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



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...

I recollect reading one of his books which was oriented around doing some secret spy mission. Very early into the mission you could decide to become a normal operative, or a night-only operative. If you become the night-only operative, it goes on for like four or six pages about your training, then when you finally go on the mission you're hanging off a cliff when someone turns on an inside light, blinding you so you fall to your death. I was rather frustrated with that because it was a cool hook that was just thrown away. He's done other stories where you could simply elect not to go on the mission, and I can understand that, however. Still, when it comes down to it, you can only have so many pages in the book.

My dad had a book which was like a mix of a CYOA and a roleplaying game. You chose the type of hero your character is (gizmo, super power or psionic), and that gave you stats. Depending on the missions you took, your stats would go up or down and you might get neat gizmos in the process. Conflict resolution was solved by a single die roll. It was sort of frustrating when I was 10 because I kept dying and had to give myself two special powers. I wonder how I'd like it now.

I don't know, I thought this bit was rather clever in a Buddhist sort of way:



But then again I find it difficult to be critical of what are essentially trash novels for eight-year olds.

I never read too many of the CYOA books, though my wife was apparently a huge fan. There were several of similar series, most of which were more gaming-lite.

Grailquest was my favorites. They were full of tongue-in-cheek humor and didn't take themselves seriously. I think there were only 6 books in the series.

Lone Wolf was the other series I collected. I didn't like them as much, because if you didn't get certain items from earlier books, you were screwed in later books. I seem to recall dying repeatedly because I didn't have a flaming sword...

Fighting Fantasy was all over the place. Unlike the other series, they were pretty much all stand alone. Some sucked. Some were cool.

These things inspired many a notebook-scribbled, home-brewed RPG was spawned after reading these. I have wish I still had my old notebooks. I'm sure what I came up with was trash, but, you know... nostalgia.

-paws

Actually, IIRC you were screwed anyway in Lone Wolf even if you had an optimized character from book 1 because of one unavoidable encounter in one of the later books that was almost statistically impossible to win. After dying a bunch of times I think I did the math and, even though math's not my forte, calculated that I had something like a 2 or 3 percent chance to actually survive the battle, even with my optimized character dating back to book 1.

My "beef" with a lot of the more statistical British gamebooks has been how in some of them the authors don't seem to have really crunched the numbers on their encounters, and/or don't understand that 2d6 probabilities aren't linear. There are a few books out there which are statistically broken, which can be a major letdown if you've just worked your way through the previous 5 books.

Maybe the most disappointing moment for me was when I realized how one of the later Way of the Tiger books actually had a bug in it that made it impossible to get a good ending and continue to the next book, since none of the entries told you to turn to a page you needed to visit to not die at a battle towards the end of the story.

Ouch.

Never read any of the Way of the Tiger books, that I can recall, but I don't think I ever ran into anything like that in the other series, except maybe Lone Wolf.

As I think about it, there was a spin off (iirc) of the Lone Wolf books, Grey Wolf (or something like that) where you started as an apprentice wizard named, not surprisingly, Grey Wolf. It was only about 6 books or so long, but it was quite good; I don't ever recall having to cheat to win an encounter.

-paws

From what i recall about the books I read as a kid, Edward Packard was always a better bet than Montgomery.

Just checked the wikipedia entry for him.

This one sounds awesome:
152. War with the Mutant Spider Ants (1994)

And I think I actually had this one:
100. The Worst Day of Your Life (1990)

-paws

Hey, come on now, I don't say that your favorite books are written for 8-year-olds.

i would have to agree that his books leave much to be desired.

i just finished "a journey beneath the sea" and there are 6 different out comes to what the atlantians are, like he couldn't make up his mind. none of them have anything to do with the other so it seems like your decision some how decided who the atlantians are/were.

i have some old choose your path books that were way better and actual had plot to them.

Oh, come on! Are you seriously positing that Choose Your Own Adventure books aren't written for eight year olds/early elementary school children? I'm not trashing them. I loved them... when I was eight! But I also thought Encyclopedia Brown was a crime-solving genius.

Wait... he wasn't?

DAMN YOUSE FOR KILLIN' MY CHILDHOOD!!!!NNNNOOOOOOOO!!!!!!