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Gamebooks are interactive fiction, generally written in the second person (but sometimes third person, and rarer still first person) which allow you as the reader to have some influence over the story. These range from the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series which has you selecting from multiple choice options and then turning to different pages to make your choice, to more advanced systems like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Adventure which has you rolling up a character sheet and keeping track of stats throughout the story, rolling dice to determine the results of different events. Basically its single player D&D for mega-nerds who have no friends. (Or whose friends have better things to do than argue about stat values) Although always a niche, gamebooks have recently seen something of a return with reprintings of several of the most famous books in newer formats, and adaptations of games into mobile or pc game adaptations.  Have you ever been reading a book or watching a movie and wanted to yell at the character for doing something really stupid? Well, now you can make the stupid decisions yourself. Have you ever wanted to play D&D, but couldn't get your group together because they were busy? Well, now you can be the PC and let a professional author be your DM! Gamebooks range in quality greatly. Some have only a single path through which leads to the 'happy ending' with dozens of pitfalls along the way to stop you and make you start over, forcing you to memorize the safe route. Others are very forgiving and manage to make a story out of whatever option you decide. Some have no rules at all, while others can have rulesets just as complicated as normal tabletop roleplaying. Some will even include character sheets. Usually simpler than in a full tabletop game, but not always.  The character sheet from the Lone Wolf series includes inventory, feats, skill values, and space to record combat rolls. Popular Gamebooks: Choose Your Own Adventure - For most people, CYOA is synonymous with gamebooks. They offer little agency, giving you only multiple choice options. Still, there's some classic tales. Give Yourself Goosebumps - Kids stories in the Goosebumps silly/horror style, all you do is pick what happens, but there are lots of different endings and not a lot of death traps. Fighting Fantasy - A classic series and very popular, recently reprinted. These offer a bit more than the CYOA style books and use some dice rolling, but its very simple and minimal. Each book is standalone rather than a series, and some use different rules. Sorcery! for instance allows you to play a warrior or a wizard, and wizards have a unique spell-memorization mechanic. Lone Wolf - The series that got me into gamebooks, offers the normal CYOA jump to page multiple choice options, but with a nice ruleset on top to add more to the strategy and action. The main series follows a ranger through a fantasy land to defeat enemies and acquire treasures to gain strength. Lone Wolf: Grey Star the Wizard - Offshoot of Lone Wolf, this series has you playing as a wizard. Very satisfying as you get to choose from several mystical arts at the start of the book, and then you get different options throughout the story based on which magic you choose. Also includes the inventory and combat systems from Lone Wolf. Decent writing and some good pictures, although lots of ways to die. Freeway Warrior - Uses a very similar system to Lone Wolf, but in a modern postapocalyptic setting. Mad Max: the gamebook! You start in Dallas, Texas and you slowly fight your way with a caravan of survivors through to California over the course of 4 books. You get to use guns and you pick from different survival skills when you start. Way of the Tiger - A bit of an offshoot of Fighting Fantasy, this classic 6 book series let you play as a flippin' ninja. Get to use all kinds of Kung Fu like "Leaping Tiger Kick" as well as ninja skills like poison and shurikens. Being reprinted and expanded into an 8 book series. Middle Earth Quest - Its a gamebook set in Tolkein's world! What more could you ask for? These books are out of print and rather hard to come by in good condition, but they're pretty high quality. The ruleset is fairly complicated and each book has a map of the region where you're allowed free reign to explore, hex by hex in any direction or order you want. Each book is set in a different location, from the Shire and Moria to Isenguard. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Adventure - Using similar rules to AD&D, this is a more rules-heavy adventure. Classic fantasy. Critical IF - A series of very different books with light rules. Settings and stories range from post-apocalyptic Heart of Ice to pirate themed Down Among Dead Men, overall pretty enjoyable. Fabled Lands - This is the big kahuna. Fabled Lands is more like an MMORPG where other gamebooks are RPGs. This world is unbelievably massive, with a series of books all describing a huge interconnected world. Books can be started in any order, and you can freely wander between the regions that you own books for. You can explore dungeons, fight monsters, get a job, invest in the bank, buy a ship, buy a crew, go on quests and much, much more. Uses a very advanced system including writing down variable key-phrases to track your progress as you loop around. Fabled lands is really amazing in its ability for you to create your own adventure, rather than following the pre-planned paths laid out for you. Destiny Quest - A new series, the books are absolutely massive. Attempts to be more like Fabled Lands and an MMORPG, with the ability to loop around and quest for as long as you want, travelling from town to town. Unlike Fabled Lands each book is its own standalone adventure. The writing seemed pretty good in these, but the rules leave a bit to be desired as ultimately you're just collecting more and more powerful equipment, your character doesn't grow much otherwise. Still, there are classes and sub-classes and different abilities, and the books offer a good variety of settings and adventure style. The story is still far more pre-determined than Fabled Lands. Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, and more have been recently reprinted as well as updated as iOS apps. Lone Wolf recently was released to Steam as well, as a part gamebook part videogame experience.  Lone Wolf on iOS Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 2, 2015 |
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Jan 28, 2015 23:25
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Play Lone Wolf for free with Project Aon: http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books Play Fabled Lands for free here: http://flapp.sourceforge.net/ then post here about how long it took you to die the first time 
Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 4, 2015 |
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Jan 28, 2015 23:30
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Some pretty nifty sounding stuff here I'll need to google up to see the current state of---but upon doing a bit of that, it seems the timing was good on the Destiny Quest front as they just recently got an Act/Book 1 out of a souped up browser rendition (Destiny Quest: Infinite) somewhat akin to that Fabled Lands one you mentioned just above though with the author deeply involved in this case such that it may well eventually trump the books on polish/content and whatnot outright. http://destinyquestinfinite.com/ http://www.destiny-quest.com/ Looks like they are going the episodic release route these next several months to wrap up adapting the entirety of it, though much the same as Conclave https://www.playconclave.com/ I really hope they eventually do a desktop offline port outright. It is super cool to see this sort of thing livening up again, though I will always wonder why they never leveraged Diskmag technology to better weather all those years it was in a lull in terms of taking the digital bull by the horns as it were...
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Jan 30, 2015 15:58
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FF#2: The Citadel of Chaos was a revelation to me when I came across it in the school library in second grade. The art was amazing, it was (like most CYOA actually) brutally grim in the ways you would (frequently) meet your end and Balthus Dire was basically the toughest rear end in a top hat you ever would meet. Plus such great creatures as the Wheelies: Fuckin' Wheelies, man.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:14
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:FF#2: The Citadel of Chaos was a revelation to me when I came across it in the school library in second grade. The art was amazing, it was (like most CYOA actually) brutally grim in the ways you would (frequently) meet your end and Balthus Dire was basically the toughest rear end in a top hat you ever would meet. Plus such great creatures as the Wheelies: Hah, that's like the great grandfather of Dark Souls' bonewheels or something. Terrifyingly strange.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:48
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Was inspired to crack open Citadel and take Balthus to task, ended up as a shattered corpse on the rocks outside the fortress. loving Ganjees.
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Jan 30, 2015 20:59
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No mention of The Way of the Tiger, probably one of the better gamebook series ever? The combat system in these gamebooks owns: basically you have to decide which moves to make to defeat your enemies. I really liked the games because most of the challenges were made for you to get around by acting like a ninja: avoiding straight-up fights, being sneaky, treacherous etc.
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Jan 31, 2015 09:59
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Tekopo posted:No mention of The Way of the Tiger, probably one of the better gamebook series ever? The combat system in these gamebooks owns: basically you have to decide which moves to make to defeat your enemies. I really liked the games because most of the challenges were made for you to get around by acting like a ninja: avoiding straight-up fights, being sneaky, treacherous etc. Slipped my mind! I am a fan, although I've only read one of the books. I should try to pick up more...
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Feb 2, 2015 17:17
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I loved the Grail Quest series back in the day. Fairly goofy Arthurian setting stuff, you had spells that got more complicated as the series went on, it was pretty rad. Plus, the Poetic Fiend.
