Anyone else get into gaming through the solo gamebooks of the 80's and 90's? What were your favorites?
I think my journey into gaming began when I was about 8 with the old Choose Your Own Adventure Books from Bantam. From there, I discoverd Lone Wolf, which was similar, but had these crazy rules for resolving fights instead of just telling you arbitrarily whether you won or lost, and all these cool powers and abilities. After that I read any gamebooks I could get my hands on-Fighting Fantasy, Grail Quest, Middle Earth Quest, Combat Command, Crossroads.
I got interested in rpgs when I found they were they same concept, but could be played with a group.
Lone Wolf were good but my favorite was a series of 4 books that I have forgotten the names of. You started out in Analand I believe and worked your way across a land. Book 3 invovled 7 serpents. Book 4 was a fortress at the end. You could keep your character from book to book like Lone Wolf but I believe it used dice, Skill, Stamina, and Luck.
Quote from: Xavier LangLone Wolf were good but my favorite was a series of 4 books that I have forgotten the names of. You started out in Analand I believe and worked your way across a land. Book 3 invovled 7 serpents. Book 4 was a fortress at the end. You could keep your character from book to book like Lone Wolf but I believe it used dice, Skill, Stamina, and Luck.
Those were the Sorcery books, a special mini-series that was part of the Fighting Fantasy line.
I remember the Endless Quest line and a few others. Pretty fun. These would be easy to implement in hypertext today, I wisha reasonably high profile publisher would print more today.
There's an excellent resource on choose your own adventure books. It has a huge listing of almost everything published or almost published. It's great for figuring out which series you read.
http://www.gamebooks.org/
I started playing Lone Wolf at about the same time as I started with RPGs. They seemed pretty popular among my classmates - at least I remember lending them out to people, enough so that I had to keep track of who borrowed what.
Oh, and in case you didn't know, you can download the Lone Wolf books here (http://www.projectaon.org/). Completely legal.
I think of all of them Grail Quest was my favroite. It's a shame that there was only about 7 of them. Well at least that ever came into stores anywhere around me. I liked the way that they had puzzle solving and just were much more involved then flipping pages and the occasional combat rolling.
I was a big fan of the Sorcery books. And the Lone Wolf, but they were a second. I never liked - at ALL - the normal choose-your-own-adventure books. It seemed so unheroic that a wrong page flip resulted in >POOF< you fall down a pit and die. I always had to keep my finger in the last place I was to be able to go back in time and make a new decision (suddenly remembering Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure :: shudder ::)
The Doctor Who solo gamebooks that FASA put out weren't bad. Those suckers were thick, and gave you a lot of bang for the buck.