What's your Experience with Gamebooks and which do you enjoy?

I was cleaning out my attic of cob-webs to find some old goosebumps books I remembered reading and really enjoying as a kid (Camp Jellyjam was my favorite), and found "Goosebumps: Tick Tock, You're Dead". I forgot Goosebumps even had choose-your-own adventure books and it reminded me of Joe Dever's lone-wolf!

What gamebooks did you enjoy, if you played any back in the day or more recently? Did they lead you into your TTRPG hobby you have now or vice versa? Any fond memories of daring adventure? I want to know!

My Favorite Gamebook!

Lone Wolf I remember really enjoying because it played out like a S&S movie but you got to choose what you do in the interesting bits and have it change a good amount of your character's saga; like choosing to help a wizard getting ambushed by the forces of darkness, you could either help him and potentially make a new companion/get a cool artifact or move on with your quest since time is of the essence and wizards aren't to be trusted anyhow what with their habits of consorting with unknown powers and sinister sorceries, instead of MMO quests where you maybe get 1-2 lines of different dialogue in a quest for different options if there are any along with the quests being little contained stories that get canned when you get to the next zone (SWTOR was killer, The exception).

I also remembered hearing about Fighting Fantasy and Black-Baron/White-Warlord to a lesser extent, The latter being a multiplayer gamebook which I thought was slick! Looking into Gamebooks on the internet I found Fabled-lands and Destiny-Quest to be popular and saw it had lots of classes and stuff similar to MMO's and ASCII Rogue-likes but in a MMO/Book hybrid sort of way. I read somewhere one of those series was due to get more books but the writer/company stopped making books because something along the lines of "Digital is the future" and "No-one will buy Game-books anymore".

Sounds like a bummer to me, A hybrid Book/MMO means no updates/patches/microtransactions to ruin the fun besides reprints and the chat feature is going to your friend's house to tell him about your adventures and showing him your sickass book! (Without Moderators!) Buying new books was like buying quality dlc/expansions I'd imagine too, unlike buying an expansion where the bulk of it is in-game skins and maybe a short quest.

Also, not paying the pain-in-the-ass subscription fees and the higher electric/internet bill for playing 3+ hours on weekends is also a plus.

Edit: Plus, you own the book physically! Forever until you sell/lose it! You can put notes in or create a high level toon and do later areas immediately, No exp/golding farming required!

I play Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. They are essentially multiplayer choose your own adventures with a map, newspaper, directory, and handouts like that. The main mechanic is you use the map and directory to decide who/what to visit and then look up indexed passage and read that for clues, which lead you to other locations/people. They are quite fun and suitable for 2-3 players. No GM needed, just can just take turns reading aloud.

I've never played a Lone Wolf book. Which would you recommend starting with?

Quote from: rytrasmi on May 19, 2023, 01:49:07 PM
I play Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. They are essentially multiplayer choose your own adventures with a map, newspaper, directory, and handouts like that. The main mechanic is you use the map and directory to decide who/what to visit and then look up indexed passage and read that for clues, which lead you to other locations/people. They are quite fun and suitable for 2-3 players. No GM needed, just can just take turns reading aloud.

I've never played a Lone Wolf book. Which would you recommend starting with?

I've only ever read the first book "Flight From the Dark" a couple of times and never finished it, Its got a lot in there! Or at least a lot for me when I was younger, I haven't read it since then. I remember choosing different paths to get to where you need to go, like under the cover of brush or along an open road with travelers, as well as choosing how to evade the oncoming forces of darkness, and deciding whether to search an area or continue on your current route, and cool powers called "Disciplines of Kai" like turning invisible or talking to animals, That's as far as my memory goes on what was in the book.

Edit: Forgot to put the name of the book in, D'oh

I played loads of these as a kid, but I haven't gone back. I really enjoyed first 7 of the Fighting Fantasy series, but less so the later ones. I also enjoyed Lone Wolf, Way of Tiger, and the Falcon series by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson.

