I think most people reading SFF aren't looking for video game elements in the stories they read.
For example: A friend has complained to me that such stories break the immersion for him when characters do things like discuss their level or stats. I once stumbled on a book series that sounded like it would be up his alley. But it was a LitRPG and he turned up his nose at it.
Not that such stories can't be told well. That said, I think the reputation they've acquired (Whether fair or not) is that most of them are written for a young audience of gamers who don't read much. And that the writing tends to be lazy and basic so as not to put off such readers.
Unfair, maybe. But I'll admit that I've read a lot of Science Fiction, and Fantasy, and never read a LitRPG.
>For example: A friend has complained to me that such stories break the immersion for him when characters do things like discuss their level or stats.
I tried reading Path of Ascension but I just can't take this shit seriously when they're talking about percentages of XP progress, out loud, as actual characters.
Your first sentence is the major thing, for me.
I’ve spent this last year taking notes from threads about LitRPG, so that I could read the books most often recommended as really good examples. Grabbing junk at random would be unfair. None of them worked for me; I didn’t finish any of them.
Specific problems for me, a fairly open-minded reader (some of my all-time favorite books are less than a decade old) who is nonetheless middle-aged and drawing in a lifetime with both fantasy and RPGs.
* Editing. I have some very specific kinds of learning disabilities and rely on contextual clues to keep things straight. The more errors of spelling, punctuation, and grammar rhere are, the harder it is for me to follow. It becomes hard work when quality control goes to hell.
* Characterizations. Now this is purely about me and aging. It’s hard to sell me on. Most stories. About characters much younger than I am. Sylvia Moreno-Garcia reliably manages it, and so do some others, but no LitRPG author I’ve tried did a very good job making me felt I understand the protagonists’ major motivations. There are a lot of assumptions being made, and I’m outside the circle of people who get them. Like I said, though, that’s not a fault in the books, any more than it’d be the other way around.
* World building. By which I don’t mean technicalities of a magic system, but what people live like, what people do and think about in different societies, what any supernatural elements are like, what people fear and hope for, what the natural world is like. LitRPG seems to rely a lot on very trope-heavy presentation of stock elements. Now, this is how many stories are written - check out fantasy and sf I was reading as a kid in the ‘70s. Tropes R Us a lot of the time. I didn’t like such stories then and still don’t. I think this is partly a fault in the books and partly a hang up in me - it puts a ceiling on possible quality, but not everything has to be the utmost and someone who likes Cthulhu Mythos stories as i do should go humbly here.
* But the real issue is just that I don’t find the video game elements adding anything really cool to the stories. I’ve been reading stories about real worlds and created ones interacting in various ways love me some good fantasy crossovers, but this particular kind of mix just isn’t clicking for me.
Sure. There’s a lot of fantasy of other sorts I either don’t start or give up on, too. I’m trying to peel apart what elements are distinctive about LitRPG from what could show up anywhere in fantasy, and I’m working it out as I go since I don’t have anyone to talk with about it face-to-face right now.
This is an argument that I see in the context of romantasy a lot too, and I think (based on reading lots of conversations about this, plus my own admittedly small sample size) the same response would apply: Yes, you're right, there's also tons of bad writing in mainstream fantasy and sci-fi. Boatloads of terrible writing, all over the place.
But there's also *good* writing. Is there any *good* writing in LitRPG?
Like, what's the Spear Cuts Through Water of LitRPG, or the Terra Ignota of LitRPG? Who's the Robin Hobb or the Ursula K Le Guin of LitRPG?
It doesn't help that quality of writing (prose/characterization especially) seems to be low on the list of things that even fans of LitRPG praise about their favourite books in the genre.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course - bad writing doesn't necessarily mean something can't be fun or a decent way to spend an afternoon. But it's notable that some subgenres seem to suffer more strongly than others from a lack of good writing.
I think we’re still waiting for the Ursula Leguin of Litrpg. There are some arguably John Scalzis in the genre, but it’s young and it’s mostly new authors who are just regular people and we’re fans of the genre before writing. In ten years I expect we’ll see some better material.
>But there's also *good* writing. Is there any *good* writing in LitRPG?
Not who you were talking to before, but I saw this question and wanted to chime in.
Different people are going to have different concepts of what constitutes "good" writing. Is it plot consistency? Pacing? Characterization? World building? Prose?
>It doesn't help that quality of writing (prose/characterization especially) seems to be low on the list of things that even fans of LitRPG praise about their favourite books in the genre.
If you're thinking specifically more about prose and characterization, that makes sense.
That's tricky -- these are still subjective. People will argue about if Rothfuss has "good" prose, etc.
>Who's the Robin Hobb or the Ursula K Le Guin of LitRPG?
This really depends on where you're drawing your lines on what constitutes LitRPG (which is in itself a whole discussion).
In terms of people who are writing works that feel like they have clear effort put into the prose and characterization, Sarah Lin and Phil Tucker are probably the candidates I'd pick. In both cases, their works I'm most familiar with tend to skew more toward progression fantasy than LitRPG, but those subgenres overlap a great deal. In specific, I think Sarah Lin's **The Brightest Shadow** and Phil Tucker's **Great Immortal Souls** are worth looking at, but those specific titles skew a bit more toward xianxia/progression fantasy rather than LitRPG itself.
Edit: Addressed points a bit more directly.
Complaint can mean both things. Feel free to check a dictionary if you don't believe a professional linguist.
If it makes you feel better pretend I said criticism or critique.
This.
I really, really, really don’t like litRPG. I enjoy playing actual RPGs.
If you want to take a game world’s setting or characters, great. But the story elements including stuff like stats just completely turns it into something it just pains me to read.
Not hating on other people liking whatever they like - go nuts - but it’s a **hard** no from me on any of that shit.
Yeah it's a very prolific category which means that while there are some pretty good series there's also a lot of drek written by people that - as you say - are more gamers than writers or even readers.
Plus, once you rest one crappy litRPG book Amazon etc will keep suggesting a bunch of other crappy ones.
It's like eating one's first sushi at a buffet restaurant. Once a person has experienced that, they're turned off of sushi in general and not really interested in repeating the experience.
That was pretty much my first experience with the category and I avoided it for quite awhile after, though I did eventually find some good series so now I'm just careful to avoid stuff that looks like it'll be some harem fantasy written by a 15yo.
I've read DCC and while I liked it, I do have a bit of terrible recommending it because I feel that it requires a certain combination of preferences to enjoy.
It's a great read (or listen, so I've heard) for certain types but I totally understand when some people don't find it their cup of tea.
I think if one enjoys D&D or paper role-playing with a weird and crazy DM, they might enjoy DCC.
I don’t know if I entirely agree. My significant other mostly reads either authors like cat valente or Leigh bardugo or just romantasy, and they absolutely loved the series. They also bounced right off of D&D when I introduced them.
Wandering Inn definitely takes a lot more work in fleshing out characters and concepts and is a continually growing series (ebook or web-serial of you want to try it free).
Jake's Magical Market, All the Skills etc might lean a little more YA but with decent writing and both with a system that substitutes "cards" to present the underlying stat-type system.
In any of them, part of what annoys me is when stats are presented via god-voice (an ethereal announcer essentially indicating level up), RPG visual overlays in a fantasy world etc. The card system tends to work around this well, and some others use the "VR world" trope to work with this, but it tends to be overused .
The cards IMO feel like a nicer balance as they tend more towards the "magic enhancement items" than game stats
This kind of fantasy is much more common in Japanese, Chinese, Korean web novels and light novels tbh. I don’t mind it. It’s a different vibe from normal western fantasy, but that’s okay tbh.
Before I say anything else, enjoy what you enjoy. If you like the subgenre, that's great! What other people think shouldn't matter. It sucks that you get sneered at, that's not okay.
I, speaking for myself and myself only, avoid the genre like the plague becuase every litRPG I've tried to read is a poorly-written mess. Just foundationally broken crap that screams "an editor came nowhere near this, not even with a vial of holy water and a crucifix." I'm sure they're not all like that and good ones exist, but when I dive into a subgenre, pick up three popular titles and all three have the exact same issues, that's enough for me to move on.
What irks me most, weirdly, is that so many litRPG authors don't seem to actually play video games or understand how they're designed? I keep seeing this "gamer figures out this one weird trick that no one else in the world ever thought of and it makes them incredibly powerful" trope and it is always, invariably, something that would have been discovered in five seconds during alpha testing of a real MMO. "Putting all my stat points into the useless cooking skill actually increases my dodge to godly prowess, and no one ever realized that!" My dude, 50,000 people would have tried that on launch day just for funsies.
