Random Elements and Gameplay/Story Balance

Hello out there gamebook fans! It's been a crazy month since publishing Greek Winter Media's second gamebook, Spire Ablaze, on Amazon and shipping out numerous copies to the wonderful Kickstarter backers that believed in the project enough to buy not one, but two (or even three!) books in advance. To all who have purchased the book: A heartfelt thank you! Your support is what makes all of this possible! Now, on to the meat of the blog.

Gamebooks and combat, stats, and the will to survive

There are several distinct factions in the world of gamebooks and interactive fiction:

• Those who prefer the old school Fighting Fantasy style books with randomized stats, die-rolling battles, and death lurking around every corner. 
• Those who enjoy the absence of combat, stats, and random elements entirely in the vein of Choose Your Own Adventure or modern classics such as James Schannep's Click Your Poison Books
• Those who follow stat-based gameplay with no dice. This group is exemplified by the hundreds of available Choice of Games apps as well as classics such as Dave Morris's Heart of Ice. This type of interactive fiction often uses keywords

Most gamebooks fit into one of these three factions or are a slight hybridization of them. Fans have their preferred style, although most seem quite willing to venture outside of their comfort zone on occasion for a particularly good read. So, if you're writing a gamebook, which do you choose? Today's article is about stats and dice, with posts about the other styles to follow.

Die-rollers

For that true single-player Dungeons and Dragons experience, nothing is better than rolling up your stats and diving into a dungeon to slay monsters. One of the reasons that the Fighting Fantasy series and its fandom has endured so long is, to me, that it distils down that visceral random feel of old-school D&D combat into bite-sized chunks for the reader, and that death is always a very real possibility. These books are often as much puzzles to solve as they are narratives: Find the proper sequence of rooms, map out the corridors, minimize your risk and find the key objects that will allow you to ultimately succeed.

This style of books has a special need to balance narrative with exploration and most especially combat. Often, the narrative exists mainly to push the player into a series of progressively more difficult challenges. Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson's Fabled Lands is a classic example of this. Fabled Lands is often likened to a world where you are dropped in and make your own story; a kind of open-world gamebook MMO. The books and challenges get progressively more and more difficult and grow with the player as he or she travels  from book to book through the open world.

There are, of course, exceptions to this story-light style of dice-based gamebook. The Lone Wolf and Way of the Tiger books masterfully manage a happy medium between combat and narrative, as do their more modern contemporaries such as Will Fincher's Maelorum. It was these books in particular which inspired the structure and style of Greek Winter's Westward Dystopia.

When I first started writing Westward, it was in the style of an old school Fighting Fantasy book. You were a gunslinger on the run from mercenaries in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The story was light, the combat fast and furious. But the more time I spent in my post-apocalyptic world, the more I wanted to expand the whys, whens, and hows of the story. I wasn't content with a bare-bones framework any more so I compromised, making combat less frequent and sections longer and full of exposition.

So how should an aspiring gamebook writer choose to use the random element of dice? The two most common ways are combat and skill checks.

Skill checks

Fighting Fantasy called it 'Testing Your Luck', other books like Tin Man Games' 'Gamebook Adventures' series have you testing a skill level to overcome challenges. No matter what you call it, these checks allow a gamebook author to inject a little randomness into the narrative structure. The player rolls a die, and on a certain result achieves success or fails, turning to different sections based on the result. The most important thing about these checks is not to overuse them! While adding the random element of chance to the narrative can be fun every so often both for the player and author, it also takes away direct control from the player. Over-used, it can irritate more than excite players so use caution!

Combat, Bloody Combat

There are almost infinite ways to accomplish combat in a gamebook. One could emulate the classic FF style or even eschew 6-sided dice altogether for the larger grab bag die pouches of D&D fame. Westward Dystopia and Spire Ablaze utilize a system similar to a standard gamebook model with a slight twist. Both you and your opponent each roll 1 six-sided die , add combat modifiers, subtract defense, and deal that damage simultaneously. I chose this mechanic rather than the more standard turn-based system primarily due to how I imagined the combat in my head as I was writing it. Combat is fast and furious, and unless you get the drop on your enemy, it's unlikely you're going to get out unscathed unless you are a far superior fighter.

The combat style you choose for your book will need to be closely linked to your protagonist's stats. If you want to try a style like mine where damage is dealt simultaneously, you'll need to adjust the character's base HP upwards to compensate for all those battles where he or she might have gotten a flawless victory under other systems. Healing items become more important as well.

Another popular decision is to add gear that the player can collect that will slowly better their stats over time. Armor can increase defense and mitigate damage. New weapons and weapon mods can be added to the game and found by players to provide a sense of progression.

One thing that I did in my second book, Spire Ablaze, was to offer up an early decision between three weapons. Depending on which one you choose, your game play will be slightly different and require the player to think differently about how they approach or attempt to avoid combat. Spire is not a combat heavy book, which makes the occasional combats even more important. You can choose a more bulky weapon with great damage output but not be able to use medical kits during battle. You could choose a small compact weapon that you'll be able to hide on your person. It deals less damage but could possibly be concealed. This option comes with additional medical supplies to compensate the player.

Balance: Gameplay VS Story

I was reminded recently in a discussion with an early reader of Spire Ablaze that gameplay/story balance is very important to a player. You can have the best story ever written, but if it's a gamebook you'll need to remember to engage the player every few pages with a meaningful choice and the occasional combat. Spire, being a prequel to Westward Dystopia, has quite a lot of story I wanted to tell, and thus even though it has the same number of pages as Westward, Spire has 305 sections as opposed to Westward's 475. Both books abound with meaningful choices that change the story around you, but Spire's sections trend longer, including an important scene several pages long right before the climax of the story begins.What works best in the end will vary from reader to reader and I will continue to experiment with gameplay/story balance in Book 3: The Lords of Benaeron, a hub-based gamebook where you'll find an open city to explore, recruit fighters and factions for your cause, and eventually overthrow the corrupt leaders of the largest city in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. I'm expecting 'Lords' to come in at over 600 sections by the end, so it's going to be a wild ride!

Never stop experimenting!

So, what are your opinions on die-chucking and gameplay/story balance? Let me know in the comments below and I'll see you next time!

Westward Dystopia can be purchased on Amazon.com or greekwinter.com for softcover copies!