Structure

Books

Many choose your own adventure books follow the tried and tested method of using a 'branching' structure that generally will provide the user with an interaction within the story in which they will be required to decide upon the path that the story will take, further on they will be presented with a similar process and so on until they arrive at an appropriate ending, concluding their adventure. I came across a few different examples of these kinds of structure maps.

Since this appears to be the tried and tested method for 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books I decided to look further afield, mainly towards games as nowadays they offer many choices. I came across some history about 'Choose your own adventure' books that I found quite interesting. I have included a quote and link to the source bellow.

In 1969, in the course of making up bedtime stories for his children, Edward Packard wrote Sugarcane Island, the book that became the prototype for the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The William Morris Agency submitted the book on Packard's behalf to several major publishers, all of whom rejected it. In 1976 Packard approached Vermont Crossroads Press (VCP), known for its highly creative and innovative children's books, about publishing the title. R. A. Montgomery, co-founder of VCP, had designed several "you"-based role-playing games for the Peace Corps, McGraw-Hill and the Edison Electric Institute in the early 1970s and immediately saw the potential in the book's format. He proposed making it into a series, and calling it "The Adventures of You." Upon publication of Sugarcane Island, Publishers Weekly called it "an original idea, well carried out." source

I find myself returning to Hello World by Jason Shiga. I really liked the inventory system he used as I found it to be a really innovative and different way of doing things from the norm which is why it interested me. His books don't just offer choices in the form of branch A,B or C but keep a record of what you have achieved through the items you have acquired while also offering the option to use said items to encounter a completely different option or branch to those already on offer. The beauty in this is that other people could arrive at the same junction and be given the choice of A,B or C and because they may have came to that junction through different circumstances they will not have the same items that you might have had and therefore could have a completely new set of options available to them depending on the items that they have picked up along the way. Where most 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books do offer a good deal of replay or reread ability the inclusion of the inventory system in Jason Shiga's book offers an almost endless amount of branches to choose from in each of the plot points that require a decision, mainly due to the fact that the same point could offer completely different outcomes depending on the items you have acquired.

Games

I have been looking into modern games also as it is now common place for big budget games to offer multiple endings, encouraging players to play through the game a couple times just to see the different outcomes according to their actions this time round. These generally rely on a series of moral choices that will determine whether they are good, evil or somewhere in between. They can also rely on certain events for example in Mass Effect 2 depending on what 3 crew members you assigned to your squad out of the 9 or so, or what character you gave a specific task would determine what characters died as a result. This would be towards the end of the game, after you have spent a good 20+ hours getting to know and love some of these characters, leveling them up, getting them equipment, learning their strengths and weaknesses while enjoying the dialogue you could have between them.   

Ideas

The 'branching' structure is a tried and tested method that does work well but play through it enough and you would quickly encounter each of the different endings. That doesn't mean it is a bad structure to use, it would work quite well for an interactive comic. however I would like to try my hand at something a little more complex and if that doesn't work the branching structure could always act as a fall back. One idea is to create some kind of moral choice bar, the reader/player would still have to be presented with some 'branching' options these would have a good/neutral/bad choice that would have to be picked from. The user would also encounter specific points in the story that would play out according to their previous choices. For example if they keep being bad to people they get the bad guy ending and vice versa for the good ending.