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Hello,
I'm working on my first proper story and I wonder what approach most of you use/prefer?
In my head I have a sort of main point where I'd want the story to lead, but 'you'll end up in the same place sooner or later no matter what choice you make' feels like I'd be cheating the reader. (As would 'any wrong move will kill you so I don't have to write more than one page for each choice).
I prefer to think that every single choice made actually changes the main characters life path, but that would suggest I'd end up writing 100s of different stories in the end.

 

Really, it depends on the story. You can easily make a story with loads of different path, but each path would have to be quite short to minimise the massive amounts of work full paths would take.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with the lead back to the same path. Sometimes, the path you take is more important than the destination. Although two paths might lead to the same place, they can still be different and enjoyable. If I was escaping zombies I could pick the Sneak path which would go on for a bit before ending with me getting to a helicopter, or a Fight path. Both paths being able to lead to success isn't a bad thing.

Branching is sort of the whole point of choose your own stories.

Oh yes, I'm very much aware of that. Just looking for the right balance.. if you give the reader all the power you might end up writing 100s of completely different stories, but giving them 'fake' power where they feel they're choosing but their fate has pretty much been determined already it's not a great story either.
For example if the main character meets an important character but chooses to avoid him there must be a completely alternate plot ór there can be ways they meet again anyway and next time you don't give them as much of a choice. The second scenario is the easy way to make sure you don't end up with 100s of seperate branches, but it does sorta mean some choice are more detours than truly different stories.

There's no expectation anyone would be able to write hundreds of paths, and not every choice necessarily is or should be a thing that will lead to a completely different story. If you'll play some of the higher rated stories on the site, especially the sprawling epics, you'll see the way it's commonly done is to have a certain number of major, very different paths, with smaller branches and variations going off or coming back to intertwine with each one. Steve's example was a good one. The player decides they're going from point A to point B and becomes set on that path, with the options along the way just dealing with how they go about it.

In the end, the author is still the one telling the story they want to tell, with the reader just getting to choose the direction to take at certain key points. Speaking for myself, I'd rather have choices that are meaningful even if it means there are less of them. A choice that explores something about the setting or who a character is is always going to be more satisfying than what color the protag's hair is or whether they put on the green or the blue shirt, or go left or right down a hallway. Though the latter three are all things that can add interactivity in small ways and even be interesting in their own right depending on how they're written, I wouldn't expect or even want an entire new path created off of every minor detail.

But however you decide to approach it, I think you'll find plotting a CYOA is a tricky thing that takes a lot of planning and restraint. Endlessly branching paths blooming out and getting away from an author have been the death of countless stories. I'd advise laying out the outline of the story in a visual way, like a web. There are programs out there, or even a poster board and some sticky notes will do. 

It really does boil down to how much writing you're willing to do.

The more possibilities there are, the more likely someone will spend more time playing your game, and the more they'll be willing to replay it in hope of finding a different path after reaching an ending.

On the other hand, too many endings quickly becomes unmanageable, both to write and to script without getting pages mixed up or accidentally causing bugs and dead ends.

Pick a manageable amount of endings, somewhere between 2 and 10, and go from there. Plot some side routes, but ultimately, funnel everything back towards those set endings. Having certain checkpoints that the reader must pass through helps too, because it prunes back the amount of branches, while still giving some leeway in how the reader gets from point A to point B.

Another possibility is to write 'dead ends' that don't immediately end, but allow the reader to progress another two or three pages onwards, possibly with some more branches that lead back to the main path or into other dead ends. That helps give the reader a feeling of choice without having to commit to writing a whole new path just to accommodate it. For instance, write a few choices that, if chosen, will ultimately result in game over no matter what, but this doesn't become apparent until three or four more choices down the road.

Since a lot of authors seem to fail to consider this, I'd add too that not every dead ending has to end in actual death, or even be unpleasant. There are lots of ways to end a story or a character's involvement in it, even if it's not what's considered one of the 'true' endings.

^Well said. Check out the endings in Endmaster's Ground Zero, for example.

I quite like this suggestion of giving the player choices that carry on for a few pages then ultimately lead to a game over, but sometimes it will annoy people. But then those people are probably the ones that don't like reading anyway, so it's sort of difficult to please them (and why should you anyway?).

There are less people who will complain about increased difficulty than there are people who are irked by obvious dead ends left and right.

I try to put illustrations on most of my dead ends, which are then added to the 'bonus content' page, so the reader at least feels like they got something out of it?

Do keep in mind how quickly the number of paths will require writing. Case in point: The Adventures of Rory Thorn. It is a short story with an average of 3,000 words from start to finish. However, because there are a large number of choices on each page, there are over 16,000 words there.

Yes, more choices is fun, but if you go that route, you have to live with the idea that most readers will never even see most of the words that you write and a story with a large number of words will, in fact, be quite short.

It really depends on what you are writing about. As a rule of thumb, the broader and more detailed the character's world is, the more choices you can weave into the story. 

Since this is your first story, I would recommend that you write out your main path without worrying too much about different choices, and once you are happy with how that is written, branch out from there. Often you will get a lot of ideas for different paths as you are writing a page - just record them and expand those paths as you deem fit. One interesting way to move the story along is to offer several different choices, where you have to find some item or solve some puzzle/problem to get to the next stage, although you may not be comfortable enough with the advanced editor to do that yet.  

Try reading Eternal. I think there's 13 different endings, all with quite different consequences as far as the protagonists' actions go. It'll give you a good idea of how much variation there can be with as little as 13 different 'true' endings (although there are dozens more 'non-canon' endings where the protagonist dies early). In some ways there's even less than 13 paths in the sense that some of those multiple endings branch very close to the final parts of the storyline.