I wasn't allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons because everyone thought it was evil and satanic, but nobody monitored my reading too closely, so I was free to read gamebooks. These were the closest I could get to D&D and my favorite was the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever. The covers for the books were a bit more tame compared to the Fighting Fantasy books, which often featured gory or evil looking covers if I remember correctly. The fun I had reading about Lone Wolf, the last of the Kai Lords, made me a lifelong fan of fantasy novels as well as an avoid role playing gamer. Dever released about 30 books in the series and I believe all of them are now available for free, so anyone can experience them in HTML form without having to spend a dime. A mobile game was also released about the character, but to me nothing will ever beat the original books.