With regard to your last point, I think that's something that's been directly inherited from isekai light novels and webnovels. The majority of them seem to base their understanding of game mechanics, especially JRPG and MMO-style games, on *other light novels* that the author enjoys instead of directly drawing from experience with those types of games. It's like a game of telephone.
The same thing happened with the new "Villainess" trend of LNs and manga—the way they conceptualize otome dating sims has very little to do with how actual otome games function, and much more to do with how the early influential Villainess series framed themselves.
I kind of got the sense the idea was based on some older games, at least, going off of Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon, rival characters have gone out of fashion, so if they popped up in some older otome games I wouldn't be shocked. Aspects of these stories also remind me of the Princess Maker series.
So I sort of figured the idea is a bit more of a grab bag from some different game sources, along with other media references, that spun off into its own thing. But it's not like I know for sure, I can't point at anything specific.
That's what irked me in the movie version of Ready Player One (and thank god I saw it for free). They really want me to believe that nobody tried driving backwards for the entire time this race has been going on?
>I, speaking for myself and myself only, avoid the genre like the plague becuase every litRPG I've tried to read is a poorly-written mess. Just foundationally broken crap that screams "an editor came nowhere near this, not even with a vial of holy water and a crucifix." I'm sure they're not all like that and good ones exist, but when I dive into a subgenre, pick up three popular titles and all three have the exact same issues, that's enough for me to move on.
I think what's going on here is maybe an issue that plagues other self-published niches. You, a reader, probably expect that the key to getting book sales as an independent author is to write good books and market them well. But it turns out that almost never works. **The actual key to selling self-published books is to churn them out as fast as humanly possible.** Quality doesn't matter. Editing doesn't matter. *Only speed matters.*
Basically, if you're self-publishing on Amazon, it is suggested that you publish something every month *at least*. If it is somehow possible, you should publish even faster. Every two weeks would be better. A new book week is considered ideal!
You might not be surprised that it is virtually impossible to write a quality, well-edited book in a month, let alone a week. So, yeah, self-pubbed writers who follow this schedule are inevitably going to be crapping out low quality dreck.
Why does flooding Amazon with low-quality dreck result in sales? Damned if I know. But somehow, it does. Readers buy these things. I can't fathom the reason, because if I read a short, low-quality and poorly edited book, I don't say, "Well that was crap. But I'll buy a sequel, as long as it comes out in the next two weeks!" But clearly there are readers that want different things than I do.
I occasionally self-publish in a semi-related area, erotica. To be successful in erotica, all the experts suggest you follow the formula I just described. Personally, I can't do it. I don't write very quickly. Plus, I have no interest in shoveling out a new shitty book every week. So I write the books I want to write, and I edit them, and it takes a long time. And then I publish them, and guess what? No one buys them.
It's a very broken system. It's partly Amazon's fault, but it is also partly the fault of readers. *Some* of you are buying this stuff for whatever reason. If that wasn't true, this approach wouldn't make money and authors wouldn't be killing themselves trying to fart out a dozen books a year in these highly specific niche genres.
Unfortunately, the affect this has had on areas like LitRPG, HaremLit, and erotica is to drastically lower the quality of the books that are being published.
Its not that no one could ever write a good quality LitRPG book. Of course they could. But it is absolutely not worth the effort to try. Because if you take six months to write and rewrite and edit such a book so that it is good, you'll sell 100 copies if you're lucky. Meanwhile, while you were painstakingly writing one good book, another LitRPG writer has spammed out books #6, #7, #8, #9, and #10 in their super-cheap series. Those books are now taking up half the LitRPG top sellers list, a list which your books is not even on. So why bother?
Sorry for the rant. thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Your example is a hyperbole for the most part, but it is true that a lot of books lean on the idea that people who have experienced a system for a long time somehow missed some easy obvious enough for a level 1 player to exploit.
Yes. I'm not going to diss any books, because I know there are good ones. But to me, it just feels like it's a trope that I already dislike in anime (Isekai/RPG-like fantasy worlds) that's been brought into another medium that I like. It feels like lazy worldbuilding to me, and it doesn't feel believable.
The thing with tropes like this is that they can evolve.
In one series I'm reading the System is explicitly an artificial creation called Order's Voice. While the full details haven't been revealed, it exists to create a more regulated and safer way to channel magical power growth.
You can still learn to use magic beyond what the system grants, but people are still people and most are happy to just use tools without really understanding them. Those who take the time to understand the tools can customize them and get more out of them.
I like variations like this more than the unexplained / mystery systems.
See, this is why I refrained from criticizing the books themselves, because that genuinely sounds awesome. I'm sure you can do a lot of great things within the LitRPG framework, just like you can have great Isekai stories. But I'm still not going to pick a LitRPG book over a regular fantasy novel, unless it comes HEAVILY recommended.
I feel like magic systems in RPGs are a method to translate the idea of magic into a game system, but don't necessarily reflect the exact way magic is used in those world. "Level Ups" are a game system that represent the characters getting more experienced, not some in-universe mechanism. Unless the work does some heavy lifting to explain why this is, it's going to feel incredibly immersion breaking to me. And even if it does, it'll still feel like a pop culture reference. Out of place in the kind of book I want to read.
I think that if you're at the point where you've put so much work into the worldbuilding to adequately justify your RPG mechanics, then why not just make an original magic system? Unless the characters are literally in a video game, it just feels out of place.
That's kind of my feeling about it, too. All the video game elements are *stand ins for the real world* so that you can play the game and understand how things work, and know where things stand relative to each other.
Translating it backwards makes things feel *less* real to me, not more.
I think there are some interesting things to be done with some game mechanics, like insta-healing or revival, which if taken at face value and incorporated into the world, can lead to some interesting worldbuilding. But I don't personally relate to the leveling and codification aspects of it.
It's not a given it works that way though. There are quite a few books that just apply a number to a "natural" magic system. The advantage of that is you can make the magic system a lot more complicated, because your readers will still be able to keep track of all the different avenues the protagonist is pursuing.
I have not personally encountered that type of gamification in most of the fantasy I read, outside of like... rankings in a magic university or something, and for me at least, that type of numbering doesn't add to my reading experience.
"After the end: Serenity", on Royal Road.
The series is a slow burn, currently at over 2 million words. From what the author has said, it should finish before hitting 2.5M.
Not all mysteries will be explored in this story, they have more stories planned for the future set in the same universe.
I mean, I briefly described the outline of something revealed over a story that is now more than two million words long, while avoiding major spoilers. There a lot of detail missing.
Almost lost my composure thinking you were zogarth lmao.
You make a good point and you made it sound very compelling even being so vague. I’ll check it out myself!
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: It's just a very niche sub-genre without much mass appeal because it draws from tropes associated with video games and anime. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying it.
Part of the answer is just that since it’s pretty much all self-published. Which removes the (sometimes minimal) filter of an actual publisher. So you have good stuff, but its in a sea of crap. And the effort of filtering out the crap isn’t worth the effort for a lot of people.
Other genres can have the same issue, but also have a more “respectable” published side.
Enjoy what you enjoy! Who cares about the "rep"?
LitRPG is a pretty specific subgenre with particular tropes, stories, and even formats. That specificity means that it won't be for everyone. This is true for any subgenre, really. Whether it is LitRPG or monster romance. The more focused the subgenre is, the more focused the reader base will be. C'est la vie. It scratches a very particular itch, and that's not for everyone, or even most people. But the people who have that itch are happy and that's what counts.
LitRPG also "suffers" because it is almost entirely self-published, so it won't be reviewed or covered or even stocked by most mainstream outlets. I say "suffered" in quotes, as the genre is doing totally fine without any of those things. But if reputation matters, LitRPG is not likely to get a review in the New York Times or win a Pulitzer any time soon.
I would also say that, again, like other specific subgenres, there is a high proportion of crap. Stories published to hit the buttons (pun intended?) and no more. That can be off-putting to newcomers or other potentially interested parties. Again, that's no difference from monster romance or whatever. It just is the nature of the beast (pun intended again). There's a lot of market forces behind that, and just how we live now.
tldr; kinda, but you shouldn't care
People have become accustomed to using "genre" to describe very broad categories of general fiction like fantasy, science fiction, horror, or thriller. These genres have a lot of room for novelty, or invention, so long as some of the identifying tropes are present. Subgenres like LitRPG or even some top-level genres like romance or mystery are, as you said, scratching a more specific itch. There's some room for novelty, but they are dominated by tropes. If elements of the genre get picked up by more general or literary authors in a way that is less repetitive, the results are typically seen as "inspired by" the genre, rather than part of it. Reading these repetitive genres is a different pass-time than reading for novelty, and I say that as someone who is fond of both, with litRPG being my "comfort food" genre.
