Fighting Fantasy was my gateway drug to D&D.
I preferred Lone Wolf.
I tried Lone Wolf. It wasn't my preference. Neither was Grail Quest.
The first time I had an idea to novelize any Fighting Fantasy stuff was when I got into the
Sorcery! books - the Quest for the Crown of Kings. By that time I'd realized I got much more fun out of it when the character was more than a list of numbers and list of items in their backpack. I gave them names, a background (family, where they came from - which might or might not match the background presented in the book, motive for adventuring - they can't
all be in it for the money and treasure!), and started a family tree.
In my own Fighting Fantasy head canon, the person who goes through
Deathtrap Dungeon is the son of the adventurer who does
Caverns of the Snow Witch/
Forest of Doom (FoD follows CotSW beautifully even though they were published in reverse order)... some 20 years later. I even have
Warlock of Firetop Mountain occurring some 20 years later, and the protagonist is female (the daughter of a weapons-maker, who sees adventurers come and go through the years, all of them wanting a really good sword that they're convinced will enable them to defeat the Warlock, and none of them ever come back, so she decides that when she grows up,
she will be the one to succeed; she does, of course). The Caverns character meets this girl in some original material I wrote to link the CotSW book to Forest of Doom, as he heads to Stonebridge to see how his surviving friend is getting along (Stubbs, who was reunited with his people in CotSW) and to tell him of Redswift's death (I gave Redswift a nice funeral scene, in addition to more of a backstory and family; I'd like to write some more about him in a prequel story, as he was a secondary character that was actually given a personality and I thought there was something to build on).
One of the things that always annoyed me about Fighting Fantasy - the adventurer is always assumed to be male. My Sorcery! adventurer is female, as are several others in some of the gamebooks.
Advanced Fighting Fantasy came out eventually, as a way to make the game playable like D&D, except the characters don't advance in levels.
I feel these games might be really fun if you don't have any dice or statistics, but instead just make it story-based, with everyone contributing and your game master leading the adventure. The biggest turnoff for these things is just how many statistics there are ... it's like, eugh.
Imagine you create your characters, and come up with their strengths and weaknesses. You then can have an adventure without worrying about boring statistics or "battles" ... you can still have encounters for dramatic and story purposes, but why not just solve those creatively? You can focus on the story your characters are going through, which I think would be something really fun to play. You could just decide, based on your players' histories with their characters, whether they're tricked or not, or successful with a negotiation, etc.
Interactive storytelling can be a hoot, whether it's a game or not. I got into that on the RPG forum I mentioned previously, and we had this long-running adventure going on, where people would write a couple of paragraphs and leave a little opening for the next person to build on. The basic rules were to be respectful of fellow participants, no killing off anyone's characters without permission, and no godmodding.
We'd use each other's forum personas as characters, and I remember that at one point somebody wrote that I was part of an avenging army coming to save the day, and got to ride a dragon (that was a cool surprise
).
What we did for holidays was to have an interactive storytelling session where we'd write a Christmas/New Year party, held in a castle, where all kinds of weird things happened. It became a tradition to hold an annual pie fight (since some of us had magic-wielding characters, cleanup was easy). I remember sitting in front of my computer, laughing until I cried, since some people wrote some really funny material.
None of the above was what you could call a traditional RPG with dice and statistics. It was open-ended and we had no idea what anyone else was going to write. But it was a blast.
Back when I was into these games, there was an enormous variety of play styles to choose from. I'd imagine that's still true today. I played
Champions a lot, a superhero game that would've driven you insane with its massive piles of numbers, but a game like
Vampire: The Masquerade was much more about roleplaying, where it was actually better if the GM rolled all of the dice in secret. There was one game in the '90s that didn't use dice at all, but I can't remember what it was now. And of course there's live-action roleplaying, which is a little different from tabletop roleplaying, and generally requires more of the participants - more commitment; more safety features for combat and character interactions that might make someone uncomfortable; more investment of time and/or money; more skill in a lot of ways, whether it's in making costumes and props, or speaking and behaving "in-character" to a degree that it's basically improv theater. (Even though I was frequently a Game Master in every game I played, I always sucked at that last part, doing accents and giving non-player characters distinctive personalities. I'd have been a terrible LARPer.
)
On the gaming forum I've been mentioning, one of the members there had spent years participating in a LARP. He had copious notes from that time, and started a long-term thread in which he related the events of the adventure he'd been part of. He updated it every few days, and it was like a many-multi-chapter story that some of us followed.
Some people confuse the SCA style of persona-building and roleplay with LARP. They are entirely different things. The SCA isn't a game, unless the people are taking part in a tournament or are really playing a game. There aren't stats, nobody rolls dice, you just interact with people.
Anyway, one big advantage to tabletop, pen-and-paper games is that their rules are all really just serving suggestions. If you find a game in a genre you like, with a rules framework that doesn't make you crazy, you're almost supposed to tinker with it.
