Gamebooks where you play multiple characters

[Gambit37]

Have there been any gamebooks where you play multiple characters? I don't mean mutiplayer stuff like Combat Heroes or Clash of the Princes, but a normal adventure where you take control of more than one character.

As far as I know, all gamebooks are solo character (for obvious reasons), or only offer a small portion of the game where you may control another member for a small time.

I'd love to know if there are gamebooks where you can play multiple characters at the same time (ie, an adventuring party) -- and if it's never been done, do you think it's possible to create mechanics to make it work in a gamebook, and still be playable and not confusing?!?

[Sophia]

This may or may not be applicable: there were some Star Trek ones I read a long time ago that were like that; they were about the adventures of the main characters, collectively, like the show. So you were reading about Kirk, Spock, etc., and you could pick what they did.

However, it was more of a "Choose your own adventure" type deal rather than having true "gamebook" mechanics.

[beowuuf]

I have a suspicion that the very last Lone Wolf book (book 32) will ahve you doing something liek that, perhaps with Grey Star, Banedon, the New Order GM and Lone Wolf. Still, this is just conjecture right now. And that would probably not be simultaneous.

Anyway, I know of nothing released so far that has multiple characters. The closest to that sort of thing is Heavy Rain, the computer game. And again, that was different sections of play at a time.


Some FF books give your armies ,etc, but I don't think they ever gave you multiple characters at once as you suggest. Mechanically it shouldn't be too hard, just you'd have to make sure that all the characters had something meaningful to do, and also it still made sense even if you wittled the party down to one person. More importantly, you'd need to make sure fights or challenges were balanced well so that minimum and maximum parties were still viable.

[Gambit37]

@Sophia: If it was a CYOA, I imagine it was something like the text just told you that you're now playing a different character?

I've been pondering if it would be possible to make something like a 4 character DM party into a gamebook. Not really thought too hard about it yet. My initial apprehensions would be:

1) Balanced fights, as Beo noted
2) Over-complex rules
3) Having enough for all characters to do, again as Beo noted.
4) Lack of "ownership" of the characters by the reader, and thus less emotional involvement

You could mitigate #1 and #2 somewhat by treating all fights as one big brawl and just rolling dice for the entire party in one go, and dishing out damage equally from their enemies across all party members. But then that defeats the point of having multiple characters with differing skills. In Ian Livingstone's Blood of the Zombies, you still play as 1 solo character, but you're mobbed at all times by zombies -- when you fight, the dice numbers you roll are the number of zombies you kill in each attack round. Perhaps something like that could work, but it's much less tense or "thrilling" than traditional gamebook fights.

Not sure how one would solve #3 and #4, unless there's significant decision making that affects different characters. This would probably turn a 400 entry book into a 600 entry book, but it would certainly help with the replay value! Would also make the writing a lot harder though.

[Sophia]

No, it was third person.

Like, it might have something like this:

Kirk and Spock stand before the Zorblaxian Ambassador. He says, 'Greetings Earthlings.'"

- If Kirk says "we come in peace" turn to 45.
- If Spock says 'Live long and Prosper' turn to 50.
- If they pull out their phasers and start shooting turn to 89.

[beowuuf]

You could have characters like skills, without individual stats. Instead the group has a general set of stats - health, mana, stamina - that is created by the party make up. Combats are conducted mob against mob (that's mob of characters, not monster objects) with a number of members giving some degree of advantage (two or more characters grant extra dice to choose from, like roll three die and keep the highest one).


Damage to the group results in losing group stats, and at certain thresholds losing members. Or perhaps you lose members failing 'saving throws' that test the group stats at certain times (traps and after battles).

I'm sure if you can chose the right combination of those you could have a compelling group make-up without complex rules.

Just as n DM, characters don't have to speak at all for us to create characters for them. Just have cool abilities (passive ones without the need to go to text areas) that make them stand out.

Mophus is a good healer, you can restore one extra point through his extra poitons. Tiggy grants a higher mana score while she is alive. You can then balance these mechanically useful but otherwise unremarked characters with characters who can do things during the game like skills - Zed has knowledge of different areas, Wuuf can scent certain things at certain times. Perhaps Halk can do feats of strength no-one else can do. All those sort of things would only be 5 - 10 extra secrtions per character for a few chartacters to balance the ones who just do something in the background.

[Zyx]

Linflas and I are on a french forum about gamebooks. As far as I know, several members have written adventures with two characters. Last one was published two days ago:
http://litteraction.fr/livre-jeu/chrysalide (fr)

I'm currently planing to write an adventure of 100§ each year, if everything goes well, the fifth year will be with 4 characters (in 2016).

[Seriously Unserious]

I've been pondering if it would be possible to make something like a 4 character DM party into a gamebook. Not really thought too hard about it yet. My initial apprehensions would be:

1) Balanced fights, as Beo noted
2) Over-complex rules
3) Having enough for all characters to do, again as Beo noted.
4) Lack of "ownership" of the characters by the reader, and thus less emotional involvement

I think a simpler way of dealing with #1 is to have the size of encounters affected by the size of the party, so a larger party means more/tougher monsters.

#2 is a bit of a challenge since the more characters you have in a story/game the more complex it gets, but maintaining an acceptable level of complexity can be managed by handling encounters or situations that require actions in a similar way to D&D games, each character gets the chance to perform 1 major action per turn, and each monster also performs one major action per turn. For the case of mob vs mob encounters each unit/group of characters/monsters is treated like a single character for the purposes of performing actions, and each unit has a specialty, so for example, heavy infantry would be slow, but hard to kill whereas archers would be easily killed in close range hand to hand combat but have the ability to kill at long range. Thus instead of having a single archer character shoot a single arrow at a single monster, you would have an entire unit of archers, say 100, shoot a volley of 100 arrows at a unit of say 60 monsters. your damage rolls would then be to determine how many members of the target unit were killed in the volley, with modifications for things like cover, armor, distance and experience/skill.

#3 would involve more work for the author since it would lengthen the story somewhat as Gambit mentioned but it certainly is doable.

IMO #4 is only likely if the storyline is badly written or the game rules badly designed. Proper attention to design and story writing should handle this, the same as it does in a solo-character game book.