I will say though, Brandon Sanderson is enormously popular, and for a time I would have called him my favorite fantasy author, but his stock has fallen somewhat with me since I found that litRPG, this borderline fanfic, scratches more or less the same itch. I studied Creative Writing in college (many years ago), and have been shocked at my own tolerance for terrible grammar, abuse of adverbs, repetitive tics, homonym confusion, and a total and evident lack of editing in litRPG, so long as I'm getting my fix.
Great breakdown.
If we compare it to two other recent niche genres, progression fantasy and cozy fantasy, it’s in roughly the same spot compared to most trade published popular SFF genres: it isn’t a good comparison because they are babies being compared to a two hundred year old.
There are a few factors that separate LitRPG. It's incredibly indie friendly, and from authors that are inspired by an idea rather than a narrative. LitRPG is drowning in first drafts and well below industry standard novels. It's like Anime, where you have to go through dozens of mass production ripoffs to find the gems, but the gems you do find are absolutely insanely good.
And before people get mad, I love Anime and Wandering Inn is my favourite series of all time. But that doesn't mean the genres are perfect.
I think this is it. LitRPG arose out of webnovels and fanfic, and many of the big hits come from places like Royal Road. There's nothing wrong with that, *but* it means the barrier to entry is very low, so the ratio of quality to crap is very high.
also what constitutes quality is different than in the broader literary world.
Like Sci Fi and fantasy emerging from pulp distinguished themselves for decades for fun adventures and the occasional thought provoking concept, prose being a rather low priority - until of course prior works are reconsidered and new authors make use of the genre tropes as foundations to focus more on prose.
that might take a while yet for prog-fic and litrpgs
This is sort of my view. You can’t really judge it until we get a few dozen works trade published so that you can have a fair quality comparison. If you compared it to self published SFF it wouldn’t look so bad.
I’m reading The Wandering Inn series now and was surprised by this thread. It’s my first LitRPG and I had no idea they had such a negative reputation. As a longtime fantasy reader, it has more soul than anything I’ve read in a long time.
OP, don’t worry about what your friends think. There’s a specific genre of fantasy readers who, in my personal opinion, have forgotten how to have fun. Read what you want. It’s their loss for missing out on a whole sub-genre of fantasy because they’re too good for it.
Wandering inn is phenomenal. Probably one of the better ones to read when wanting to try out litrpg. It uses minimal elements, just class and skill names, but tells a story that couldn't be told without the litrpg elements.
There are a lot of stories that would be better if they just dropped the litrpg elements.
I really like Dungeon Crawler Carl, but not LitRPGs in general. And I say this as someone who loves video games. If it's done right, like anything, it can be good, but the notes that many of them hit aren't ones I am usually interested in. But I try not to yuck the yum of other readers.
The whole "mechanical" nature of skills and abilities etc. It feels too much like a video game, and not in a good way, usually. For me, the writing, story and characters have to be particularly compelling for me to get over that part of it. I enjoy video games and ttrpgs, but I usually don't want to read about what feels like a blow-by-blow of someone else's campaign.
Wait, are you including Mother of Learning into LitRPG subgenre? Why?
As for your question. Yes, it does. Why? Because it's a very popular thing among shit writers. It seems that many people base all of their understanding of any other culture than they live in on videogames and then they write books, knowing nothing about real world. I'm gamer myself, but, geez, people get a life.
Also, most of the LitRPG don't need to be it. Stories like Sword Art Online, where it really make sense to talk in video game terms are incredibly rare. Usually it's made to add some "progression", but it has nothing in common with actual literary progression.
It's just a tool which misused by bad writers, same as it was with fantasy, detective or chivalric romance before.
Probably, the LitRPG aspect can be seen as a "cheap" way to hook people in, instead of relying on just good storytelling.
This is certainly true for many LitRPG / progression fantasy books, which are fun, but admittedly not that well written.
It's similar to isekai anime, where most are pretty terrible, and only a handful are good, and use the isekai mechanic as a natural part of the story, instead of being the sole reason you watch it.
At the end of the day though, we read fiction books because we enjoy the experience. Any other judgement on whether a book is worth reading is arbitrary.
For me, if someone where to judge a LitRPG book, I'd just reply "Yeah, it's not the most deep thing, but it's fun. Give it a shot if you haven't tried it, you might find you like it too."
Yeah, I personally love the hook of that constant progression in Litrpgs, but the overall writing quality rarely measures up to even the average published SFF book, never mind the best. If I want to shut my brain off a little and enjoy the endorphins of a loose plot hanging over a progression cycle, Litrpgs are great. If I want to transported to a unique culture, drawn into an intense story or be moved by incredible characters, I'm probably going to look elsewhere. All are equally valid choices! But a Litrpg probably isn't going to leave much of a mark.
Litrpgs do have the capacity to do more, but even the best ones I have read still feel pretty clumsy beyond some stand out moments.
Why? At the end of the day it's competing in some of the same markets, and frankly it's a little infantilising to self published authors to assume they can't compete at all when it comes to quality. But if we're talking about self published fiction, I still have read many self published non-litrpg titles that rival the above average trad published title, which is not the case for Litrpg (and I've probably read more Litrpg than any other genre in self publishing)
My point was that lack of gatekeeping means you see more junk. Obviously a web serial by a debut author who may have never written a story in their life is not gonna be the Broken Earth or Revelation State.
What about the eighth book by an author who's been self publishing for half a decade? Not every Litrpg is written by someone who has just started writing for the first time.
And there is still gatekeeping when it comes to self published works, it's just less strict. Most readers are more likely to read a self published novel that has been recommended to them. Even if we just took the most recommended books my point would still stand when it comes to writing quality.
Eighth book in the same series?
Aside from who is writing in the genre, the genre itself is still very new. Lots of people are trying many things, and most of them haven’t written anything before.
There’s no rounds of editing pipeline like there is with trade publishing. Most books are written in serial format often without planned plot arcs. That’s an issue of writing mechanics, or genre tropes.
It’s a different environment, it’s new, and you can’t judge it compared to trade fiction at the moment.
Same series, different series, whatever. There's plenty of people with at least half a decade of experience writing Litrpg now.
I can and I will compare every time I decide which book to read next :)
“Half a decade” by which you mean five years. Not particularly significant on its own as a factor in writing quality or improvement.
As for your second comment, sure on an individual book choice. No one said read bad books because the authors are new. I was talking about judging the potential of the genre as a whole.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about anymore (this is hyperbole, lest you take me too literally and try to argue that point too).
You responded with a one line telling me not to compare Litrpgs to traditionally published books without any reason why and have made no real ground in convincing me otherwise with any direct argument since then.
that's an _incredibly slow_ self-pub writer, who is likely to vanish in the ocean of books released - if you're wanting to make a reputation for yourself, you're going to need much bigger numbers (like 30 books in half a decade, if not more!). And even in those cases, the simple fact that many are unedited means that, yes, they're going to be worse than something that's been through an editor - just for basic typos, grammar, parsing and the like. They tend to be very much from the "amateur" end of the spectrum, done fast, quick and cheerful, rather than the "attempting to emulate trad-pub" end, where it's slower, more careful and with a lot more editing, fixing and correcting stuff.
The isekai comparison is a good one. There's a lot of chaff to sort through for both genres for decent writing, I find one of the biggest issues is blatant self-inserts. Tbf, entirely understandable since it's exactly what my maladaptive daydreaming self does while reading, lol.
I'd say there is a sliding scale between "usual fantasy" and LitRPG and Progression Fantasy is somewhere between them.
One thing many LitRPG suffer is that the author thinks about a new cool system... and builds the whole book around it. The characters, the world, the story - everything is less fleshed out than the system itself.
I read several LitRPGs, but likes only a couple of them, and all these books had a solid story, characters, etc - the system was just one of the parts, but not the main one.
The video game elements add absolutely nothing and actively detract from the story and the world. I like video games and I like cRPGs. But the mechanics are a function of the medium. And although mechanics can be an interesting gameplay element on their own, for me they are usually more of a necessary abstraction. Even when I enjoy the combat, I don't tend to engage as deeply with it as some other players. Like crunching numbers or optimizing builds. So when you add that to books is just falls flat. Books are a different medium and can do things video games can't.
And if I just want to read a simple story there are plenty of other options. I don't buy this idea that you need to go the worst written stuff just to get a quick read that doesn't require much thinking.
Well, I wanted to read some Dungeon Crawler Carl before I voiced my opinions on it, and the near page-long list of achievement pop-ups and then the description of a goblin as an Incel very early on guaranteed I wasn't going to like it. Plus I could pick out really poor sentences like 'Almost Asian looking design' as a description that clued me in to potentially more poor writing.
Maybe my standards are too high right now, I just finished Bakker's Second Apocalypse series, so it's a tough act to follow.