Exactly. One thing I noticed with the Fighting Fantasy gamebook plots is that some of them are godawful linear. I kept wondering why I couldn't explore both tunnels in a mine, why did it have to be one or the other? Of course the author didn't want the game to be unbalanced, but for storytelling purposes, it makes no sense. So when I started novelizing these books, I threw the one-or-the-other stuff out the window. If it made sense to my character, in the context of whatever situation they were in, I'd let them do both tunnels, or try other things. Of course balance is important, so it wasn't difficult to figure out why one of their attempted actions doesn't work, or have someone steal the magical thingy (or have it turn out to be broken or whatever so it couldn't be used to unfair advantage).
The way I handled the "you gain untold riches" at the end of one adventure was to have the character walk into a town and promptly have most of his money confiscated for taxes ("to support the ongoing war against _____"). Therefore, the character needed a job, which led him to the tavern (where most of these adventures seem to start - with a rumor in a tavern or meeting someone who has this great idea to get rich but needs a partner, etc.), where he met a mysterious person who was looking for a brave adventurer to find a very special item lost in Scorpion Swamp...
Like the pre-AD&D? Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic, Elf is a class sort of D&D?
One thing that never made a lot of sense to me was the definitive idea that Elves and Dwarves hate each other. At least in the Dragonlance series, the authors and creators of the various modules and novels came up with an in-universe reason
why.
I've been trying to read and engage with the thread but it's all just lost on me.
I started out with baby steps. My first introduction to multi-ending stories was Sugarcane Island, one of a series of kids' books similar to Choose Your Own Adventure, where you have part of the story and then you have to make a choice. Success or failure or just a different part of the adventure happens depending on which choice you pick.
RPGs build on that. The Dungeon Master/Mistress (no off-color jokes here, please; women DM games as well) presents a scenario, and you - the player character - decide what to do about it (if anything). What you choose to do or not do will affect what happens next. The DM should be able to anticipate most possible outcomes (what happens if the PCs fight, if they try to negotiate, which branch of the tunnel or road they take, if the magic user/cleric are up on their spells, if any character is hurt, etc.). Things can get really weird if the players do something the DM hasn't anticipated, or if they fixate on something the DM only intended as background flavor but the players think it's important. Suddenly the DM has to make something up about whatever it is.
A good referee needs to be able to run things without lots of pre-prepared statistics since almost inevitably the players are going to try something the referee hasn't anticipated. If the referee can wing it without the players realising they are doing so that's a win.
Exactly. And the developers of the game I've been novelizing for over the past year should be thankful that I don't bombard them with questions on Facebook over the significance of some of the background details in some of the scenes; there's a fairly significant one that leaped out at me and made the storyline make much more sense, but it was never mentioned as part of the plot or dialogue. At this point I just incorporated it myself, but in my opinion, they missed a golden opportunity to improve the game's storyline.
I think you're always going to have situations where we know as people irl something our characters don't, and it is up to the party and DM to make it work. Our D&D campaign has had multiple occasions of just a couple characters in our party talking out of ear shot of others, and we don't all take the time to vacate the room in real life or anything. There's a certain amount of trust and acceptance in really being able to place yourself in the shoes of someone who is not rolling the dice because they're the actual elf monk, and sometimes, you have to pretend to hear/know/see something or not hear/know/see something you did or didn't (woo that was a banger of a sentence). Insight checks are your best bet. As someone who has read an ungodly amount of Forgotten Realms literature, played a lot of D&D video games, and am super familiar with 3.5 and 5e campaigns, there are lots of time my character in this campaign has had to not know some sort of lore/history/reference I knew 'irl' because I had read about it in a novel. Even with my character having really good religion and history and related skills, I remember one occasion my character horrifically misidentified a dragon, shortly after reading the literal time of dragons or whatever trilogy. Stuff happens.
Yep. It's annoying in a game when someone gets meta and mentions hit points and other stats. That's not how characters talk in fantasy adventure stories, and I know I'd have to ignore so much if I ever got into a Dragonlance RPG based on the first 12 modules. Those were novelized as the Chronicles Trilogy (Dragons of Autumn Twilight/Winter Night/Spring Dawning), and
D&D 5e, as already mentioned. It adds roleplaying elements to the game mechanics that, to my memory, D&D never had before. For instance, character creation includes choosing a background that gives you personality quirks and story hooks, and whatnot, and players are rewarded, in-game, for roleplaying.
Didn't Unearthed Arcana have some of this?
BTW, every time I created a campaign, I told the players to give me a couple of paragraphs about their characters - what kind of family they come from (if they have a family), what sort of basic personality they have (I wanted to know something they were afraid of and something they really liked), and what their motive is for adventuring. I left it up to them, but told them I didn't want a party full of sons/daughters of nobles with a full array of armor and magic stuff; this background material was to be relatively ordinary, since that's how most adventure heroes start out - an ordinary person who ends up doing extraordinary things or getting into extraordinary situations, and they'd start out with the basics for weapons, armor, and belongings.
I got some surprisingly interesting ideas, and some good things I could use for plot hooks to surprise them with down the line (estranged from the family? Guess who's going to pop up at some point).
