The Stupidest Puzzle in Adventure Gamebook History

You try to cross back to the real world, but it is no good. Some force holds you here. It will be released only if you are successful in the Trial of Ghosts. You have heard that in some parts of Titan, humans practice barbaric forms of trial. For instance, a sorcerer might be thrashed with stout branches of thorn. If the wounds on his body form, in the judges' opinion, shapes born of Hell, then he is burned as a necromancer; if not, he is released, though he may be near death or scarred for life.

In the same way, the Trial of Ghosts is arbitrary - a matter mainly of luck. On the opposite page is what you see on the ground in front of you. Roll one die: this is the number of the square you start on. You now have to pick a route through to the centre, which is where the judges sit, and is indicated in the diagram by a question mark. The route you take must consist of only five squares, including the one you start with. The route can go vertically, horizontally, or diagonally from square to square. Thus, if you start from 4, your route could be 4, 7, 183, 21, 19. When you have chosen your route, turn to the paragraph whose number is its total (234 in the example above). If the paragraph makes no sense, you have failed the test and will be hanged on the gallows, with the crowd's laughter ringing in your ears. Because you are currently bound to this world, your POWER will be drained and your physical body will die too. Good luck!

Section 309 of Phantoms of Fear, there, with a puzzle charitably described by the Fighting Fantasy Wiki as "flawed in multiple ways". If it's not obvious from the text, you are in a dream world during this encounter, so whether or not the paragraph you reach as a result of this puzzle makes sense or not may be up to the player's interpretation.

One thing not really mentioned whenever this puzzle comes up, though, is that it's not actually necessary to complete the book. You can completely avoid the Trial of Ghosts in a successful playthrough.

So: Is this just a terribly designed puzzle, or a massive piece of trolling on author Robin Waterfield's part for players who go the wrong way?

(On another note: see section 332 of Space Assassin, which is similar (it's skippable but can come up in a successful readthrough)... but author Andrew Chapman, who lived in Australia when it was written and had no input once he'd submitted what he'd written to Puffin, later stated that it bore no resemblance to the puzzle from his original manuscript, and it was as much a mystery to him as it was to everyone who read it!)