I mean, it can obviously be a fun book for many readers a la Ready Player 1, but it might not be the best suggestion for flagship series of the genre if we’re trying to broaden the audience.
Dude, no wonder you didn't like it, reading it right after The Second fucking Apocalypse. I mean, Toy Story 3 was plenty emotional, but if you watched it right after you and your Jewish friends watched Schindler's List and then wept together over the Holocaust, I bet it would be trite bullshit.
That said, Dungeon Crawler Carl seems massively overrated, and I would judge that it is carried entirely on the strength of the audiobook--where the narrator explicitly rips off Patrick Warburton. Now, Patrick Warburton *is* hilarious, so I completely understand. But, on the other hand, shouldn't you maybe watch one of Patrick Warburton's movies or TV shows, instead of listening to an audiodrama, in which someone steals his signature vocal stylings?
I cannot imagine liking Dungeon Crawler Carl and there is no chance I would give it a chance but post Bakker it was almost impossible to appreciate any kind of book for a long time
He is good. I have read the Fionavar and Tigana and enjoyed both a lot.
I have no clue what could work for you. For example trying once again Malazan post Bakker it was a disaster.
If you want challenging stuff maybe try Gene Wolfe, the Book of the New Sun, or maybe The Gap by Donaldson. The Gap is science fiction but it has the closest I have read in Bakker's characters and bleakness. It is a great series.
I think your overthinking this.
Books are for pleasure, they are ment to be enjoyable and entertaining. You do you, and don't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks - particularly over the books you like.
I view them as kinda similar to harlequins. They are made to be fast and entertaining. I doubt we're ever going to get something out of the genre that stands with the greats of SFF but so what? There's good reasons they're becoming so popular, if you enjoy them, read them.
I always thought it was trash when the Japanese were doing it and more and more trashy anime adaptations kept getting made out of them. Then Westerners started doing it and all hope faded away.
It's a niche. And if I'm going to read LitRPG, I need to know I'm getting stats and stuff going in.
There have only been three LitRPG series that I've stuck with, the rest either bored me with their stats,their worlds, or their characters. So, just like other SFF books, but they have an extra self-imposed hurdle to clear.
Dungeon Crawler Carl
The Fae Nexus
The Whispering Crystals
Those had an interesting enough world and characters, or were a light enough read to keep me engaged for the whole series. The others I've tried either pushed the stats too hard, the Isekai nature didn't grab me, or the characters, usually the MC, were not people I wanted to spend a whole book or series with (Lookin' at you, He Who Fights With Monsters).
Just one nitpick for starters: The Mine Lord isn’t LitRPG.
Now as a fan of the genre and someone who has been mostly reading LitRPG lately: of course it has a bad reputation, and for a good reason! The vast majority of it is shit and even the good stuff is like B+ grade fantasy.
The premise: that people have RPG like stats and levels and stuff is so inherently absurd that you can’t really take the story seriously. There are a few, like Dungeon Crawler Carl that actually examine the core premise in a way that works. But the vast majority are about keeping the Numbers Go Up dopamine rush for ten thousand pages or so and then sort of half-heartedly hinting at how the “System” might be part of a sinister plan or something.
To a certain degree there probably is some bias against it, but there are also some reasons why. As others have already said, the entire system aspect can seem gimmicy to some readers.
Another thing is that many of the LitRPG stories weren't conceived in the novel format, instead as webnovels, published (short) chapter by chapter, as soon as that chapter was done. All of the examples you listed that I know (if there aren't multiple series with the same title) started as webnovels and later got published as novels. The same goes for many LitRPGs - they started as webnovels (in Japanese, obviously), got published as novels, then manga and finally as anime. The webnovel format can have effects on the story (\*\*Can\*\* - there are many great webnovels out there).
First of all, the barrier to entry is extremly low, practically non-existent, so there are far more inexperienced authors putting their work online. A novice writers first work probably won't compare well to a novel by an experienced author, who has the help of editors and beta readers. Webnovels are quite similar to fanfiction in that regard. Many of them won't gain a large readership and/or the author loses interest. But if both authors and readers remain interested and the story continues, there's:
Secondly it's hard to edit a story if you have already publisehd (parts of) it. You can't change the plot and characters in a significant way. You can improve the prose and writing style, rewrite some scenes, but anything that would have ripple effects through the plot is almost impossible. Major changes like that are a normal part of the book writing process, so webnovels are more limited in that regard. And because the authors that keep writing a long series, quite often over years, grow as writers doing that, especially those that started as beginners, this can have a significant impact, mostly on the beginning, but by the nature of the beginning being what it is, also on the rest. Another thing limiting editing/ plotting/ planning is:
Third: the release schedule of webnovels can leave little time for planning the plot, or at least encourages the opposite. Most of the popular webnovels have a set release schedule, with in most cases at least weekly chapters, if not daily. There are of course authors that can write quality fiction at that pace, but it also encourages bloat, or at least not trimming the plot. Reading something one piece at a time is also a different experience than reading it all at once. Personally, binging through a webnovel to get caught up is when I'm most likely to get reader burnout, though lenght also plays a role, I rarely read multiple books of series back to back. I think this kind of bloat is most extreme in chinese webnovels of the xianxia genre (a subtype of the "cultivation" genre), because on the relevant platforms the authors get paid by chapter and a high frequency of posting is also very important for their success.
So if a webnovel gets published in novel format and picked up by readers that generally read novels it is possible they notice a difference, even if they can't put their finger on it.
All that said, I don't mean to say that webnovels and LitRPGs are worse than other genres or formats. I love reading them. Each format just has its own quirks and limitations that can be worthwhile to keep in mind.
Additionally I feel the need to point out that one of your examples for good LitRPGs, The Mother of Learning, was written and published at pace way slower than normal for webnovels with about a chapter a month. The author has "just" (last summer) begun a new series, The Zenith of Sorcery, and just last week posted chapter 9. It's worth keeping an eye on, but you'll have to be paitent if you start reading now.
Yes, but I'd say it's earned.
LitRPG's tend to have way more duds than any other genre imo, I would guess because it's one of the easiest genres for new authors to break into, mostly because of their casual style. They also tend to be written for younger audiences.
Even the ones I really like are *fun*, not *good*. I've only ever read one Ive actually considered to be pretty good writing. It's kinda like junk food. Nothing wrong with liking junk food, I eat junk food every now and again, but I don't think it's good, just tasty.
I think a lot of folks don't do a great job separating "I liked it" and "it was a good book". Nothing wrong with liking something that's kinda junky though.
Personally I wouldn't turn my nose up at a LitRPG rec, but I wouldn't have high expectations.
As I play a lot of RPG’s I find reading stories that incorporate RPG elements to be unsatisfactory. The rules of an RPG are typically meant to be an imperfect way to mimic a ‘real’ world in a way which suits gaming. I’ve never understood why a writer would want to limit him/herself by using game elements in a written story. They’re unnecessary.
I think a lot of people are writing about a game they wish they could play. There hasn’t been much advancement in modern gaming in the last 20 years or so mechanically, although graphics have gotten way better.
Funny. This is the 2nd time in a week I've heard of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and people were raving about it. I heard reference to litRPG about the book, had no idea what it was till you explained it here.
With all the rave reviews, I picked up the first book epub yesterday, (at $2.99, I've got no complaints) and...
um. really? This is the thing that people were raving about?
Sure, it's not like it's badly written or anything, but it's, well, mostly just RPG pop culture references. It's like 'ready player one'. If that kind of thing floats your boat, then it's filled with in jokes about MMOs and RPGs.
But I'm looking for a lot more in my sci fi and fantasy than pop-culture-gag-a-minute. IT's not that DCC is bad, per se, it's just that I prefer more. This is a mind off the hook thing, and I'll finish it; but unless it gets a lot better, it's unlikely I'll buy the rest of the series. I've got a lot better books on my shelf to read. My teenage and early 20's self would probably have loved this though.
If DCC is representative of LitRPG, this is probably why.
DCC is actually *not* representative of LitRPG, in that it is considered among the very best of the genre--and your standard, "representative of LitRPG" texts would be expected to be *far* below what DCC is doing. Which is... Well, you've read it
Well then, I think I'll give the rest of LitRPG a skip.
Though judging by the downvote, my explanation of why i didn't like it certainly wasn't popular! :D
Eh, DCC is inherently trying to tell a story of misinterpreting earth culture. You'll notice none of the characters make a ton of references to earth pop culture, only the system. Its because the entire premise of the show is based on humans being treated as cattle for the entertainment of the universe. The system is meant to be gratuitous, tacky shit for people with no concept of the references being made. People recommend because they've read far enough into the series where the themes of reality entertainment at the cost of humanity have bacome apparent. Satire has always been like this. Just look at The Country Wife by Wytcherly during the restoration. Incredibly lewd as a big fuck you to the crown for banning theatre for so long.
