Interactive Fiction (AKA: Choose Your Adventure)

[Rali]

One of my earliest exposure to "role playing" were the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I can't remember how many times I flipped through The Cave of Time and many others. Then I found the Lone Wolf, Car Wars, and Endless Quest adventure books around the time I bought the original D&D Red Box set, which really started me into RPGs. I recently dusted off my old books and have looked at and tried a number of the newer breed of digital interactive fiction.

This has gotten me to thinking of trying my hand at creating a couple short AtB interactive stories. Does this sound like something you'd be interested in seeing?

Also, please share any experiences you've had with these types of Interactive Fiction books (or apps), and what you liked/disliked about them.

[Warshield73]

I have never cared of CYA books but if a ATB one, or any other PB IP, came out I would probably give it a shot.

[CyCo]

Loved the Fighting Fantasy books, still own a couple, including all 4 of the Sorcery! series.

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[thorr-kan]

Read some Choose Your Own Adventure, but started with Endless Quest. I enjoyed them and had quite a number. I still have a few, and I'm attempting to corrupt my boys with them. In fact, I'm reading Endless Quest 1, _Dungeon of Dread_, right now...

[Ouroboros]

Back in the late 80s and early 90s I had a decent collection of CYA and some of the Lone Wolf series, they were some of my favorite books ever. I sorely regret selling my CYA's to a used book store in my teens, thinking I had grown out of them.
I loved the interactive aspect of them, being presented with a series of choices in the story even though many of them lead to premature demise. the CYA's were much like getting to be inside an episode of a favorite tv-show. I ultimately love the Lone Wolf series more, due to it's more advanced character building system, and continuing story which spanned over ten books. I also love Gary Chalk's illustrations, they really brought the Lone Wolf world to life for me. I was disappointed that his work wasn't used for the entire LW series. I have gone through the first few books of LW numerous times over the years and still love them. I had read some other related books growing up, one of the Freeway Warrior books, and one of the D&D based ones, as well as some kind of advanced CYA book or two.

There wasn't much that I didn't like about any of those old books that I can think of right now. I prefer the more involved character system of Dever's LW style books is about it.

I also loved the Infocom interctive fiction video games - Zork, Lurking Horror, Hitchiker's Guide, and the others. The first IF game I played was Colossal Cave/Adventure on my aunt's work computer, and the next one I encountered was the Hitchiker's Guide daptation at a science museum computer lab, and I picked up an infocom collection for christmas a few years later. All in all I spent many hours with these books and games growing up, they were a great introduction to the concept of a tabletop roleplaying game and I often used them as a substitute when I wasn't able to get together with my tabletop friends.

I think that ATB is a perfect setting to use for an interactive fiction book or game, and something I would definitely be interested in seeing.
I'm going to have to start on my LW collection again. I still haven't replaced book 5, but Project AON can help with that - some years back, Joe Dever granted the rights to them for Lone Wolf books to be reproduced in a free online readable format (complete with illustrations)