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It's a bit late, so I'm not sure if I'm going to convey this idea properly. 

Anyway - my idea here. There's one storyline that plays through from 3 different perspectives. Each perspective has different events with different meanings, all going simultaneously and sometimes colliding here and there and breaking off into their own story again. 

You, as the player, can only watch, you don't really interact at all. Each page will have a choice at the bottom: continue with perspective A, go to perspective B, go to perspective C. It's one story that you can watch from multiple sides, multiple angles. 

The more you watch a specific perspective though, the more agitated they seem to get and the more they might comment on the feeling of being watched, and it distracts and increases a bit of paranoia which may change what they do and therefor the ending of the story. 4th wall breakage.

You're only one entity - you can only watch one thing at a time. So as you're watching one event play out, you might be missing another, or you might pop in in the middle of an event where it doesn't quite make sense unless you had stopped by earlier to watch. 

The three different perspectives I was thinking were a little fugitive family, gang members, and a police force, set in a high fantasy world. Each group has a main little set of 3 people in it, each with unique appearances and personality and history. 

As events go along, if you witness certain ones at the right time, you might unlock some background scenes which'll be accessible in the item section. "restarting" with the given link at the end will change the story, and break the 4th wall quite a bit more until it throws the original plot off the rails. Maybe have a bit more actual choice in the story, and actually interact with the characters a bit. I dunno. 

What do ya'll think of the idea? It follows a lot more linear path, so I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea for a cyoa or not. 

If ya'll like it, I'm gonna need a slave driver to annoy the fuck out of me to do it. Throw dead babies at me or somethin', in the name of motivation. I dunno. 

I've also been musing about recruiting a couple co-authors too. One for each storyline, so it has an honestly different feel for each storyline you view. Each storyline is linear, except for the odd dialogue from watching that one too much. All the clashes between the perspectives can be roleplayed out. If I do end up getting co-authors for this, then I'll pass you a visual reference along with a short personality and relationships, and you can take it from there and do as you wish with the characters.

The visual references I'll have included in the story as an item you can access or not access at will, along with some more info about the world itself. It's a high fantasy world, with it's own races/animals/magic/technology. I have what I've written down so far about it here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/14bnmpq-jkwFefpf6DU13V229pCUSbwkqWleoebp8egc/edit

I'm a bit afraid that it's too complicated to have a coauthor write in that kind of world though. So I dunno. If you wanna volunteer, coolies. I may or may not decide to do the co-author thing.

Obligatory joke opening: Oh so you want people to write fanfiction for your fiction?
Now moving on.

I know that writing for someone else in their setting, I struggle because my writing style will probably not be the same as theirs, so it'll not fit together. Obviously, you mentioned this is what you'd want, so it is good that you recognise that people will probably write differently.

The next issue is that you don't want to write and mess up something. No matter how much you tell me about your world, there is no way you can tell me every detail and how it is in your head. This puts pressure on the writer, which might lead to them ignoring the details to avoid getting them wrong, which can mess with the writing quality. Also if they assume something and it is important, but then they find the assumption is wrong, it can really ruin the ideas they built in their heads.

Being flexible with your world is probably big here, and talking it out with the writer if they do mess up to see what can be done. Obviously this can ruin the intended vision of your project, which you don't want, so it is pretty tough to manage.

Granted, I never really wrote for someone else, so these points might not be as big as I think they are, but I wanted to mention them regardless.

Anyway, I'm fine with more experimental cyoa's as long as you, the writer, are consciously deciding to do things the way you are. Normally a highly linear story would be bad, cause of the sites namesake, but keep in mind that your story STILL has choices. Sure, it might take longer for some to take effect, and that is the risky part. I'd say that it is still fine, just make sure your writing (or the coauthors) pulls the reader in so they keep reading despite the initial part not meeting expectations.

Moving back to coauthors, I haven't looked at the google doc yet, but I'm getting the feeling that you have a pretty thought out idea, which means you are invested. Getting random's to contribute leaves a lot of room for disaster, since you'd ideally want them to be as invested as you are. I'm pretty sure you won't be paying the coauthors, which means you probably won't be getting professional level stuff, and they likely won't act very professional. People will probably prioritise other things over your story, which can make it feel like nothing is getting done.

Anyway, this obviously depends on the coauthor, so I guess you just need to make sure you find the right people. Just, personally, I'd say that even if you find someone who seems perfect, be prepared for them to give up half way through, or something. I might be biased, but I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people who lose motivation or just change priorities.

Finally, I wish you luck, and I do wonder if any people will offer to coauthor, since it is quite the undertaking, but would be pretty fun to even just look on from the sidelines.

TL;DR
Good luck figuring this out, quite the pickle if you ask me. Anyway, I'd say go for it, breaking reader expectations isn't a bad thing, it is just generally harder to do right.

EDIT P.S.
Hey I remember you posting about this (world at least) before, so you're definitely invested! Anyway, I looked through the google doc and you definitely seem to have a solid idea (of the world, and plot given the thread,) which is good.

Hey, those guys also have a council of nine! Huh, weird. Anyhow, do whatever, I don't understand this well enough for an informed opinion.