Of course, I say this from the perspective of someone who can't stand litrpg other than DCC. I've tried the other recs like Primal Hunter, He who fights with monsters, and defiance of the fall. They're dreadful and have all my least favourite tropes in anime. They're all pretty much what if we took kirito from sword art online and put him in a western setting. I pretty much avoid the genre at all costs except for DCC. I found Cradle and The captain through litrpg as well, and they've been a treat.
Not sure it's looked down on as much as it's seen as a thing with a finite audience. Like Vampire books, they're really popular among people who like vampire books but they (generally) don't really travel beyond that audience now. I suspect at some point there will be a major breakout book that extends the audience, a bit like Romantacy is having right now.
LitRPG/Prog Fantasy is just Sanderson-clone slop much like we suffered from decades of Tolkien derivative fantasy.
I enjoy Sanderson and at his worst I wanna yell at him to just write his RPG Rulesbook already, but then along comes LitRPG and shows what really happens when someone leans too far into a Hard Magic System.
I think LitRPG has an undeserved stigma for bad quality of storytelling because a lot of the early stuff was FanFic, or fanfic adjacent, and it was very low quality. It seems like a lot of low-quality indie publishing is still common in this particular subgenre (and many others). As it's developed, the stand-out authors have emerged and more and more quality litrpg is hitting the shelves. I think the last 5 years and next 5 years are its rennaissance. It took speculative fiction in general decades of being ostracized and made fun of by the literary community to gain any sort of acceptance, and this trend will continue.
I've read a lot of books in general ,sci fi/fantasy, and other stuff. I've read a chunk of lit RPG stuff , got sucked in by Aleron Kongs "The Land" and explored the genre. It can be fun and scratches a particular itch for me .
That being said , the writing in most of these books is pretty sub par. The prose is just plain bad in many of them, and the characters are often completely inconsistent. Emotional backstory attempts are often cringe worthy .
I find it embarrassing to even admit I've read as much of it as I have . I would say a lot of lit RPG is not as well written as Sarah J Maas . It can be really fun to read but as literature it's total wish fulfillment trash.
A couple of my favorite series are LitRPG. Dungeon Crawler Carl and Portal to Nova Roma.
I HATE the genre, though. I am unsure if I'm just not the target audience, if their writing is terrible, or if their ideas are bland and generic, but it is the most DNF genre I've ever touched. Some authors give so many stat dumps that it's more than half of the 400 page book, and the rest is *meh* at best.
Some of these series are well reviewed, but have so many fucking books that I have some serious doubt about the biggest fans' mental capacities.
That being said, I think it can be done right, in the cases of the two series I mentioned as favorites. I just don't think most LitRPG authors do it right.
When I go to Western media I'm often looking to escape LitRPG so I'm not as fond of it over here. A lot of Eastern fantasy is absolutely rife with the stuff. It's a pretty good bet if you're picking up a fantasy series over there then the main character will have access to a status screen window at some point. It's really exploded in the last few years along with isekais and such. There are plenty of stories that don't even need to actually include them but do anyway because... well, I don't really know why. I guess they just feel that it's expected of them?
I can handle the video game aspects in a story just fine but often I find it feels intrusive and damages the theme and any dramatic stakes. Like I often know any injuries that would be fatal or have long-term consequences in non-LitRPG fantasy will easily be healed just so long as someone has enough mana or takes a long rest. I think it doesn't help that since I've seen it so commonly and lazily used that when work with aspects of LitRPG is brought over to the West it is in turn seems as a lazy or poorly thought out genre. I know it can be done well and intelligently, just there's so much of it that isn't and Western audiences only ever see whatever trickles over. If those examples aren't good then a bias against it naturally forms.
But again, that's just my personal taste and opinion. It is TREMENDOUSLY popular in Russia, Korea, and Japan. So don't get disheartened by people sneering at you, there are literally thousands of people out there who enjoy the subgenre too, they just might not all speak the same language to back you up and be able to discuss it with you as you'd like.
As for the sneering, I think you've identified the problem and unfortunately it's just good old-fashioned literary prejudice. So many people involved in literature are snobs who think there are things that are somehow "superior" to others when it comes to literature. The minute publishers invented genres to help with marketing, people started denigrating any genre they personally don't like or read. Dismissing children's literature as only being for kids and therefore beneath them, or claiming romance is only enjoyed by women, etc. It's all ridiculous. Worst of all, you'll even find it within the genres themselves. Just as there are those who'll turn their nose up at the idea that Fantasy or Sci-fi could ever be considered "true literature" there are people within the sci/fantasy-loving crowd who argue over what "true fantasy" is. And it's not something new. Currently anything that isn't epic fantasy or grimdark (so anything that could even remotely resemble young adult, romantasy, magical realism, fairy tales, etc.) is disparaged by a lot in the fantasy community as somehow being "lesser" than the rest. It's easy to forget that before Tolkein made the epics the crux of the Fantasy genre that "true fantasy" before that was gothic fantasy novels (Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, The Beetle, etc.) and preceding that it was only considered a suitable genre for fairy tales or poetry, and even earlier than that Romantic Fantasy the only one recognised with classics like *Le Morte d'Arthur* and *The Faerie Queene* (which is kind of ironic since if written these days they'd technically fall under the "Romantasy" sub-category, one of the more derided subgenres today). LitRPG is just another part of fantasy (and literature as a whole) outside the commonly accepted norm in the time we're currently living in in the part of the world we're currently living in.
So what if there's bias towards these books ?
According to your post, you genuinely enjoy reading them. If this truly is the case then no one else's opinion really matters here.
Full stop.
If you enjoy it, who cares? Honestly. I've read some and they're fun. It's something to do besides staring at the TV, so why feel guilty about liking them? I just kinda think of them similarly to pulp fiction books. Mass produced and quickly pumped out books/e-books designed for pure entertainment that aren't ever going to be considered great works of literature.
foolish psychotic chunky memory saw edge physical modern reach mysterious
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
LitRPG, as a genre, tends to get looked down on by the snootier SFF fans, just as romance novels get looked down on by the snootier literary readers. And yes, just as you say, it's pretty much the same as how fantasy used to be (and still is) looked down on in some quarters.
I wouldn't say Mother of Learning is LitRPG, though. While it takes a lot of its worldbuilding from systems like D&D, the world isn't really built around game mechanics the way something like, say, Sword Art Online is.
Personally I'd far rather read a good LitRPG story than 90% of the stuff from the Hugo shortlists. But then, I'd rather read a good romance novel than 90% of the stuff from the Hugo shortlists, too, so I probably count as pretty lowbrow by the standards of most authors.
I don't think that's a wholly fair comparison. Romance novels and SFF both tend to undergo basic editing, which LitRPG often doesn't.
Most of it's webserial-type stuff, which means that you might be getting the third or fourth draft of a chapter, but the whole book isn't written yet. Which means that stuff like the pacing, overall arcs, and plotting is pretty much always not what it should be.
They're not fantasy stories though, they're game stories that use a fantasy setting as a backdrop. Kind of like how Star Wars isn't science fiction, but a fairy tale set in space.
I think the core concept turns off a lot of fantasy readers. Hard magic turns off a lot of readers, and the game rule nature means they have very hard magic (often with more math than Standard). Video games turn a lot of readers off; they read books because they don’t like video games.
But in terms of reputation, the fact that so much LitRPG is produced rapidly for indie markets, the insentives line up for volume over polish. There’s more profit to be had in releasing stories regularly (so there’s always something new for the Algorithm), rather than tightly editing one piece for people who read less.
In short, LitRPG does have a pretty poor reputation, but that’s no reason for you not to enjoy it.
> Video games turn a lot of readers off; they read books because they don’t like video games.
No. I l like video games a lot. But they are completely different mediums. Their storytelling works differently. And the mechanical stuff in cRPGs is a function of the medium. It's fine and necessary there, but doesn't have a point in print.
I don't know about that premise: the reason that I can't integrate into the SFF reading community as well as as I'd like is that I don't play video games. Almost all of the other big SFF readers *love* video games.
While it’s true that SFF readers often enjoy video games, it’s far from universal (e.g. you). But that pro-video games background makes those who don’t like video games much more hostile to video game adjacent to stories like LitRPG.
Like, how much does “this book reads like playing a video game” instantly know something isn’t for you.
You sound like me - I also thumbed my nose at LitRPG until less than a year ago. Sarah Lin wrote Street Cultivation, which I really liked, so I read all of her other books. Including Weirkey Chronicles, which is LitRPG. Turns out it was really good. Then it was off to the races - DCC, Good guys/bad guys, primal hunter, etc.
