If you're at all like me, when you were a kid, you read books from the Fighting Fantasy series. These were like choose your own adventure books (which we also available), but unlike the CYOA books, there were monsters and fighting.

Some Links:

http://www.advancedfightingfantasy.com/

http://www.fightingfantasygamebooks.com/

I was thinking that it wouldn't be all that terribly hard to make webpages that allowed you to play adventures like these. It's not like they need graphics, just text.

And it reminds me of an old text adventure creation utility I made when I was a teenager....

The key is keeping the game system small and simple. The old fighting fantasy books had three statistics: Skill, Stamina, and Luck. These games were perfectly playable with just these three stats.

I think this stuff could really work in Flash...