Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Choose your own adventure stories are narratives that use a system of numbered paragraphs which the reader selects to have a unique experience of a story, this gives a the normally linear experience of novel reading an interesting twist, as the reader will have some form of choice in how they progress through the narrative. The Fighting Fantasy series is the most well known of these with 25 books set in a variety of environments and also using some pen and paper RPG mechanics for combat and character progression. The amount of choices in some of these books is staggering and although, each path ultimately leaves the player at the same endpoint destination, the choices the player makes to get there could be different several times.

I made the above "map" for a choose your own adventure book called Return of the Wanderer from the Penguin Adventure Gamebooks series which uses a very similar choose your own adventure, combat and character progression systems which are commonplace within the genre. From this map, I can a clear way of the mapping and progression of the story, where the choices end in death or dead ends and when they loop back to the main narrative. This map showed me that, although there seems to be a great deal of choice within these books, it normally is something of an illusion, as each path ultimately leads to the same destination, just in slightly different ways.

The scope for what is achievable with this system is great, but as fine as multiple branching storylines are, there has to be a definitive start, and end (perhaps not so much an end, as multiple outcomes to the story may be possible).

These stories often follow the Quest story structure and also feature elements of good vs evil conflict arcs. In many of the stories, the character goes through the adventure by themselves and often dialogue isn't a big feature of them. They are mostly set in a high fantasy environment and contain a lot of the tropes frequently associated with such. As generic as the settings are, they are good fun and tell a story in an interesting way, although it is difficult to grow attached to the characters that appear within them as opposed to a traditional novel due to the fact that mostly, they don't have the best writing.