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to obtain a clue. This organization was used in Speaker in Dreams and the included flowchart shows the progression from one encounter to the next. Sometimes an encounter can be reached from multiple points, such as the nodes in the gamebook. For example, “The Bell Tower,” which is a key location according to the flowchart, can be reached from encounters six, seven, or eight. Other parts of the flowchart are extremely linear, though. Encounter three leads to four, then to five, and then to six, with no other listed way to progress through the story (Wyatt, 2001, p. 32).

However, I found that in practice the flowchart was easily set aside. The players in my game did not pick up on any of the clues from encounters three and four and were unable to proceed directly to encounters five and six, as shown in the flowchart. However, as the DM, I had added a little twist in the beginning that allowed the players to skip way ahead to encounter 14. The beginning of most modules lists adventure hooks, which are ways to get the party interested in the current adventure. One of the hooks listed in Speaker in Dreams was that one of the character’s mentors was from the town where the adventure took place. I made this mentor, Alein, one of the NPCs in the adventure who had been kidnapped. This twist to the adventure hook gave the party reason to look immediately for Alein and thus go directly to encounter 14, her last known location. Unlike the gamebook, even in a fairly scripted module, the DM and players can subvert the intended narrative structure. It all depends on the way the game is run. In other cases, a D&D adventure may indeed be run in a way that is similar to the pick-a-path tree structure. For example, the players might reach a dead end. They might walk in a room, fight a bunch of rats (not exactly an exciting plot point), find no treasure and no exit other than the one they came from. This predicament seems quite similar to the gamebook reader who chooses the next page, only to find that after a bit of unsubstantial plot they are instructed to “return to the previous page and make another choice.”

If we used a tree-like structure to represent the D&D module we would see that, like the gamebook, there are different endings depending on the actions of the players. What such a model doesn’t account for is that unlike a gamebook, one very rarely encounters an unsatisfactory ending. In fact, in the episodic structure of the campaign setting, a final ending may never actually be reached, rather only partial endings to individual episodes. The group structure, along with the DM, usually prevents unsatisfactory endings from happening. It may be that one particular character meets an unfortunate and untimely end, that their story does not continue, but the story does not end there for the player. If the session is a part of a larger campaign, the player will usually draw up another character and continue. Even if the player ends playing the game at that point, the narrative continues with other characters and other players. A good DM will not only compensate for situations like this, but he or she will let players add to the world and story that surrounds them, something that is impossible in a pick-a-path story. Ultimately, the structure is similar in that both stories involve decision points, but in TRPGs the number of decision points or the direction they lead are not pre-determined.

Another key difference between TRPGs and gamebooks is that players not only have the ability to make a choice at decision points but also the opportunity to come up with what those choices may be. The pathways in D&D continually expand outward rather than having overlapping points in order to connect to pre-determined endings. When players are posed with the question “what do you do?” they are given the opportunity not only to make decisions but also to build their own pathways. This is especially true of home games and longer running campaigns. Although Scott did have several possible endings for the orc adventure (see appendix) in mind, no pre-set