looking for feedback for a fantasy 'online gamebook'

[Monkeys]

Thanks for the feedback - the common thread seems to be that people want more 'quests' in there. So I'll attempt to prioritise that from now on.

Leaving the overall structure of the thing aside, what do people think of the details (eg the artwork, the tone of the writing, the layout, mechanics etc?)

[Simon C]

I'm not sure that the responses can really be essentialised as "more quests please".  I think the problem is more that the game is often essentially binary - accept the quest or refuse, succeed or fail.  I'd like to see more emphasis on the way you complete the quest being significant.  For example, I think the quest with Owryth is great, with a lot of potential to be really interesting.  But I want to know more.  I want to know what the signifigance of the frog quest is to the story of my character.  For me, it was a cool moment when my troll (who I'd imagined as trying to become more human) helped another being to become human.  It would be awesome if the game could support that more. 

I thought that the art was essential to the game, but the wide variety of styles was a bit confusing.  It's impractical, but I think working with a single artist with a stong visual style would be the best way to create atmoshphere for your game.  Sometimes I felt like the events in the game were designed to fit with a cool picture you'd found, rather than the other way around.  That was a bit frustrating, because it made the world feel kind of arbitrary.

While we're on that subject, I found the world presented in the game to be a bit hollow.  I didn't get the feeling that this was a place that existed outside the demands of the game.  I'd like to find out about the world as I play, and to have that world be coherant and interesting.  I'd like there to be events happening in the world that my character could interact with.

Sometimes pages were frustratingly slow to load.  I found my attention wandering if a page took too long.  That might be a problem of my shitty work computer though. 

I think the presentation of the game was ok.  Not fantastic, but servicable.  You might think about using a heavier font, perhaps with serifs, to convey a more archaic feel.  Always make readability come first though. 

I think what you're doing here is really interesting, and I'm giving you tough feedback because I think this has potential. 

[Aaron Blain]

Aw, man! I was just telling a friend about how I have never enjoyed DnD half as much as I enjoyed reading Lone Wolf as a kid. I've been scouring used bookstores recently, as well as pondering the potential of the gamebook format. I have some questions for you.

What gamebooks have inspired you? In what ways do you seek to emulate or innovate?

Perhaps more importantly, why did you choose this format? What can it do for that other types of games cannot?

I associate gamebooks with "Choose your own ADVENTURE" rather than with "Roleplaying". Plot-driven adventure stories (Haggard, Burroughs, Howard, Moorcock, etc.) seem much more suited to a format in which the range of choices and game feedback are necessarily so limited. "What? The Princess was captured? AGAIN? My honor demands I sally forth!"

Which seems to be the issue people are having here. This seems to be much more like a single-player MUD. A gamebook in which the reader is merely being set loose on a fantasy world. It must be very difficult to try and make something so freeform when you must remain neutral toward the player and the total potentiality of accumulated events. Which is why, I imagine, that the gameplay is a montage of seemingly random scenes (at least it has been for me so far).

Now that's not to say that I think it's a hopeless endeavor. I'm suddenly quite entranced by the thought of a huge coffee-table book that constitutes a game setting for a single player to explore practically indefinitely. I actually don't think it's even terribly impractical. Here are a few suggestions:

- Make a BIG deal of global variables that each have many possible causes AND effects. From what I've played, the only thing carrying over from scene to scene is the player's stats. Go crazy with player status effects like "player is all wet", which can be caused by getting caught in the rain, getting knocked off the pier, etc., and affect several different situations. Furthermore, I think the overall appeal of this game will come from variables that say things like, "the orcish faction has been weakened", a flag (or even a "hit point value") that can be modified during several different scenes. Shall I choose the "Assassinate orcish chieftain" scene? "Instigate infighting"? "Rally the dwarvish armies"? "Cause an avalanche in crucial orcish territory"? with stats and prior experiences determining the available options.

- Some have mentioned that the game has no initial impetus (such as a princess being captured). I think this is fine so that there is some high-level story for the curious reader to discover, or at least a cohesive setting which warrants thorough exploration.

- Are die-rolls and game-overs necessary? Are you SURE?

- Don't feel you need an illustration all the time. I think it would be better to use that placeholder more often, and cull your images to a more focussed style.

Hrm. I refused to work for Mr. Infinite and starved to death in a ditch, wondering if the GM was twisting my arm in his usual way, or whether something else would come along. It appears I was just spamming a streetwise roll which must have been well beyond me. However, I find this preferable to the standard, "You fail, nothing happens. What next?"

