Pointless branching in Voyage of the Moonstone

[Rune Owl]

I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, but I am reading Voyage of the Moonstone for the first time and there is a LOT of pointless branching starting at section 75.  (Click on the file attachment to enlarge it.)

If you don't shoot with a bow, your other options are to fall down in several different ways.  I know there are a lot of examples of pointless choices in the books, but this one is just silly.

[Nym90]

Yeah, it's things like this that make the New Order books not as good as the earlier series. Fewer meaningful choices and alternate interesting paths to explore. If a game book is going to be so linear, it might as well just be a regular book. And meaningless choices are especially bad because at least those sections could have been added elsewhere to pad out the plot.

The first 10 books all had a lot of interesting alternatives to try which made each book very replayable, and the first few Grand Master books had some alternate paths at least in the beginning. But starting with book 11, Joe definitely switched to a more linear structure. While that made each playthrough longer and thus potentially more rewarding at first blush, it also took away some of the magic of what makes gamebooks special.

[andyc]

Books 21 and 22 are especially linear I agree. It is worsened by the fact that they really are a single 700 section adventure of often rather unrelated events strung along a very narrow path. Buccaneers of Shadaki was the only time I have been bored reading a Lone Wolf book as I had had enough of my journey south with the Moonstone by the second half of that book. Trail of the Wolf is my favourite of books 20-28 by far, and looking at the Project Aon 'paths' map, it looks the least linear (with Rune War close behind).
Storms of Chai is by far the most linear of all the books as discussed before, but it didn't bother me like Buccaneers did, since the plot was far more compelling to me.