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Feb 2, 2015 19:26
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Pod Your Own Adventure is a podcast where the host invites guests on every week to play through a game book. I figure people in this thread will probably enjoy it. The Sonic the Hedgehog series is something special.
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Feb 2, 2015 21:20
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Steve Jackson's Sorcery! (which used the Fighting Fantasy system with variant magic rules) is also being adapted to apps -- the first two books have been released. Wish I still had my copies.
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Feb 2, 2015 21:27
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Selachian posted:Steve Jackson's Sorcery! (which used the Fighting Fantasy system with variant magic rules) is also being adapted to apps -- the first two books have been released. Wish I still had my copies. I really like Sorcery! 's magic rules. You have to actually memorize (simple) spells yourself, using your actual brains to roleplay a wizard. That's pretty clever. (ZAP!) Meanwhile roleplaying a warrior means no brains required 
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Feb 2, 2015 21:33
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Zaphod42 posted:I really like Sorcery! 's magic rules. You have to actually memorize (simple) spells yourself, using your actual brains to roleplay a wizard. That's pretty clever. (ZAP!) Unfortunately, the app doesn't reproduce that aspect. Instead, when you cast a spell, you have to pick the spell's code one letter at a time out of a spinning cloud of letters. It also has a sort of mini fighting game instead of just rolling the dice to resolve combat.
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Feb 2, 2015 21:37
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Just got a few of the new reprint of the Way of the Tiger because I lost my original books and wanted to go through them again! Can't wait to get a chance to try them out.
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Feb 3, 2015 11:16
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Project Aon, the official online printing of the Lone Wolf books, should probably be added to the OP. Since the originals are long out of print (I think there was a reprinting of some of them for the RPG a few years ago, but aside from that) that's the most accessible way to play it.
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Feb 3, 2015 11:21
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There's also these 2 offshoots to Project Aon that either tie in or take a slightly different route: http://www.projectaon.org/staff/david/ Seventh Sense handles much of the grunt work in the background http://www.projectaon.org/staff/frederic/index.php LoneWolfDS homebrews it up in a full tilt manner for the Nintendo DS, but only goes up to the 4th book and I'm unsure what the state is of the remaining ones making the leap on over.
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Feb 3, 2015 14:37
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Carrasco posted:Project Aon, the official online printing of the Lone Wolf books, should probably be added to the OP. Since the originals are long out of print (I think there was a reprinting of some of them for the RPG a few years ago, but aside from that) that's the most accessible way to play it. Added to my second post! I forgot about that website but yeah, its a good way to check out Lone Wolf. And Lone Wolf is fun stuff. ExiledTinkerer posted:http://www.projectaon.org/staff/frederic/index.php LoneWolfDS homebrews it up in a full tilt manner for the Nintendo DS, but only goes up to the 4th book and I'm unsure what the state is of the remaining ones making the leap on over. I've played that one on my DS, and its pretty solid. Nothing beats the actual books, though.
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Feb 4, 2015 08:10
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Back in "the day" there was a tabletop/pnp role playing game called "Tunnels and Trolls". The system itself was ok, but what really made it stand out was that there were tons of solo adventures for it. http://www.tunnelsandtrolls.com/ - overview solo dungeons http://www.freedungeons.com/ http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/bcintro.htm http://www.gristlegrim.com/tunnelsandtrollssolos.shtml http://www.tunnelsandtrolls.com/soloadventures.shtml
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Feb 24, 2015 19:33
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Seemingly kind of relevant(I guess there's some deep rift I'm perhaps not cognizant of between the whole "IF" thing and gamebookery?), as well as maybe being the first "game" of any sort for the Tekumel setting after all these years---depressing as that may be as that only now brings them almost up to par with Glorantha as D&D still continues towering over the lot of them: https://www.choiceofgames.com/2015/04/choice-of-the-petal-throne-rise-to-glory-on-the-battlefields-of-tekumel/ quote:In the Empire of the Petal Throne™, will you find glory, or a knife in your back?
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Apr 11, 2015 14:19
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