How hard should a gamebook be?

Achievement unlocked. 

It's a great thing to see, but only when it's earned. If the world can be saved just by stumbling through an adventure picking options at random, where's the sense of reward? At the same time, gamebook writers are aware that a lot of readers don't have the patience to go digging after clues. If they don't get a pat on the head every few minutes they'll lose interest. We can't please everyone, so what's the answer?

Every gamebook series has to find its own balance. For example, Vulcanverse:

"No one is holding your hand. There is no main quest at the beginning, and at times you will find yourself wandering around looking for clues, treasures, and quests to accomplish. This can be frustrating, but the rewards are for those who persevere and who keep an eye out for the signs and clues you find. One of the coolest moments in these books is when you discover that a clue you found makes sense and reveals a new adventure or a way to solve a problem."

(Review translated from Spanish.)

In those books your decisions can completely change the world, deciding the fate of empires, permanently altering the landscape and the people in it. As another review (also translated by Google) put it: "You have a lot of adventures ahead of you -- not because Vulcanverse has no end, as in other open-world series, but because the stories follow one another and intertwine seemingly without end."

In a traditional gamebook, challenges must be addressed linearly and each one must be dealt with before you progress to the next. That means the individual challenges can't be too hard, because if the player is stumped it's not as if they can go and tackle another quest while they're thinking about it. In other words, challenges can't involve the player thinking, "OK I don't have what I need for this right now, but if I come back with item X and clue Y maybe I can do it." There's the strength of open-world gamebooks right there.

When the rewards have to do with saving an entire civilization, the effort on the part of the player has to be such that it feels earned. That's why Vulcanverse isn't the kind of loosely open-world game in which you can drift around with one eye on something else and still expect to pile up heaps of treasure and accomplishments. To save a universe you have to be prepared to work at it. One reviewer remarked on how he'd been playing for hours, getting a whole bunch of things set up in The Hammer of the Sun, and finally he was able to carry out a ritual that completely changed the whole realm of Notus, unlocking lots of new quests. That cascade of new opportunities, he said, was an achievement worth waiting for.

I was reminded of all this when talking to an old friend about Gunslinger, a tactical RPG-ish boardgame by Richard Hamblen that we used to play a lot back in the 1980s. The best way I can describe it is to say the game would reliably throw up moments as vivid and dramatic as this:

"Remember what incredible stories we'd have to tell after a Gunslinger game," I said. "Why don't we still play that?" My friend shrugged. "Because each game lasted a couple of hours, and nobody has the patience these days for anything that takes longer than Exploding Kittens."

(I can't argue with that, as these days I'd be much more likely to spend a couple of hours playing Fights in Tight Spaces, which has a lot in common with the tactical gameplay of Gunslinger but with much less set-up time and snazzy animations too.)

Quick and simple play for spoon-fed rewards? Or mighty triumphs that you have to work at achieving? There's no right answer to this question. Vulcanverse's hard-won victories are certainly not to everyone's taste, but if there's any gamebook approach that caters to everyone's taste then believe me I'll write it.

French-speaking readers may want to pick up a copy of Le Marteau et l’Enclume issue #12, which is devoted to the launch in France of Forge Divine, the French name for Vulcanverse. Candidly I sometimes wish we'd called it something like that in English too, as the implied connection with the online crypto-based game has probably done little but confuse potential players of the gamebooks. So just for the record, you don't need to know anything about the online game to play the gamebooks -- and vice versa.