Talking the other week about Mark Smith's Virtual Reality gamebooks reminded me that I was also called in to do some editorial work on the first one, Green Blood. In the original version, your only chance of dealing with the elves was if you'd picked SWORDPLAY, SPELLS or UNARMED COMBAT at the start of the book. Given that you create a character by picking four out of a list of twelve skills, that means that more than one in four randomly chosen characters wouldn't be able to complete the adventure.
Mark's argument was that a player would be crazy not to start with at least one of those skills, but I was more used to roleplaying games like RuneQuest, and there the whole point is to customize the character by picking skills. It's never a given that you have to be a fighter or a wizard, as in D&D. Even one of the pregen characters in Green Blood (the thief) couldn't have finished the adventure.
It is frustrating to be told you need a certain skill halfway through a book. In Ravages of Hate, you can do the swordfight without SWORDPLAY and the wrestling without UNARMED COMBAT - just make sure you have LOTS of Life Points if you want to do that.
ReplyDeleteYou can also succeed at the spell duel without SPELLS in Ravages of Hate. I enjoyed coming up with mundane items that can counter the elf king's magic. It can be a fun challenge for any of the players.
There are other ways to win as well so that any combination of skills can succeed. I made sure that every skill does important things and if it is less prevalent in the book, then the consequences of using it will be more beneficial when it is used. This especially applies to SEAFARING, which opens up areas that no other character could get to.
Mark and I took different approaches to our VR books. I changed the selection of skills to fit the adventure, and I was at pains to make sure that a player could complete the book with any selection of skills. Mark treated the skills as more like the list in GURPS, figuring that the player wouldn't take skills that obviously didn't apply in the current book. Since you weren't going to carry the character on into other adventures, that approach never made sense to me.
DeleteThe AI generated art is beautiful. (It has some weirdness inherent to such AI). What was the prompt that generated it?
ReplyDeleteIt was: "The feast of the king of the elves; dark folklore; in the style of Richard Dadd".
DeleteI felt that Kingdom of Wyrd had a similar problem. I *think* that to win you had to have the Battle Standard, and the only way to get that was by letting someone die in the Fane and not resurrecting them...and if you were a solo player you didn't get that chance. If i worked it out properly. Which I probably didn't.
ReplyDeleteYou do need the battle standard, but I'm pretty sure you can get that without leaving your comrade dead. If you're playing solo, IIRC it's your own double on the bier (shades of The Empire Strikes Back). Either way, you should have options to get the standard.
DeleteBut... it's been 9 years since I last edited it. Can anyone who has played the book more recently confirm?
It's as you say; if you are on your own, it is your body on the bier, which later comes to life and must be defeated. From then on, the options are the same for a solo player or multi player party.
ReplyDelete