fuck around and find out

A CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE, or CYOA, originally came from a series of children's books where each story is written from a second-person point of view. The reader assumes the role of the main character and influences the plot's outcome by deciding their actions and behavior. The concept doesn't change all that much from the origins - you're just actively writing the CYOA, with the help of someone running it like a DND DM, as opposed to reading it and making the choices based on pre-existing ones that an author put in a book.

A HEART GAME, on the other hand, is a deep dive into a character's experiences, personality, associations, etc. It's basically traveling into the heart of the character. This could result in participants being able to change events in said character's memories or actual life, through their decisions throughout the game. Alter their perceptions of people important to them, change their memories... or alter their perception of you, before you manage to make it out from their heart. (If you do.)

Never run a CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE before, but want to?

Luckily, we have a bananas amount of examples, and even some docs! Here are redacted's, snowend's, chroma's, as well as Sisi's doc for her snowend CYOA.

Never run a HEART GAME before, but want to?

kyriakos has a whole FAQ devoted to the mechanic, and you can find some examples from 2015 here, here, or here! I don't have any current examples and will update when I do.

Want some help figuring out how to write or run something? You can ask on this post! I'll try to help, and anyone can also answer questions or offer any advice they have. We're all friends here just trying to have fun ok.