on gamebooks and design paradigms
Feb. 23rd, 2024 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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making_games[repost from my journal from 2021]
So one of the problems with my being an old-school gamebook fan (mostly Fighting Fantasy, some Lone Wolf, and occasional others) is that I often get "stuck" in that paradigm of Skill, Stamina, and Luck and maybe one or two other stats. Gamebooks can be much more flexible than this - Fabled Lands was a renowned "open world" system that ran off keywords and stats and equipment (hard to really get into when you can only chase down a single book as it was designed to "take place" across multiple volumes, but it wasn't the authors' fault we were living in South Korea and gamebook availability was scarce!), you have more "literary" themes like Kim Newman's Life's Lottery (Yune passed her copy on to me years ago because it wasn't to her taste, and I played a little and also found it boring, so got rid of it).
Anyway, I was doing very Fighting Fantasy-esque stuff here and I think this stat system could be used to good effect in another gamebook but actually I'm excited about the idea I just had about retooling the system to reflect chess, but in such a way that you don't have to have prior knowledge of chess (which would raise the barrier to entry) - the flavor rather than the real thing, if you will. (There will inevitably be the serious chess player who one-stars the whole thing because it doesn't include actual chess but that can't be helped.) This will entail reworking many choices/confrontations but that's okay, I have time vis-à-vis the contest deadline, and I think it will make the entry stronger. It will also raise the barrier to entry in that I suspect most gamebook enthusiasts are, like me, middle-aged nostalgia hounds of things like Fighting Fantasy; IIRC Windhammer tended to attract Fighting Fantasy and similar clones, or else Fabled Lands clones, in terms of system. But I recall seeing more innovative systems custom-built for the stories they were telling, like a murder mystery gamebook. It would a shame not to fit the mechanics to the theme and the desired experience - the essence of game design!
This isn't to slag old-school gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or Fabled Lands; the genre had to start somewhere and I would argue that Fighting Fantasy actually did encapsulate its dungeon hack/fantasy adventurer experience very well! But the really outstanding Fighting Fantasy games transcended that - Creature of Havoc with its use of random decision-making to simulate lack of free will; Sorcery! with its Spell Book; and apparently Rebel Planet has a puzzle that teaches you binary (keeping in mind that these were written and marketed as children's books). Or take House of Hell with its "scared to death" mechanic!
So one of the problems with my being an old-school gamebook fan (mostly Fighting Fantasy, some Lone Wolf, and occasional others) is that I often get "stuck" in that paradigm of Skill, Stamina, and Luck and maybe one or two other stats. Gamebooks can be much more flexible than this - Fabled Lands was a renowned "open world" system that ran off keywords and stats and equipment (hard to really get into when you can only chase down a single book as it was designed to "take place" across multiple volumes, but it wasn't the authors' fault we were living in South Korea and gamebook availability was scarce!), you have more "literary" themes like Kim Newman's Life's Lottery (Yune passed her copy on to me years ago because it wasn't to her taste, and I played a little and also found it boring, so got rid of it).
Anyway, I was doing very Fighting Fantasy-esque stuff here and I think this stat system could be used to good effect in another gamebook but actually I'm excited about the idea I just had about retooling the system to reflect chess, but in such a way that you don't have to have prior knowledge of chess (which would raise the barrier to entry) - the flavor rather than the real thing, if you will. (There will inevitably be the serious chess player who one-stars the whole thing because it doesn't include actual chess but that can't be helped.) This will entail reworking many choices/confrontations but that's okay, I have time vis-à-vis the contest deadline, and I think it will make the entry stronger. It will also raise the barrier to entry in that I suspect most gamebook enthusiasts are, like me, middle-aged nostalgia hounds of things like Fighting Fantasy; IIRC Windhammer tended to attract Fighting Fantasy and similar clones, or else Fabled Lands clones, in terms of system. But I recall seeing more innovative systems custom-built for the stories they were telling, like a murder mystery gamebook. It would a shame not to fit the mechanics to the theme and the desired experience - the essence of game design!
This isn't to slag old-school gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or Fabled Lands; the genre had to start somewhere and I would argue that Fighting Fantasy actually did encapsulate its dungeon hack/fantasy adventurer experience very well! But the really outstanding Fighting Fantasy games transcended that - Creature of Havoc with its use of random decision-making to simulate lack of free will; Sorcery! with its Spell Book; and apparently Rebel Planet has a puzzle that teaches you binary (keeping in mind that these were written and marketed as children's books). Or take House of Hell with its "scared to death" mechanic!
