When you think about role-playing games or RPGs, your initial thought is probably about computer games like Zelda or The Last of Us on a computer or mobile phone. But did you know that they grew out of a much older hobby, called pen and paper RPGs? If you’re on this site, then you probably do; you’ve probably even played some, especially the very first one:
Dungeons and Dragons!
This timeless classic was invented by Gary Gygax and friends back in the 1970s. But for the uninitiated, it’s a game where one player essentially plays the game master, buys all the books, dice, etc., and writes a story. Then using a set of rules, they take the players through a story where they adopt a character fitting with the game’s setting, choose your own adventure and what happens when presented with various story situations, and move the story along by applying results to various dice rolls.
It is an immersive experience that allows players to feel like they are part of the action and living out their dream adventures. Trust me, it’s a lot more fun and easy to understand than first meets the eye.
In many ways, it’s a perfect setup for recreating a detective mystery. Wizard Detective Academy is a perfect example of this. Which can sometimes make it puzzling why there have been relatively few detective mystery games. Possibly it may be that the original inventors started with a background in wargaming. Hence how most of the games have for years focussed on “hacking and slashing monsters then nicking their treasure.” Thus, these games feel like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter written for burglars, muggers, and capitalists.
But one area where these games have taken on the detective trope is the solo gamebook.
Yes, you can play RPGs, just you on your lonesome! You may even remember them from your childhoods. Essentially starting with the Scholastic Choose your Own Adventures, where you plan your way through adventures by turning to number paragraphs on each page. For example;
Do you jump out of a plane with a parachute? Turn to paragraph 234, or don’t bother with a parachute. Instead, turn to Paragraph 15 and chuck the book away. You’re dead.
Some of these books which were aimed at kids could be kind of weird and bloodthirsty. Famously in one imaginatively titled,
“You are a shark.”
Mystic forces change you into a shark; then, you can become an octopus that gets eaten by a shark in another option. So you can play a game where you eat yourself; that’s some next-level, Inception-style existential psychodrama for books aimed at nine-year-olds.
These books involved rolling dice and flicking backward and forwards through pages. To watch someone playing one is to wonder if you had forgotten how to read a book?
Of course, the most famous solo gamebooks were the Fighting Fantasy range, as created by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson in the 1980s. These were mostly the same kill the monsters, grab the treasure adventures as in Dungeons and Dragons.
These gamebook adventures are perfectly designed for the detective mystery format, and some writers have had some great success with it. A quick search of eBay or Kindle and you may just encounter classics like Sherlock Holmes, Solo Mysteries.
There had to be a Sherlock Holmes, of course. Call it sexism, but why don’t more people want to be Miss Marple? Imagine a sexy version of her played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Or
The Mystery Squad and even a Famous Five one with cards, dice, and a map, adorably with this one, you get a picnic and gingerbeer cards instead of hit points. Run out of them, and it’s game over.
So if you want an old-school mystery combined with a novel, why not find one and have fun. Or at least leave your fellow commuters wondering if you or they have forgotten how to read books properly?
And of course, the Wizard Detective Academy “choose your own adventure” style mystery solving games are the very latest and greatest adaption of this timeless RPG style. They have added new layers of immersive stories, interactive puzzles, and magic that are sure to thrill and delight mystery detective fans for many years to come.