Dunder Moose

If you’re worried bro style games won’t give you cool character moments at low levels, I gave a level 1 PC a quest to tame a couple giant hyenas. I thought he was dead for sure. Dude comes back the new alpha of a pack like an anime protagonist

No matter how many times you and your friends pass around a CYOA book and read it together, it will never become a campaign.

The reason so many opinions on this topic are so far off is that the majority of people are playing a collaborative CYOA story game and incorrectly calling it a campaign.

Sometimes we have to use strong words to encapsulate strong ideas. Frankly, I think actual history is awesome, particularly the gaming hobby. We literally have thousands of tabletop RPGs which do thousands of things in different ways. Not only that, we have an effectively infinite palette of possibilities going forward, not just in mechanical methodologies, but in subjects, topics, realizations, and mechanisms of tool use. We have a massive field of possibilities. A lot of the current punditry in the field is so heavily insular that anytime they have a singular new idea to them, they think they're the first person to ever have that idea when they know that's not the case or should know. Not only that, they suddenly decide an idea that they've been denigrating for a couple of decades is the new hotness, and they immediately believe that nothing they said before will be remembered nor matters. It's only what's cool at the moment, and that is important and good. These are the same people who consistently and continuously bitch about "theater kids" in the hobby. Yet, when they are a decade or more behind the innovations that said "theater kids" introduced into the hobby, suddenly it's a miracle and their flash of insight is genius. It's tedious and tiresome.