amazon's "look inside this book" feature: This suggests for Warlock an average prose-page length of ~250 words, and out of the six in-book pages, there's two of illustration for four of prose, giving an average page length of ~170 words. The edition I was looking at hat 192 pages - knocking off ten or so for front and backmatter, that gives an estimate of a total count around 30500 words. So if FIA is saying a single playthrough is 2.5-3k words, that suggests you're seeing about a tenth of the book...

[Nafai]

Ooops just remembered another one: the Space Hawks sub-series of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I liked CYOAs with continuing plotlines. ^_^

[monele]

Aaah, I'm glad to see this generating much nostalgy ^__^

So that adds up to about 15-30k words in a book.

Meow... So they're definitely not small stuff. It does feel a bit cheap when going through only one path but I did realize the pirate one was huge when I read it like a regular book (and even then I skipped the sections I knew...).

Probably to avoid the crass bigotry demonstrated by the English-language publisher in making the overtly-evil skeletal pirate figure left-handed, when statistically speaking he's far more likely not to be!

Mwaha XD... I so didn't think about that

I know I'd be really annoyed if I thought I was doing well story-wise and got let down by bad dice rolls

Supremacy of story over randomness!

But I would respect the other limits, like only saying "I've got the rope" if I did actually choose to spend my limited resources on that rope rather than something else.

Yeah, I like to at least respect inventory stuff... otherwise there's really no playing part anymore

I was mostly a fan of the Lone Wolf series

Like Jake I grew very partial to the Lone Wolf series

Mmm, amusingly, a friend of mine pointed me to a website with an online revival of the books :
http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

I never really liked the series when I was a kid (maybe too serious?) but I tried it yesterday and was rather hooked o_o

There was this series of books as well that allowed you to play as a party of characters, and had different events that depended not just on stats, but on profession and gender as well.

I've played one called Défis et Sortilèges in french that lets you play as one out of four characters from the team. You get to read character-specific sections from time to time. But it's still a one person party as far as the rest of the rules are concerned ^^;...
The other one close to this would be Blood Sword which went very close to regular tabletop RPGs by letting you play alone or with 3 other people, each one controlling a character. There was only one book but some sections were only to be read by specific classes, and sometimes you'd get "members who avoided the hit, read 232. Others read 513", so each player would get his own description of what happened. But you couldn't split the team for example

I actually read that VR book Moni ^_^ as well as a couple of others in the series, all well done.

Woop! I'm actually thinking of ordering "Heart of Ice"... I've read that it was the best of the series and "the one gamebook you should play if you play only one of them".

I think the ones I was most obsessed with though were the Wizards, Warriors and You series:

Interesting ^^. I've gone through a "dual book" series too which was probably similar except that you'd actually meet the other character (which *could* be played by someone else, reading the other book at the same time). Actually we've talked about that series once while discussing multiplayer VNs ^_^;

Havet Storm was the first CYOA protagonist - perhaps the only one - I have ever read who actually had a personality of his own.

I guess it *is* important to have well fleshed out avatars from time to time ^^. Amusingly, we find the exact same problem with VNs

Glad you're recovering Moni!

Oh, it's sad to hear that you have been ill for the past week. Get well soon.

Thankies ^_^. I should be fine for when I go back to work tomorrow... *crosses fingers* ^^;

The actual original "Choose Your Own Adventure" series are the "purest" and the most like VNs

I don't even know if these were ever published in France (what with all the name changing)... the Fighting Fantasy were certainly the most popular though, along with a few huge gamebooks with large illustrated pages including a few games like labyrinths and stuff. These ones were for younger kids though. Oh, I realize those are the Usborne Puzzle Adventures!
There's something I'm curious about : the CYOA claim having multiple endings (while FF series rarely had more than one good ending)... so... are these 1 good ending + 55 deaths or are there actually possible variations?
I also suppose there were no dicerolls and only story?

From the very book(The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) in my hand, it's around 2.5 to 3.0 k words.

Is that 3000 or 30000 words? (sorry, the point is making me confused)


Okay, I took out my FR version of the Warlock. It has 186 pages for the gaming part (taking out the rules and one or two pages of background story) with 36 full page illustrations, making it 150 actual text pages. Using your average of 250 per page this would give 37500 words... but given all the spacing and some illustrative separators, I guess it is closer to 30K in the end. And that's not even one of the biggest books, sheesh! o_o...
I didn't want to admit it but they were definitely not shy in the writing department ^^;...

[Vatina]

I used to play a lot of those kind of books, although I weren't very good at them. I can't mention any series though, since I lent them all at the library and can't remember the titles ^^; I know that there was one series that I liked though... *tries desperately to remember*
(The title was probably in danish anyway)

I remember one I really loved and played a couple of times was one where you were sent back in time, and had to solve a murder without being killed yourself. It was the first one I tried, since my brother recommended it to me. Another one was where you were in a car race, hehe
The only one I own myself is a Dragonlance book where you play as Raistlin. I don't think I ever made it through that one, I ended up going in circles. Argh, I suck.....

