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From: bhollebo@superior.carleton.ca (Bryan Hollebone)
Subject: Re: CYO Adventure Books (was Re: REBEL PLANET - novel?)
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References: <43m9b4$ds2@news.tuwien.ac.at> <43vup7$7oc@globe.indirect.com> <ckND7q_00WB7BlBvAX@andrew.cmu.edu> <44fdnj$n60@vivanews.vivanet.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 1995 00:50:41 GMT
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In article <44fdnj$n60@vivanews.vivanet.com>,
In <ckND7q_00WB7BlBvAX@andrew.cmu.edu>, "Andrew C. Plotkin" <erkyrath+@CMU.EDU> writes:
>[Various about "choose your own adventure" type books]
>It's not the compression or the huge data storage -- it's the critical
>data storage. This can be measured in tens of bytes for a small
>scenario. Trivial stuff for a computer, but impossible to get across
>in a book, unless the player is willing to scribble a lot of
>incomprehensible codes on paper. "If you have item 47XJ2, and you wish
>to use it on the door, go to page 52." Hmm. Has anyone done this sort
>of thing? 

Steve Jackson Games (the same SJ of the Choose your own Adventure series,
now on the net as sj@io.com) used to publish a lot of these things in their
house magazines, particularly the AADQ, a Car Wars magazine. Anyway the best
solution I remember them coming up with was an add system. For example, when
you picked up an item, it would tell you to add ten (or whatever) to the
current entry number whenever you wanted to use it. Most of the time this
pointed to a nonsensical entry, but it provided a neat backdoor out of some
situations. As I recall, magic spells were handled this way in some of the
CYOA books too.

Hope this helps,
BPH
