The chain of inheritance goes back to old-school, heavily map-based RPGs in which the map of the dungeon formed the immediate structure of the narrative, and thence to Tolkien. In some, like the Duelmaster books, getting a sense of where you are on the map is everything. A lot of RPG-influenced gamebooks, like fantasy novels, start with a map of the area in which they take place in many cases, having some idea of the land you’ll be traversing is useful information. It’s not hard to see where this comes from: it’s a development from inkle’s savvy adaptation of Sorcery. Most nodes offer > 2 options, and rejoining is very common but relatively conservative, mostly taking you back to the closer neighbours in the tree. Some routes can be traveled in either direction – not enough that you can elect to circumnavigate entirely westwards, but often involving a little westward backtracking to get to a desired point. While there are some local bottlenecks, there are no mandatory nodes between the game’s opening and close. Like many physical-space CYOAs, 80 Days has the kind of structure that I think of as a quest: it begins at a single point (London) and then branches out across a wide range of territory, before the strands ultimately rejoin at a single ending (also London). Either the branching structure represents the passage of time, or it represents travel in physical space. Space-based organisation is the more recent and uncommon arrangement. I have a number of things that I want to talk about firstly, how freaking well it handles structure and player knowledge.Ĭhoice-based narratives tend to be organised in one of two ways.
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