Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Scribe]

Many of you are gamers, so perhaps you will understand.

When you have no options, no perceived options, its easy to just let it go. "Ah, I see, I'm going to lose." or, when its all wrapped up and you are locked in for the victory "ah, yep its over I win in X moves, nothing you can do about it gg."

That feeling, is one of calm, of being free. Win or lose, there is nothing really left to do or be stressed over.

However, when you have what you believe are options, you have potential. You can see a path, but you are unsure on the next steps, what exactly you need to do to get from A to G when you cannot be sure that B is even the correct step.

All you know, is that much like Agent Smith...you "hate this place....I must get out of here" well.

That is a bit of a pain in the ass place to be mentally.

(It doesnt help that the stock market has to implode at this point some time, but when!)

 

[Ryujin]

The old TolkienQuest books by Iron Crown were amazing. I told my wife to play the first one, Night of the Nazgûl, and she had to play it twice right off the bat, it was so good. Highly recommend that series (well, the three that got printed), along with Steve Jackson's Sorcery! and Lone Wolf; I got a lot of play from those. I also really liked Sagard the Barbarian, Fighting Fantasy, Fabled Lands, Sherlock Holmes, and several others.

Main Menu - Demian's Gamebook Web Page

I still have the Steve Jackson Games "Fighting Fantasy" 3 book GameBox on my bookshelf. Spines never cracked. Didn't have the heart to tell my mother that's not what RPGs are, when she gave them to me for Christmas.

 

[MoonSong]

Many of you are gamers, so perhaps you will understand.

When you have no options, no perceived options, its easy to just let it go. "Ah, I see, I'm going to lose." or, when its all wrapped up and you are locked in for the victory "ah, yep its over I win in X moves, nothing you can do about it gg."

That feeling, is one of calm, of being free. Win or lose, there is nothing really left to do or be stressed over.

However, when you have what you believe are options, you have potential. You can see a path, but you are unsure on the next steps, what exactly you need to do to get from A to G when you cannot be sure that B is even the correct step.

All you know, is that much like Agent Smith...you "hate this place....I must get out of here" well.

That is a bit of a pain in the ass place to be mentally.

(It doesnt help that the stock market has to implode at this point some time, but when!)

Are you playing in Arena?

 

[RealAlHazred]

I still have the Steve Jackson Games "Fighting Fantasy" 3 book GameBox on my bookshelf. Spines never cracked. Didn't have the heart to tell my mother that's not what RPGs are, when she gave them to me for Christmas.

Those are pretty good. They're all different, with little crossover unless you squint and decide, behind the scenes, that you're playing the same guy.

The best four series:

• TolkienQuest: The first three gamebooks produced by ICE under the license with the Saul Zaentz Company were written by John Ruemmler, who made each one a hexcrawl-in-a-gamebook. Night of the Nazgûl has you bringing a message to Hobbiton that there are dark figures in the night. The Legend of Weathertop has you searching for the ruins below Weathertop to retrieve an item said to lie below. Rescue in Mirkwood has you searching for a noble elf who disappeared within. Some people don't like them, but I absolutely love that each playthrough can be wildly different.
• Lone Wolf: This series was fairly standard in style, but had a really well-realized setting, and your character can develop all sorts of cool abilities; you get a new power after completing each book. It was popular enough to spawn a spin-off, The World of Lone Wolf, which had a different protagonist. All books published in the 80s are available online at Project Aon.
• Steve Jackson's Sorcery!: This was a spin-off of the Fighting Fantasy series. FF books were basically independent one-off stories you played through; instead of that, Sorcery! was four books with a series of linked adventures. And you could play a warrior or a wizard, which was cool! The magic system involved memorizing three-letter codes for spells in a separate book, and then trying to pick the right option in each encounter where you could use magic. A really good part of it was the excellent evocative art by John Blanche; in some of the encounters you had to notice a clue in the art that would only be obliquely referenced in the text. Really good. You can play this on Inkle as well.
• The Way of the Tiger: I had forgotten about this one. You play a ninja, and each book builds on the story of the previous one. It was disappointing that the publisher canceled the series one book before it would have ended, but it shared the feature of Lone Wolf that you could gain a skill after each book. It was another spinoff of Fighting Fantasy (sort of), but the setting was different from the rest of that series; it was originally seen in Talisman of Death (FF #11), but it's very different from that one.

 

[Scribe]

Are you playing in Arena?

No.

 

[overgeeked]

Man, the anecdote about the Nazi getting kicked out of the punk bar should not be this relevant this often.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's worth checking the Fighting Fantasy books out, @Ryujin. Those were created by the future founders of Games Workshop, have classic artists who went on to do TSR UK and Games Workshop stuff, and is very authentically old school RPG goodness.

I would put Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Deathtrap Dungeon, City of Thieves and most of the Sorcery! series up against anything TSR did in the 1E era. City of Thieves in particular is quietly super-influential, as it builds on City-State of the Invincible Overlord by showing us what an evil city with urban goblins, orcs and so on would look like as a functional location. It's mostly concerned with the PC doing a fetch quest through the city, but it all feels very lived in.