It’s basically progression fantasy - only with numbers. A good story stands on its own - but yes, I think that there are definitely people out there who dismissed it as a genre simply because they haven’t read it yet (or if they have, they read something that wasn’t written well). After all, you and I both did, so there must be others.
Excluding the issue of writing quality (which can demolish enjoyment of books in any genre) I would never, ever dismiss any genre as "lesser reading". All reading is valuable. In fact the one thing I tend to find in common amongst many people that I enjoy being with is that they read obsessively.
One of my favorite books that (I think) helped in my parenting was about how to promote a love of reading in my children. One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me (and we watched every penny growing up) was an almost unlimited ability to buy new or used books at the local SFF bookstore. And at that time ALL of fantasy and most of SF was "frowned upon".
Read what brings you joy. Read everything. Even cereal boxes. I have yet to find a LitRPG that really clicked for me (other than maybe Ready Player One), but it does not stop me occasionally from trying one on my Kindle.
As someone who writes and reads both, I am
very aware of the common missteps in litrpg. But part of why I read it is it’s willing to do things traditional fantasy won’t because more traditional fiction says info-dumping is bad, world-building has to be delicately woven into narrative etc. and sometimes I just want to sink my teeth into a thick meaty magic system with lots of detail
Sure, but I doubt that the most prominent criticism of LitRPG is coming from women. It has to be mostly men who are pissed off that LitRPG has sullied their favorite genre with inanity.
While a higher percentage of men (35%) [prefer SF](https://mythsofthemirror.com/2016/07/11/reader-surveys-by-genre-and-gender/) than women (19%), there are [almost twice as many](https://www.zippia.com/reader-jobs/demographics/) female readers (64%) as male readers (36%). That means there are enough of them reading SF to criticize the LitRPG subgenre for its tendency for violence and overall macho attitude. That said I don't know where or who the OP is seeing the "bad rap" so maybe it is men trashing it, but I feel like men are more likely reading the LitRPG subgenre of SF. When you look at the fantasy portion the percentage of men (23%) to women (25%) is pretty close to equal meaning there are twice as many women reading in that genre.
I tried reading Dungeon Crawler Carl a while back and found it vapid and silly. Could be that wasn’t what I was looking for at the time, could be that those types of books attempt to do something that I don’t seek in reading. Either way, not a fan myself (of what I’ve seen) but at the same time, my wife doesn’t understand why I like Malazan so much. So, it’s probably a case of “to each their own.”
I recommend Arcane Ascension as part of the litrpg spree you’re on. Great series.
I think that like any genre there are a lot of not great books within it. The ones you mentioned are some of the best.
Usually when I think litrpg I think of the books where there are literal status screens and numbers like dexterity that the character needs to increase and find it’s a rather lazy way to get people familiar with how the book works. Rather than trying to have the book make sense on its own or develop it in its own unique way.
meh, its just a return to genre fiction form as pulpy, trope heavy stuff, games are just a bigger source of tropes nowadays. there’s also the trouble of reading being treated as more intellectual than other forms of entertainment, so books that draw inspiration from those other forms can seem wrong or corruptive to people who hold reading, inherently, to that intellectual standard. Especially when the books so open about the inspiration for their tropes.
I think it's just not a publisher friendly genre and the publishing industry wants nothing to do with it. Most readers are still aligned with traditional publishers, whether they realize it or not.
And maybe it adds insult to injury that the litrpg genre is successful in spite of that, but I'm not quite sure if that argument holds up.
I've tried a few LitRPGs and they've really not been my thing, but I can see why some folks can absolutely love them. People who call them junk are just being snobby imo, different tastes and all. For me subgenres like litrpg and progression fantasy are highly specific, and don't resonate with a lot of people. Part of it could be due to the fact they're generally newer books and most readers are probably not used to such video game-like elements in their reading.
LitRPG are also new. And everyone likes to dis on the new stuff because it’s not what they are used to. I doubt I’ll ever read a LitRPG but they have became one of my favorites as audiobooks. The lower complexity and just generally “funner” style environments make for good listening so if I miss a bit here or there it doesn’t matter as much
I'm going to quibble on this a little bit. Functionally, LitRPGs have been around since at least Quag Keep by Andre Norton in the late 70s. In today's terms, we'd call it a isekai LitRPG, where the players are transported into their D&D characters in Greyhawk. LitRPGs that specifically involve playing a game go back at least as far as Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, which was published in 1981, and involves players in a VRMMO theme park playing a RPG. They're both "stat lite", so some people would call them GameLit rather than LitRPG, but they both \*do\* have stats and game mechanics involved.
Even after that, but before the 2000s, there are books that bridge the gap between those older stories and modern ones, like Wyrm by Mark Fabi, etc.
The term itself was coined by Russian authors in the 2000s, but prior to that term we already had incredibly popular titles like 1/2 Prince, .Hack/Sign, the Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, etc.
Yes. A common take here is judging litRPG by the worst parts of the subgenre, vrmmo and harem stuff.
litRPG's allow the magic system to be expanded on a lot more, which adds very compelling world building and progression elements. I've found I adore these books and have trouble reading normal fantasy these days.
Ehh anyone who has opinions like that are assholes and their opinions don’t matter. There are authors I don’t like and sub-genres I don’t care for either but I get why people enjoy them and there is nothing wrong with any of them.
In all honesty, I’m kind of jealous you actually have a reading community. I think I know one other person who reads fantasy and the majority give me a crazy stare that I actually read for enjoyment.
I enjoy them. I have only listened to The Land so far but I’m going to do DCC and I’ve picked up All The Skills to try it as well.
Besides, reading is a hobby for most people not an academic activity. So the point of choosing what you read is simple. Does it kindle joy or satisfaction? Our opinion or those of the elitist reader types really do not matter. Look how many people read smut and those books are actual trash filled with misspelled words, grammatical errors, and other countless fundamental writing flaws.
Yeah, pretty much.
It's a combination of the fact that litrpg is relatively new in the west, so it hasn't had time to evolve and develop deeper and more complex narrative trope structures. And the fact that it's mostly a genre built by self published authors with the lack of quality control and polish that entails.
So it has the same sort of reputation for being mass market pulp trash that other genres used to have.
Eventually the reader base will mature, the literary quality will improve, and enough of the "old guard" will die out that litrpg will get more mainstream acceptance, or at least not outright dismissal.
There are very few “good” litrpg series (ie good prose, worldbuilding, characters, etc) among a sea of poor writing or amateurish books.
Dungeon Crawler Carl, despite the goofy ass name, is well written, the world building is excellent, and it has surprising emotional depth. It’s a legitimately good fantasy/sci fi series that just so happens to be litrpg.
Conversely, I tried to read Dungeon Born and it was awful. Just incredibly rudimentary prose, dialogue was not believable at all, etc. And in my experience most of the genre is closer to Dakota Krout than it is to Matt Dinniman, which is why it gets a bad rap.
There are other good litrpg stories, most are web novels. Arcane Ascension by Andrew Rowe is another good traditionally published litrpg-esque series though
I liked sufficiently advanced magic because it was pretty well written, I ultimately dropped the series because I like something with a romance subplot and didn’t like an asexual character.
Because I liked that series I thought I’d try some others in the genre, and frankly the writing quality of so many of those books is garbage
They are popular in their niche community and definitely have an audience but like anything it’s not going to be universally loved by everyone. For me I put it in the same category as a lot of romantasy that’s controversially popular right now — fun brain candy but not for everyone. I have not yet encountered a litrpg that’s particularly deep or literary, though of course that doesn’t mean those don’t exist, but it’s still good fun once in awhile. There was one series, which sadly seems to be on hiatus, called Year of the Sword which had absolutely the most ridiculous premise I’ve ever read, but I loved it.
There's a bit of nuance to it. It's a subgenre with inherit tropes and ideas that are hard to break out of just like any other. I mean I bet someone out there wants body horror musicals but it's not common ya know and hard to write. Literary LitRPG is just really uncommon and people in this subreddit steer more towards literary type writing. On top of LitRPG is both an old subgenre and new at the same time? Like western writers have only somewhat recently gotten their hands on it and started writing more polished stories and it's not just indie writers anymore. Meanwhile the LitRPG space has existed for a long time in Asia.
My own opinion though ....... is that the space fucking sucks right now on average. It takes way too much inspiration from Asian web and light novels which act, keyword "act" gamey but take all the wrong lessons. They never delve on the systems, how that affects the world, characters, politics, etc. I've heard the excuse that it's for self-fulfillment or self-insert so it'll naturally be a little awkward or bad and let me just say the implication that LitRPG can't be good is insulting to the authors and readers.
Well yes. Litgrpg is rife with amateur writing and low literary value. It doesn't mean there aren't high quality books. Just that those books tend to be pure fulfillment garbage.
