Over the last couple of years (and hundreds of game sessions) only three games have completely blown my mind and…

Over the last couple of years (and hundreds of game sessions) only three games have completely blown my mind and changed my feelings about what a roleplaying game can be: Dungeon World, The Final Girl, and The Society of Dreamers. Well, after tonight, I’m going to add one more to that list: Cheat Your Own Adventure. 

Wow! 

It is so good. 

Here’s the thing: we were supposed to play Monsterhearts, but because of a few cancellations, we decided to do something else. None of us had played Cheat Your Own Adventure before, but I remembered hearing about it on The Twitching Curtain and thought we could try it out. To get started, you use a couple of tables to generate a Choose Your Own Adventure-style book title (such as “The Swamp of Despair”). From there, one person, the Reader, begins narrating the story in the second person. Once a decision point is reached, each other player offers an option, in the form of “If you choose to do X, turn to page XXX.” Whoever presented the option the Reader likes best rolls two dice. If he rolls higher than the lowest number on a sheet (from 1-12), then he becomes the new Reader and continues the story. If he rolls lower than the number, he narrates the character’s death. The original Reader then gets to ‘cheat’ and flip to a different page instead, and that new person becomes the Reader and narrates an automatic success. 

The game leads to some really terrific storytelling, and the options being presented by the players on each round can lead to all kinds of crazy possibilities. We played the game three times tonight. The first two times were very adventurous stories, filled with lots of derring-do and humor. They were terrific. But then . . . 

But then . . .

We had the idea to interpret the name of the story generated sort-of metaphorically. We wondered, ‘Could we tell a story that is more serious and dramatic?’ Does The Swamp of Despair have to be a literal swamp? 

In that spirit, Dan got us started on the third story by setting the scene between a woman and her dying husband. She asked her dying husband what his favorite memory of her was, and that was the first set of decision points to be presented by the other players. From there, the story we told was about one man going through the necessary motions of preparing for your imminent passing. There were visits to the hospital, matters of what to do with his stuff he’d be leaving behind, and the need to reconcile with an estranged son. It was a story that was just devastating, and very tough to get through. It had flashes of humor, as the dying man tried his best to cope with the situation with a smile, but these little moments of levity only made the overall story that much more sad. 

It was fucking incredible. Several people had tears in their eyes at the end. 

From a gameplay standpoint, there were several times when options were presented by the players which, if chosen, would take the story in very different directions, and I loved that about this game. Sometimes those options were very scary. Like, in the case of the dying man, there were times when he could have chosen a more embittered path, or we could have introduced elements of his past infidelity to his wife. 

Anyway, it was a magnificent time. Thanks to Daniel Lewis Russell Benner Kristen D Scott Owen Ferrell Riley and Gary Wilson.