Co authors are generally a mistake and if you can get a volunteer at all even on the slim chance they stick it out, communication issues etc when trying to keep a story in a persistent style in a specific setting will double your workload.

Otherwise, experimental stuff will always sound stupid or pointless when explained. If you have an idea you're really caught up on, best thing to do is just to it and prove by example that you can make it work.

Just with respect to progressively breaking the 4th wall in response to the reader's choices, @EZunmaker 's unpublished story Cherry Falls has a good example (starting on roughly page 5) that you might dig (I think it started out as a CYOA on this forum?).

For co-writers, I've had some success with two of my friends irl (just one or two pages each though). They started out as beta-readers/giving me notes, but then were inspired to write/re-write certain pages. Ironically enough, these were the pages that I had written "in their voice" in the first place.

Anyways, I (and, I'm sure, many others) would be happy to look at your unpublished stuff as you progress through it.

I don't really like head hopping in a traditional cyoa. If you're doing some kind of collaboration thing with multiple active participants, or you make some kind of twist to it that has game components - like Atlas, sure, head hopping is probably going to be a good tool.

But a cyoa is primarily about choice and roleplay. So choosing who's eyes your viewing a story from isn't really working towards the purpose of actually influencing the events of the story. If the player cannot impact the story events, you're taking away the core strength of the medium.

If I want to read a story with a large scope and multiple character POVs, I'll pick up something by Joe Abercrombie or G.R.R.M. I look to a cyoa to live the story as the protagonist/antagonist and influence the outcome.

>But a cyoa is primarily about choice and roleplay.

Traditionally that's the case, but there's no actual rule against exploring the medium of hypertext fiction in other ways as long as there's enough of a plot to stand on its own merits. Experimental shit really only gets its reputation because so often the gimmick is allowed to become the focus and some pretentious dipshit of an author thinks that equals them being artistic or something.

But this goes back to what I was saying already. There are endless arguments that can be made about why whatever kind of story theoretically or on principle should or shouldn't work, the only real way to prove it one way or another is to just do it, not sit here and take a vote.

But since we are voting, you're voting for...

There’s no rule against wearing a Speedo to the beach either, but most people probably shouldn’t anyway.

CYOAs were a spin off from traditional storytelling, I'm sure someone at some point was willing to argue they were a terrible idea destroyed theme and structure etc. While 'CYOA' itself and its meaning has obviously changed; very little of what you'll find here is much like the stuff that used to be printed in the books, in content or in structure. And that's not just another dig at CYS as a whole btw, because you can look at some of Berka's stuff for immediate examples of how to do different well.

What a story is in its most basic form doesn't change but that doesn't mean there's ever just one way to tell it. The one in the OP might wind up sucking or (more than likely) never happening at all but I have to disagree with the idea of immediately shooting down any idea that doesn't adhere to strict ideas of what a CYOA should be or what POVs they should be told from etc.

Besides that, the POV described in this case seems pretty clearly to be a persistent one. The player as an observer from just outside reality jumping around timeliness or whatever with very little power to directly effect things is something I've seen I've seen done well in sci fi (see the Zero Escape games and others by the same writer, although those relied on not letting on what was going on till the end) so I don't see any reason why the same basic idea wouldn't work in fantasy.

The thing is once you start having characters sensing your presence and reacting, and allow it to kick in at any point in events that can be wandered through freely you hit this insane level of complexity. You need a base untouched timeline that needs to tell a complete story in its own right and then on top of that tons of alternate scenes for each different level of the the characters' awareness . So that's the main reason I just don't see this happening, it doesn't sound like she's really sat down and thought out just what exactly will be required to make the idea work, and I'm remembering that 15 pages for the last story was a struggle.

(this is sorta just added onto mizal's post? I dunno.)

Anyway, I struggled with 15 pages because there was a lot of shitty shitstorm happening irl, and when I did have time to work on it, I just couldn't focus, or it'd been long enough since the last time I touched it that it'd grown a bit stagnant and I'd have trouble picking back up again. If you check out my previous account (oh I shudder) there's a lot of stories with a lot more pages - I think altogether, there's roughly around 75 - 125 pages of writing there, from all the stories? Though I think those were all abandoned because I was aiming for long epics like The Other World in length. Not to mention all the linear stuff I write and keep on google docs. I love writing, it's just hard sometimes. 

Despite being only 15 pages, it has a site rated length of 5/8 too - same length as Haunted, and seems a smidgen more than Inseparable or Snow? I focus more on quality/length of the page than quantity of pages, because it gives a chance to honestly know the characters and the world you're interacting with. 

I just sortof like experimenting with my writing in general. Sometimes it flails and fails horrendously, and sometimes it's actually kinda good - like the one story I do have published. There were some areas that I didn't really do right, but other areas that seem to have worked out perfectly. People seem to enjoy it despite it being short and rather linear.

So yeah, this thread is just an interest check really, have people point out problems with my plan/idea if there are any or suggestions, and hopefully score myself a slave driver to throw dead babies so I don't wallow and let irl get to me. 

Rating matters jack shit on the site. Games that are far worse are often rated far better than others.

I meant lengthwise. 
The site takes into account number of pages, wordcount, and I believe scripting and such. 5/8 lengthwise. Ie: even though 15 pages sounds short, there's a lot in those pages.