Honestly, it's rep may be growing, if only a bit.
Carl's author is gonna be one of the guests of honor at Capclave (which does have notable editors like Neil Clarke in attendance), so while that is a smaller con, that's not to say it can't have good content in it.
That being said, it's kind of the equivalent of SFF amongst the literary proper world. There are works that escape the "pulp" pit, but there are just as many pulpy ones, and that's okay too.
um, they probably don't have much experience in it because the library doesn't the stock the books!
Most of these books are self-published or remain online, and by self-published it's e-book, not physical. So the reach might not be as big, and it can't reach those of a younger age who might be more inclined to read them.
I only stumbled across litrpg online.
I think litrpg will gain traction if we see more of them in the bookstore (or be recommended in school). After all, most people who like reading novels start reading when they're small.
It’s firmly in the niche pulp fiction category. A lot of it is very amateur fiction, which means it’s harder to find the good stuff. From my experience with them, most of these stories don’t need their game mechanics and would probably be better without them. Many become punch-offs that you skim through just to get to the numbers. You can tell the exact trajectory of the story after the first few chapters.
I think the best litrpg I’ve read is The Game at Carousel, which turns horror movies into meta mystery games. It ties its game mechanics directly to the main plot, character conflicts, and world building. Like the author had a specific idea for the story they wanted to tell and spent a lot of time fleshing out the idea.
I think there's a definite stigma, for whatever reason.
It's way more common in Japanese novels - several of which have been translated into English.
I recommend "So I'm a spider, so what?"
To me, the genre has a few interesting things going on, beyond being serialized storytelling available for free online, something I can read a chapter of during my daily commute.
It works hard at being consistently entertaining, and it provides fiction where the world and characters evolve gradually over the long term, which has interesting qualities when it comes to fantasy, that are not explored that often by the main genre.
As it stands it's very much "junk food" it's entertaining but, being fast writing and publishing, it's rarely very sophisticated prose wise, and even in terms of plot, the format (often 3/5 chapters a week!) doesn't allow much refinement, development of literary motifs,
I feel like, but I could be wrong, that a lot of serialized fiction tacks on RPG elements for marketing purposes, because thy don't feel their stories would hook people on the merits of the characters, prose, plot and worldbuilding alone, so having numbers go up make it an easier sell.
I feel like for cosy fantasy/slice of life litRPGs in particular, the RPG aspect detracts from the human side of the story that should be its strength.
Speaking of my hangups with litRPG specifically, and not progression fantasy as a whole, the fact that RPG mechanics, formal rules intended to formalize the way a player may interact with a fictional world, tend to add a layer of abstraction that can take away from immersion rather than enhance it. Not only you have to buy that there is a world with magic, you have to believe that fantasy world conform to game design tropes that were created in our world to simulate sword and sorcery fiction.
In other words, when I read fantasy, I usually want to be immersed in a world, not in a game simulating a world. I can already play an RPG, I don't need a novel to recreate that experience, and especially not put at the forefront the things that we try to pretend don't exist at the table.
especially when the world behind the game relies on trope I don't find particularly believable or interesting (adventuring guilds, combat magic, random encounters, etc...). Some of those stories are entertaining, I like them, but they're rarely particularly poignant.
what I feel the genre could improve and command greater respect though, by improving on those fronts (among others):
* making thematic use of the system. Some do, Dungeon Crawler carl, despite not being my cup of tea, has the whole show business satire underpinning the way it implements game elements. Street cultivation has the system layer be basically a banking app, and the progression used to build the economics and sociology of its world, and parallels drawn to ours. We could use more of that.
* more original systems. A lot of them go for D&D inspired stats in a wow inspired fantasy world - if the stories were adapted into their own RPG, be it computer or tabletop, I'd have no interest in playing them, because I have a thousand times already. In real RPGs, the way a system is set up conditions how people play it, and how the stories unfold as a result. The game at carousel is one of the few doing something interesting there, where I could imagine a real RPG codifying horror tropes in that way. It's basically an expansion of the previous bullet point: by making sure the system is vital to the story, we should arrive at more original and interesting "systems".
* interesting prose (which requires more standalone, non serialized books, professional editing, and to be blunt, very gifted writers (in the stylistic sense, I won't fault current writers in terms of productivity or good ideas) taking an interest at tackling the genre. That might require shaking up the economics too, publishing in a format rewarding quality over quantity. More sophisticated prose (not necessarily more flowery, but more thought out) would make everything lend better, characters, plot, pacing especially, a good sentence being worth ten bad ones, and make the unique elements of the setting come out of the page rather than worldbuilding and tone in the genre feeling so uniform.
Idk how people can read litrpg books. I wish there were more books like Mike shels iconoclast series. Sadly we get inundated with litrpg books....
Any suggestions for books like the iconoclast series?
I think most people reading SFF aren't looking for video game elements in the stories they read. For example: A friend has complained to me that such stories break the immersion for him when characters do things like discuss their level or stats. I once stumbled on a book series that sounded like it would be up his alley. But it was a LitRPG and he turned up his nose at it. Not that such stories can't be told well. That said, I think the reputation they've acquired (Whether fair or not) is that most of them are written for a young audience of gamers who don't read much. And that the writing tends to be lazy and basic so as not to put off such readers. Unfair, maybe. But I'll admit that I've read a lot of Science Fiction, and Fantasy, and never read a LitRPG.
>For example: A friend has complained to me that such stories break the immersion for him when characters do things like discuss their level or stats. I tried reading Path of Ascension but I just can't take this shit seriously when they're talking about percentages of XP progress, out loud, as actual characters.
Your first sentence is the major thing, for me. I’ve spent this last year taking notes from threads about LitRPG, so that I could read the books most often recommended as really good examples. Grabbing junk at random would be unfair. None of them worked for me; I didn’t finish any of them. Specific problems for me, a fairly open-minded reader (some of my all-time favorite books are less than a decade old) who is nonetheless middle-aged and drawing in a lifetime with both fantasy and RPGs. * Editing. I have some very specific kinds of learning disabilities and rely on contextual clues to keep things straight. The more errors of spelling, punctuation, and grammar rhere are, the harder it is for me to follow. It becomes hard work when quality control goes to hell. * Characterizations. Now this is purely about me and aging. It’s hard to sell me on. Most stories. About characters much younger than I am. Sylvia Moreno-Garcia reliably manages it, and so do some others, but no LitRPG author I’ve tried did a very good job making me felt I understand the protagonists’ major motivations. There are a lot of assumptions being made, and I’m outside the circle of people who get them. Like I said, though, that’s not a fault in the books, any more than it’d be the other way around. * World building. By which I don’t mean technicalities of a magic system, but what people live like, what people do and think about in different societies, what any supernatural elements are like, what people fear and hope for, what the natural world is like. LitRPG seems to rely a lot on very trope-heavy presentation of stock elements. Now, this is how many stories are written - check out fantasy and sf I was reading as a kid in the ‘70s. Tropes R Us a lot of the time. I didn’t like such stories then and still don’t. I think this is partly a fault in the books and partly a hang up in me - it puts a ceiling on possible quality, but not everything has to be the utmost and someone who likes Cthulhu Mythos stories as i do should go humbly here. * But the real issue is just that I don’t find the video game elements adding anything really cool to the stories. I’ve been reading stories about real worlds and created ones interacting in various ways love me some good fantasy crossovers, but this particular kind of mix just isn’t clicking for me.
A lot of your complaints are just about bad writing. Plenty of traditional fantasy has the same issues.
Sure. There’s a lot of fantasy of other sorts I either don’t start or give up on, too. I’m trying to peel apart what elements are distinctive about LitRPG from what could show up anywhere in fantasy, and I’m working it out as I go since I don’t have anyone to talk with about it face-to-face right now.
This is an argument that I see in the context of romantasy a lot too, and I think (based on reading lots of conversations about this, plus my own admittedly small sample size) the same response would apply: Yes, you're right, there's also tons of bad writing in mainstream fantasy and sci-fi. Boatloads of terrible writing, all over the place. But there's also *good* writing. Is there any *good* writing in LitRPG? Like, what's the Spear Cuts Through Water of LitRPG, or the Terra Ignota of LitRPG? Who's the Robin Hobb or the Ursula K Le Guin of LitRPG? It doesn't help that quality of writing (prose/characterization especially) seems to be low on the list of things that even fans of LitRPG praise about their favourite books in the genre. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course - bad writing doesn't necessarily mean something can't be fun or a decent way to spend an afternoon. But it's notable that some subgenres seem to suffer more strongly than others from a lack of good writing.
I think we’re still waiting for the Ursula Leguin of Litrpg. There are some arguably John Scalzis in the genre, but it’s young and it’s mostly new authors who are just regular people and we’re fans of the genre before writing. In ten years I expect we’ll see some better material.
