The adventures we chose

[thebitterguy]

So, as normal, the fact something is old reminded me of my own history. Monday’s article about the 20th anniversay of the Fighting Fantasy books made me realize that those books served a vital purpose in my youth.
I've been a gamer since I got a copy of the red box . Possibly before that, but nature and nurture and who wants to get into all that

Comments

[srhall79]

I know (as well as I know anything that happened 20 years ago) that I probably cheated a few times to get to the end. I mean, that's how these things go, right? What person in their right mind is going to play one of these things, hit a dead end (or just die) and go "ah, well. Fun while it lasted!" You work your way back, and choose option B (or just skip the battle).

Well, sure. Nature of the beast. And besides, you paid for the book, why not read all of it? And to do that, you needed to stick your thumb in to mark your place and go down the stupid action line. In Lone Wolf, where 0 was the best combat result, I know my pencil seemed to fall on 0 pretty consistently in those hard fights.

That was one thing that made the Fighting Fantasy so hard. You couldn't just flip back a few entries and grab the seventh ring. At the start of the dungeon, you might have gone left instead of right, and missed out on a ring forever. You went through that door, and so never reached the dead-end with another ring. If you weren't perfect, you were screwed.