R. A. Montgomery sucks!, the Choose Your Own Adventure guy Options

[Wounded Ronin]

R. A. Montgomery, who authored a lot of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, sucks! I've been reading some of the re-published CYOA books he's wrote here in a local library. Basically, as long as the subject of the story is exotic adventure in the real world (i.e., in the Amazon, for example), the stories are okay. But as soon as the story becomes entirely fantastical (i.e., taking place in a haunted house, or in deep space) R. A. Montogmery completely drops the ball with his narrative structure.

In these cases, he ends up having each book contain lots of possible storylines, but then very little development of the new branching-off storylines, and very little room for player choice to determine the outcome of the storylines. I feel the books would be more satisfying if he'd stuck to 1 or 2 major storylines, but then had there be a more developed network of player choice affecting the outcome of those storylines in more varied and subtle ways. One example of a storyline I didn't like was from The Abominable Snowman (1982). At one point in the book, your character is informed by some professor that the Yeti are in a bad temper because some people went to the mountain ahead of you and killed one. Because of this, the professor advises you to reconsider your search for the Yeti, and suggests going somehwere else to look at tigers instead. However, if you decide to go somewhere else and look at tigers, your character dies exactly 2 page-hops later regardless of what you choose to do; either you get pwnt by some poachers, or else a tiger eats you. At that point I thought, "Dammit, Montgomery, if you're not going to take this subplot seriously at all why did you include it in the first place? That was a total waste of 2 pages in this book."

According to Wikipedia, Montgomery

had designed several “you�-based role-playing games for the Peace Corps, McGraw-Hill and the Edison Electric Institute in the early 1970s and immediately saw the potential in the book’s format.

I don't know what if anything he was writing for the Peace Corps, but as a former Peace Corps volunteer I sure hope it was less brain-dead than some of the choice branches in the CYOA books!

Anyway, yesterday I decided that I should write a CYOA style story, but have it be a lot better than some of the Montgomery stories that dissatisfied me. I feel like ideally I could combine important reader decisions in shaping the plot and the outcome of the story while at the same time enhancing role playing elements and gameplay by having there be statistics, like in a lot of British gamebooks. The way I see it there should actually be a lot of different statistics that would make the player stronger or weaker in different situations, and choices would be less a matter of "right choice versus wrong choice" and more "what course of action would most likely play to my character's strengths". So, eh, I guess I'll see how that goes...