I just hated when the books had errors, though Like writing the wrong number next to the choices, and send you into and endless loop... my brother caught a few of those and corrected them for me.
The dice thing was really annoying too. In the end I didn't use dice at all, since I found it silly to lose by coincidence after getting really far.

Those books were great back then. When I discovered VN's I thought about those immiediatly xD I also tried creating a few myself long, long ago... I'm having a bit more luck creating VN's though

[monele]

I just hated when the books had errors, though

Ack, tell me about it XD... I actively avoided some of the books I had because I remembered they had errors ^^;... I mean... bugs... bugs in books! How often do you get that? XD

[papillon]

There's something I'm curious about : the CYOA claim having multiple endings (while FF series rarely had more than one good ending)... so... are these 1 good ending + 55 deaths or are there actually possible variations?
I also suppose there were no dicerolls and only story?

The actual CYOA books had really wide story variation and not always a lot of internal consistency.

You are walking down a long hallway. Turn left, and your uncle will take you on a hot air balloon ride that will land you on an abandoned island in the middle of the pacific. Turn right, and your aunt will take you on a spelunking expedition where you will be kidnapped by gnomes. Totally different storyline.

A lot of the endings are bad ends, but it's certainly not all-bad. While the story deviations can be very random (as mentioned above), usually the bad ends come from doing something the story hinted was a bad idea. "This path through the mountains is totally safe. This path is dangerous and prone to avalanches, but there might be treasure on it." And it's pretty much like that - the dangerous one has a slim chance of having something good on it, but probably it's going to kill you.


As far as favorite series go, when I got together with my husband and found his childhood collection of books there was one we both thought was good, but the name of it is slipping my mind at the moment... The general idea involved being a time-travel agent...

[chronoluminaire]

Havet Storm was the first CYOA protagonist - perhaps the only one - I have ever read who actually had a personality of his own.

I guess it *is* important to have well fleshed out avatars from time to time ^^. Amusingly, we find the exact same problem with VNs

Yes, it is!

The actual original "Choose Your Own Adventure" series are the "purest" and the most like VNs

I don't even know if these were ever published in France (what with all the name changing)... the Fighting Fantasy were certainly the most popular though, along with a few huge gamebooks with large illustrated pages including a few games like labyrinths and stuff. These ones were for younger kids though. Oh, I realize those are the Usborne Puzzle Adventures!
There's something I'm curious about : the CYOA claim having multiple endings (while FF series rarely had more than one good ending)... so... are these 1 good ending + 55 deaths or are there actually possible variations?
I also suppose there were no dicerolls and only story?

Yes, the original CYOA books had no dicerolls, inventory, or anything like that; just choices and story.

And as papillon says, there were wildly differing storylines, with many different endings. One of them very much irritated me because there were strange mysterious goings-on, and depending on the choices you made, the reason for the events turned out to be something completely different. Aliens, an MI5 investigation, a mad scientist, a load of coincidences... ggrrrrr, that really irritated me. Like in certain VNs, when taking one action will have consequences on something that shouldn't be remotely related. It completely breaks consistency and suspension of disbelief.

...Okay, I'm done ranting now. I think most CYOA books weren't like that, actually; just one or two.

[monele]

Oooh, I actually played one similar to these then. It was german and about the famous missing 13th floor in most (all?) buildings. You were a young kid and had very different storylines depending on your choices too... and funny point : if the story told you to go to the 13th section, it told you "just as in most building, there's no 13th section in this book... if you were sent here, it means you lost" ^^;

[Jake]

Oooh, I actually played one similar to these then. It was german and about the famous missing 13th floor in most (all?) buildings.

It's certainly not all buildings, since plenty of buildings in the UK have thirteenth floors. (I also quite frequently end up parking on the 13th storey of the multistorey car-park in town, if it's busy, since that's the roof)

Using your average of 250 per page this would give 37500 words... but given all the spacing and some illustrative separators, I guess it is closer to 30K in the end.

As it goes, the 250-words-per-page estimate average was based on counting the number of words on the sample pages of the English-language version of Warlock on Amazon, so it should already take into account at least some of the gaps.

One of them very much irritated me because there were strange mysterious goings-on, and depending on the choices you made, the reason for the events turned out to be something completely different. Aliens, an MI5 investigation, a mad scientist, a load of coincidences... ggrrrrr, that really irritated me.

I'm pretty sure the ones we dissected in English class were very much like this. They weren't official CYOA-brand (the only one of those I remember playing involved time-travelling back to a mediaeval jousting tournament... which I remember seeming pretty odd since the protagonists seemed to be Americans, in the US) but they were very similar in approach - just aimed at readers a few years older, I think.

[papillon]

Husband says the time-agent thing I'm trying to remember is called Falcon.

http://www.the-underdogs.info/showbook.php?id=22