Blind Choices
There a ton of these in the Lone Wolf and they're really annoying. I'm talking about those sections where you read something like
Iron doors are set flush into the wall of this rust-streaked edifice; one to the left of the archway, and one to the right.
If you wish to investigate the left door, turn to 263.
If you choose to investigate the right door, turn to 306.
- Joe Dever, Trail of the Wolf.
You're asked to choose, but you're given no information on which to base your decision. If it's your first time through the book you may as well flip a coin. It does give you a bit of variety in a replay, but only if you remember which way you went last time. But there's no reason not to make it a bit more interesting. Tell us one door is out of the way but guarded and the other is unguarded but right in the open. That gives us some information to work with. Did we roll high stats allowing us to win fights quickly? We'll take the guard. Did we pick Assimilance, allowing us to sneak through the unguarded door without being seen? That's a potentially interesting decision.
Skippable Scenes
Another type of choice Dever loved to give his players was the old "You see an interesting thing. Do you want to look at it?" Sometimes these points of interest are good, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're just a bit of extra backstory with no positive or negative outcome. Sometimes they're a whole side-quest.
‘There stands the Oridon Stone,’ he says. ‘It marks the graves of ten thousand men who fell at the battle of Inkil Reach.’
Prince Karvas regards the monolith with a mixture of sadness and pride, and you sense that quietly he yearns to visit this battlefield marker.
If you wish to leave the trail and ride with Karvas to the Oridon Stone, turn to 104.
If you wish to dissuade the Prince from visiting the monolith by reminding him of the urgent need for his swift return to Seroa, turn to 139.
- Joe Dever, Mydnight's Hero.
Honestly, who is reading one of these and thinks "Yes, I'd like to miss out on some of this book." Of course you're going to go investigate the thing because, worst case scenario, you die. And that doesn't mean anything because no one is playing these books and not cheating. I'm sure someone, somewhere has at some time attempted the "iron man run" but it's just not how people are generally playing. Which brings me neatly to my next point.
Death
Death is pointless. Like I said, no one actually treats it like a game over. You just go back to the last section you were on and try something else. Or if it was a death in combat, you just pretend you won. Or if it was one of those dead-man-walking scenarios, you just pretend you didn't do the thing earlier in the book that killed you just now.
Your life and your quest end here.
- Joe Dever.
There are tests you can fail and fights you can lose in these books without getting a game over, and they're much more fun. Because you actually can get that worse outcome and keep playing, and that's a consequence you actually do have to deal with. This isn't a video game where you can force the player to go back and replay from the start to make it seem like your game's much longer than it actually is, the player is in full control here.
Game Balance
Now, I wouldn't include a combat system in a game book anyway, because it almost inevitably leads to that whole death issue. Not that you can't have your protagonist fight people, just that the whole RPG-inspired dice-rolling bit is not a good fit for this kind of game. But if you're going to include it then you really need to put more thought into it than Dever did.
You've got two stats in this game. Combat Skill and Endurance. Endurance is your health, stamina, hit points, whatever you want to call it. As long as it's above zero you're alive, if it drops below one then you're dead. It's not really a problem. It can certainly make the game easier or harder depending on how much you started with and what modifiers you get, but it's never going to break the game.
Giak: COMBAT SKILL 9 ENDURANCE 9
- Joe Dever, Flight from the Dark.
Combat Skill, on the other hand, is deceptively crazy. It seems pretty reasonable to begin with but it almost immediately goes from difficulty slider to absolute win/lose button. If you start with book one (and since they're all freely available online there's no reason not to - it's the best one anyway) then your CS will be a number between 10 and 19. If it's low then you'll want to avoid fights. If it's high then you can take a few more risks. But that's the range that Dever had to account for.
The way it works is that you compare your CS to your opponent's (we call that number the Combat Ratio), roll a d10 (ten-sided die) and cross-reference the results on a table in the back of the book. It goes from -11 to +11. At the low end you've got a 20% chance of instantly losing, and at the high end you've got a 30% chance of instantly winning. It's stacked in the player's favour, but if your CR is below about -4 then you're not going to have a good time.
But right from the start Dever started throwing around CS modifiers. Weaponskill and Mindblast are optional skills in book one that give +2 CS each. The magic sword you pick up in book two gives an absolutely ludicrous +8 CS and turns you into an untouchable murder machine for the next several books. By book 17 I worked out that the player's CS could be anywhere between 25 and 56 - or, depending on how you read the rules, which are notoriously vague, 10 and 66. An enemy with a CS of 36 is basically a game-ending brick wall for someone with a CS of 25, but may as well not even exist for someone whose CS is 47 or higher.
Deathlord Ixiataaga (with Deathstaff—uncharged): COMBAT SKILL 60 ENDURANCE 39
- Joe Dever, The Deathlord of Ixia.
There is no way to work around that. Either you make the enemies weak enough that lower-end players can beat them, in which case combat is meaningless for players who've played through the whole series, or you make them challenging for those high-CS players and essentially force low-CS players to just cheat past the combat because it's literally unwinnable otherwise.
So like I said, don't put RPG-style combat into your gamebook. But if you do, don't give the player stat-boosting abilities or items.
To Be Continued...
This actually ended up longer than I expected it to and I've got more to say, so I'll save the rest of it for a part two. If you've played these books (or similar ones like Fighting Fantasy) and have any suggestions for other issues to cover, or any comments on the stuff I've said, let me know.
I tend to prefer the way the Blood Sword series does things where your choices can make your life easier or harder but there's (mostly) none of the "You picked east instead of north, you can no longer win but you won't find out for another 50 pages." stuff that plagued the FF series.
ReplyDeleteAs for combat, I think either all combat should be avoidable (so even if you roll terrible stats, it's still worth actually playing the game) or you should have fixed stats and have the book balanced around those stats.
For the matter of death, I think it should stay. But mostly just because I like reading the death scenes. :p
Making combat avoidable does help a lot. The early Lone Wolf books usually let you avoid fights if you made the right choices and/or picked the right skills, but as the series goes on it becomes more linear and forces you into more fights.
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