Twenty nine Lone Wolf books are available free online at Project Aon (https://projectaon.org/en/Main/Books), along with another series set in the same world and a third series set in a post-apocalyptic Earth. They're all great fun to play through at least once, and the Lone Wolf ones really amount to an epic campaign.

The Fighting Fantasy books are very different, because you have almost zero chance of making it through them first time. They're more like puzzles, in that you have to piece together a way to complete them over numerous attempts, which can be fun or frustrating. And for the most part they are one-offs, rather than linked series for the same hero as you see in Lone Wolf. They are fun though, and I'm currently trying to make my way through them all (I'm on book 24 so far).

Double post.

I still read them....

In fact, I just got my awesome new hardcover of Heart of Ice, from GameFound
https://gamefound.com/projects/otherworlds/heart-of-ice?previewPhase=CrowdfundingEnded

Last fall, I ran a dwarf fighter through several Tunnels and Trolls solo adventures from back in the day.  Kind of fun in a 'I want slap the author in the face' way.  <hint>  Play them like a video game with save points and you actually get to enjoy what was written and not spend 90% of your time re-rolling characters.

[Or, play it like Ground Hog's Day where you return to the entrance point and can fast forward through certain parts of the adventure.]

Dating myself, but the "Choose Your Own Adventures," and "Endless Quest," books fed my noggin' like nobody's business - and while maybe not gamebooks per se, that was all I could get at the time.

Quote from: Summon666 on May 19, 2023, 04:53:39 PM
I still read them....

In fact, I just got my awesome new hardcover of Heart of Ice, from GameFound
https://gamefound.com/projects/otherworlds/heart-of-ice?previewPhase=CrowdfundingEnded

I enjoyed "Heart of Ice" as an e-book. Good design to that, and it works well with internal links so that you don't need to manually find "page 54".

Another one I'd recommend is the "Fabled Lands" series. That's set up as an open-world fantasy game, something like a computer RPG sandbox in book form, each book covering a particular land area. At one point I had a computer version of it called "FLApp" but think there's a commercial computer version now.

Long ago I read the original CYOA books (whose owner zealously protects that exact phrase's trademark now) and the "Sorcery!" series by Steve Jackson.

Tolkien Quest (Later Middle Earth Quest) had around 9 or 10 books. It had its own system but was kind of compatible with MERP, or at least had a conversion guide. The system was the closest I've seen in a gamebook to something that could be used for actual tabletop group play. I believe the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game came later and was an attempt to do just that (use the system from the gamebooks for tabletop play).

Fabled Lands was a close second for being suitable for tabletop play. Indeed there was a Fabled Lands tabletop game that unfortunately never went anywhere.

My last try was with a gamebook series namned Bloodsword. I found them interesting  mainly because of being able to play them in a group of four player. I played the first book maybe 3 times. On my last run we cleared the dungeon, but got killed by a optional boss att the very end. I was completely  against the idea of course, but a player insisted that the dungeon would had not truly been conquered without killing this massive boss. I called lunacy but went a long it and went TPK.

I think Bloodsword is pretty good but punishing. It can be a bit tiring though since there is a lot of text to be read out loud, which usually fall to me.

I'm still gonna try to finish the whole series at some point.

Delete

Quote from: KrisSnow on May 19, 2023, 05:37:54 PM

Quote from: Summon666 on May 19, 2023, 04:53:39 PM
I still read them.... In fact, I just got my awesome new hardcover of Heart of Ice, from GameFound
https://gamefound.com/projects/otherworlds/heart-of-ice?previewPhase=CrowdfundingEnded

I enjoyed "Heart of Ice" as an e-book. Good design to that, and it works well with internal links so that you don't need to manually find "page 54".

Yeah... truth is, I am reading it via ebook as well for that exact reason. I just wanted a nice hardcover for my library.

I dip into Fighting Fantasy books every so often. Most recently I've found myself frustrated by Forest of Doom which I beat the first time I played it about 40yrs ago.