What the hell is a “Reader-Influenced LitRPG”?

You remember those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books when we were kids? Yeah, they were lame.

Cool idea, but terrible execution.

• Second person writing?
• Really only one storyline, and when you choose to go off that storyline, you pretty much die every time?
• Having to flip back and forth between pages on a paperback?
  

Lame, lame, lame.

Somewhere in the early 2000s, we created this fancy new thing called an ebook.

We are no longer limited by pages in a paperback—an ebook can be as big as you want. And we don’t have to flip back and forth between pages—we can embed hyperlinks within the document.

So, using that as a basis, I set out to create MY vision of what those old crappy paperback kids books SHOULD have been, except written for adults.

Something that was, first and foremost, a good story, and not just a poorly-written adventure to support the gimmick of gamifying fiction.

Something with an actual main character who you can’t necessarily control, but can nudge to make certain decisions. And those decisions branch off into entirely different stories—much like in life, where every decision you make in the present changes your future in vast and unknowable ways. In fact, this whole concept is kind of an exploration of the multiverse idea!

Obviously, this is a very lofty idea—to create a fictional universe where each reader-influenced decision leads to a completely different, novel-length story. I quickly recognized that it would take years just to write one edition of this story, which would contain twenty or so completely different novels within it.

I decided to treat it like a tree: I wrote the main trunk, and a few main branches, off of which there are numerous POTENTIAL stories that simply have yet to be written. Then I decided to leave it up to you folks whether those stories ever get written, and if so, which ones.

To support this, I opted to start a Patreon page (patreon.com/DJMolles), so that people could vote on which storylines they’d like to see written.

I figured I would make Coalescence pretty much crowd-funded, so I’m offering the ebook itself at the lowest price that Amazon will allow (99¢ , though I will use their option to promote it as a FREE ebook as often as they let me). Then, on Patreon, the lowest tier ($1/month) gets you access to polls where you can vote on which Coalescence storylines you’d like to see expanded.

If there is enough support for it, then maybe it becomes a thing, and I continue to expand the Coalescence Multiverse into the massive, complex webwork of storylines I originally envisioned.

_____________

Even if you think it’s a bullshit idea, do me a huge favor and just go download it!

Then open it up and give it a try, and let’s see if my big idea has any legs to stand on!

Go to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/B0FHJ7N6Z8

Go to Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DJMolles