While blogging and twittering for DestinyQuest Infinite, I often bump into the close cousin of gamebooks like DQI: tabletop, or pen and paper RPGs.

The two genres connect in some very obvious ways. Both are about your journey as the player, in both you often keep your inventory and stats on an actual piece of paper, both have some element and balance of choice and luck, and both have malleable storylines that change depending on the choices you make.

Despite these similarities, tabletop RPGs often cater to a different crowd. The back and forth of a pen & paper game is communal and improvised, whereas a gamebook gives you a completely formed adventure to enjoy in the comfort of their own mind.

But all this got me thinking – how similar is writing a gamebook to crafting a good tabletop campaign?

Scripting vs. Prompting

The one big difference between tabletop RPGs and gamebooks is that one is already pre-written and the other can change on the fly.

Of course, if you’re reading a gamebook for the first time, it’s still fresh and you might as well be playing a game made up on the fly. It’s a brand new quest and only the book/GM knows where it will lead to.

And they do know – a brief look at the excellent Campaign Mastery website informed me that GMs typically start with a general idea of the key conflict and final destination of the players. The GM has to balance that pre-determined conflict with player choice, on the way to wherever the campaign’s final destination is.

While this seems like a completely different approach from gamebooks, which are already written and don’t allow variation, at a high level there are some similarities. Most gamebooks task you with a quest – save the land by killing the evil king – but you can take a meandering path to the goal (sometimes never even reaching the goal at all). How you play through the adventure is up to you, and the book might define the end but create multiple middles.

The Writing Process

So, is planning a gamebook like planning a tabletop RPG campaign? Obviously the former takes more writing than the latter, but how similar is the planning process?

DestinyQuest author Michael J. Ward told us on Twitter that in both, it’s important to strike “the right balance between narrative, combat and player agency.

“As the author you are essentially the gamesmaster, so you are directing the action, guiding the players. My experience of planning campaigns certainly fed into my gb writing.. Obviously the two can never be the same but I learnt lessons through running campaigns about setting, character. And no matter how open-ended, a good GM imo should be able to tease/nudge/steer the players when needed.”

Gamebook author Dave Morris, on the other hand, leans toward tabletop GMing giving more power to the player, since “in a campaign I don’t have any preconception of what the players will choose to do. Steering [the players] means it’s failing as roleplaying & turning into an authored story imo.”

Stuart Lloyd, who is a veteran gamebooker but fairly new to the tabletop RPG world, had this to say:

“RPGs were more about going with what the players wanted to do and responding to that. My RPGs had fewer obvious options, but I had to be more prepared and ready to improvise. With a gamebook, I have a scenario, I think of all possible options, then narrow them down to the ones that have the biggest effect on the game.

So you could buy some silk pyjamas in an RPG if it’s a character thing or because you can, but in a gamebook I would only have fewer options, restricted to the ones I think are what the player would want to do… So pure character based options are not out of the question – it’s just I can’t have all of them. So when I write gamebooks I try to get in the players’ head.

So, I guess an RPG could be used as a focus group to write the scenario as a gamebook.”

While there are some differences in focus, the common theme seems to be the struggle to enable player agency. Every author has a different approach to writing and campaign making.

If you like to have your scenarios, choices, and major plot points penned before sitting down to a game, then yeah – you’re a bit like a gamebook writer. If you prefer to leave the player with more freedom and choices, then you will probably find gamebook and campaign writing very different beasts.

Over To You

I think that’s a good place to end this ramble of mine.

We’d love to hear more about how GMing feeds into (or doesn’t feed into!) gamebook writing – and vice versa. When you create RPG campaigns, do you feel like you’re planning a book? Tell us on Twitter or leave a comment below!

Yuliya

Yuliya handles marketing and writing at QuestForge, and is the self-appointed chief of keeping Chris sane (despite Chris's insistence that he is the sane one).