It seems that the major portion of your effort thus far has gone into the "mechanics" and making them work. You have done a great job. For what it's worth, in Lone Wolf I always enjoyed little contextualizations that made my choices feel substantive. "Because of your foe's thick armor, subtract 3 from your combat prowess unless you are fighting with a mace.", etc. Also, I avoid amateur fantasy writing at all costs, but I'm surprised to say that I don't mind yours at all. Well done!

Please, please, talk all about this. You have at least one eager supporter. I'm going to go re-read "The Caverns of Kalte".

P.S. If you aren't familiar with the adventures of Lone Wolf, they're actually free online now at projectaon.org . Nowhere near as satisfying as holding the paperback, but still a valuable resource.

[Monkeys]

The global variables are *meant* to be really important, but aren't yet - basically because I've written the bits where you trigger various things, but not the bits where you see the results...

Sadly, I have very little time to write Age of Fable, so it changes slowly.

[Aaron Blain]

I think that's really what will make the game take off. Go crazy with them, even if they don't amount to much of anything. "The old lady notices the mud and thorns covering your breeches, but says nothing."

You have a great foundation so far, though. Your system is pretty slick, although you do imitate the conventions of tabletop gaming more than I feel is necessary.

So, I made my way into the Caverns of Kalte and was having a good time with my wily non-combative kai lord (CS 14, no Sommerswerd or Mindblast). After rolling this around my mind, I finally decided that I like the fact that the books are somewhat biased toward combat machines. You can max out your Combat Skill and stroll through the book without even a temptation to cheat, but playing cleverly is more difficult, interesting and rewarding. I.e. you are in fact reading more of the book by finding ways through situations when you could just kill stuff and ignore the other content.

However, I was down to 4 Endurance points (having lost only a few in combat, which was pretty cool!) when I got strangled by the guy stuck in the pentagram who turns out to be a Helghast. Something like : "You feel the skeletal hands of the Helghast close around your throat. Lose 6 ENDURANCE points. If you are still alive . . ."

Well, no, I'm not. So that's it then? I just close the book and tear up my character sheet? Not only is that not fun at all, but it in no way tempts me to go back to the beginning of the book and dive in once more. Rather, it tempts me to cast out the sense of self-enforced "creative honesty" which makes the book exciting and cheat like crazy. Which is the equivalent of playing a videogame in "God Mode" so you can wander around at look at the monster graphics. Gets very old. I didn't check to see if the "back" button works in your game, but if it does, your game will often become a joke after people die. The spell will be broken, so to speak. If it doesn't work, I imagine that people will tend to just get pissed off and quit. Now, I can't imagine a "quicksave" mentality in something like this (MAYBE a "save in town only" mechanic), and neither do I imagine you aiming at the Roguelike community.

For me, it would be much more satisfying to have global variables measuring my achievements. In one Mega Man Zero game, there are a handful of missions available at any time. You can give up on a mission, whereupon a different one is made available. The more missions you give up on, the more the game story changes until eventually, the ending goes from "Save the world!" to "Escape from our HQ before we are annihilated!" Trying to get "the good ending" is something that definitely brings players back again and again. So, if I am taking too long, rather than starving to death, I would rather find out that I was too late to stop the king's assassination or somesuch. Fallout also did this with its modular ending. "You saved humankind. However, the people of Shady Sands all died of smallpox or something." You could even take Sonic the Hedgehog as an example: Yes, you foiled Robotnik FOR NOW, but you won't achieve final victory until you recover all the chaos emeralds!

To put things in psychological terms, character death is punishment. I am suggesting that character failure be met with negative reinforcement, which is much more humane and effective. Compare:

"You didn't defeat the troll king! Bad player! No more game!"

with

"You can have a cookie when you defeat the troll king!"

To put it another way, don't tell an unsuccessful player, "You're out!", rather reward success with increased story power. Unless of course you ARE catering to the Rogue ethic and you want death to be a constant threat. In which case you are basically making the prose equivalent of Dragon's Lair and the only advice I could give you is that your writing better be as compelling as Don Bluth's animation. (Which is not unthinkable, given how impressed I am thus far.)

You could take the easy way out and create an "Adventurer Resurrection Service" which incurs steep debts, but I think this game is better than that. (I have to say I was disappointed by the appearance of a quest bulletin board, a device whose preponderance is shocking given its utter ridiculousness).

You should probably move to the playtesting forum. I would be happy to contribute further.