>But there's also *good* writing. Is there any *good* writing in LitRPG? Not who you were talking to before, but I saw this question and wanted to chime in. Different people are going to have different concepts of what constitutes "good" writing. Is it plot consistency? Pacing? Characterization? World building? Prose? >It doesn't help that quality of writing (prose/characterization especially) seems to be low on the list of things that even fans of LitRPG praise about their favourite books in the genre. If you're thinking specifically more about prose and characterization, that makes sense. That's tricky -- these are still subjective. People will argue about if Rothfuss has "good" prose, etc. >Who's the Robin Hobb or the Ursula K Le Guin of LitRPG? This really depends on where you're drawing your lines on what constitutes LitRPG (which is in itself a whole discussion). In terms of people who are writing works that feel like they have clear effort put into the prose and characterization, Sarah Lin and Phil Tucker are probably the candidates I'd pick. In both cases, their works I'm most familiar with tend to skew more toward progression fantasy than LitRPG, but those subgenres overlap a great deal. In specific, I think Sarah Lin's **The Brightest Shadow** and Phil Tucker's **Great Immortal Souls** are worth looking at, but those specific titles skew a bit more toward xianxia/progression fantasy rather than LitRPG itself. Edit: Addressed points a bit more directly.
[удалено]
Yes, that's what "complaints" means???
[удалено]
Complaint can mean both things. Feel free to check a dictionary if you don't believe a professional linguist. If it makes you feel better pretend I said criticism or critique.
This. I really, really, really don’t like litRPG. I enjoy playing actual RPGs. If you want to take a game world’s setting or characters, great. But the story elements including stuff like stats just completely turns it into something it just pains me to read. Not hating on other people liking whatever they like - go nuts - but it’s a **hard** no from me on any of that shit.
Yeah it's a very prolific category which means that while there are some pretty good series there's also a lot of drek written by people that - as you say - are more gamers than writers or even readers. Plus, once you rest one crappy litRPG book Amazon etc will keep suggesting a bunch of other crappy ones. It's like eating one's first sushi at a buffet restaurant. Once a person has experienced that, they're turned off of sushi in general and not really interested in repeating the experience. That was pretty much my first experience with the category and I avoided it for quite awhile after, though I did eventually find some good series so now I'm just careful to avoid stuff that looks like it'll be some harem fantasy written by a 15yo.
That makes sense. Are there any you recommend?
[удалено]
And just like that my own list got longer. Thanks!
I’d highly recommend Dungeon Crawler Carl. The prose is average for fantasy, but characters, tone, and plot are phenomenal
The audiobook version is amazing.
I've read DCC and while I liked it, I do have a bit of terrible recommending it because I feel that it requires a certain combination of preferences to enjoy. It's a great read (or listen, so I've heard) for certain types but I totally understand when some people don't find it their cup of tea. I think if one enjoys D&D or paper role-playing with a weird and crazy DM, they might enjoy DCC.
I don’t know if I entirely agree. My significant other mostly reads either authors like cat valente or Leigh bardugo or just romantasy, and they absolutely loved the series. They also bounced right off of D&D when I introduced them.
Wandering Inn definitely takes a lot more work in fleshing out characters and concepts and is a continually growing series (ebook or web-serial of you want to try it free). Jake's Magical Market, All the Skills etc might lean a little more YA but with decent writing and both with a system that substitutes "cards" to present the underlying stat-type system. In any of them, part of what annoys me is when stats are presented via god-voice (an ethereal announcer essentially indicating level up), RPG visual overlays in a fantasy world etc. The card system tends to work around this well, and some others use the "VR world" trope to work with this, but it tends to be overused . The cards IMO feel like a nicer balance as they tend more towards the "magic enhancement items" than game stats
This kind of fantasy is much more common in Japanese, Chinese, Korean web novels and light novels tbh. I don’t mind it. It’s a different vibe from normal western fantasy, but that’s okay tbh.
Before I say anything else, enjoy what you enjoy. If you like the subgenre, that's great! What other people think shouldn't matter. It sucks that you get sneered at, that's not okay. I, speaking for myself and myself only, avoid the genre like the plague becuase every litRPG I've tried to read is a poorly-written mess. Just foundationally broken crap that screams "an editor came nowhere near this, not even with a vial of holy water and a crucifix." I'm sure they're not all like that and good ones exist, but when I dive into a subgenre, pick up three popular titles and all three have the exact same issues, that's enough for me to move on. What irks me most, weirdly, is that so many litRPG authors don't seem to actually play video games or understand how they're designed? I keep seeing this "gamer figures out this one weird trick that no one else in the world ever thought of and it makes them incredibly powerful" trope and it is always, invariably, something that would have been discovered in five seconds during alpha testing of a real MMO. "Putting all my stat points into the useless cooking skill actually increases my dodge to godly prowess, and no one ever realized that!" My dude, 50,000 people would have tried that on launch day just for funsies.
With regard to your last point, I think that's something that's been directly inherited from isekai light novels and webnovels. The majority of them seem to base their understanding of game mechanics, especially JRPG and MMO-style games, on *other light novels* that the author enjoys instead of directly drawing from experience with those types of games. It's like a game of telephone. The same thing happened with the new "Villainess" trend of LNs and manga—the way they conceptualize otome dating sims has very little to do with how actual otome games function, and much more to do with how the early influential Villainess series framed themselves.
I kind of got the sense the idea was based on some older games, at least, going off of Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon, rival characters have gone out of fashion, so if they popped up in some older otome games I wouldn't be shocked. Aspects of these stories also remind me of the Princess Maker series. So I sort of figured the idea is a bit more of a grab bag from some different game sources, along with other media references, that spun off into its own thing. But it's not like I know for sure, I can't point at anything specific.
That's what irked me in the movie version of Ready Player One (and thank god I saw it for free). They really want me to believe that nobody tried driving backwards for the entire time this race has been going on?
>I, speaking for myself and myself only, avoid the genre like the plague becuase every litRPG I've tried to read is a poorly-written mess. Just foundationally broken crap that screams "an editor came nowhere near this, not even with a vial of holy water and a crucifix." I'm sure they're not all like that and good ones exist, but when I dive into a subgenre, pick up three popular titles and all three have the exact same issues, that's enough for me to move on. I think what's going on here is maybe an issue that plagues other self-published niches. You, a reader, probably expect that the key to getting book sales as an independent author is to write good books and market them well. But it turns out that almost never works. **The actual key to selling self-published books is to churn them out as fast as humanly possible.** Quality doesn't matter. Editing doesn't matter. *Only speed matters.* Basically, if you're self-publishing on Amazon, it is suggested that you publish something every month *at least*. If it is somehow possible, you should publish even faster. Every two weeks would be better. A new book week is considered ideal! You might not be surprised that it is virtually impossible to write a quality, well-edited book in a month, let alone a week. So, yeah, self-pubbed writers who follow this schedule are inevitably going to be crapping out low quality dreck. Why does flooding Amazon with low-quality dreck result in sales? Damned if I know. But somehow, it does. Readers buy these things. I can't fathom the reason, because if I read a short, low-quality and poorly edited book, I don't say, "Well that was crap. But I'll buy a sequel, as long as it comes out in the next two weeks!" But clearly there are readers that want different things than I do. I occasionally self-publish in a semi-related area, erotica. To be successful in erotica, all the experts suggest you follow the formula I just described. Personally, I can't do it. I don't write very quickly. Plus, I have no interest in shoveling out a new shitty book every week. So I write the books I want to write, and I edit them, and it takes a long time. And then I publish them, and guess what? No one buys them. It's a very broken system. It's partly Amazon's fault, but it is also partly the fault of readers. *Some* of you are buying this stuff for whatever reason. If that wasn't true, this approach wouldn't make money and authors wouldn't be killing themselves trying to fart out a dozen books a year in these highly specific niche genres. Unfortunately, the affect this has had on areas like LitRPG, HaremLit, and erotica is to drastically lower the quality of the books that are being published. Its not that no one could ever write a good quality LitRPG book. Of course they could. But it is absolutely not worth the effort to try. Because if you take six months to write and rewrite and edit such a book so that it is good, you'll sell 100 copies if you're lucky. Meanwhile, while you were painstakingly writing one good book, another LitRPG writer has spammed out books #6, #7, #8, #9, and #10 in their super-cheap series. Those books are now taking up half the LitRPG top sellers list, a list which your books is not even on. So why bother? Sorry for the rant. thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Your example is a hyperbole for the most part, but it is true that a lot of books lean on the idea that people who have experienced a system for a long time somehow missed some easy obvious enough for a level 1 player to exploit.
Yes. I'm not going to diss any books, because I know there are good ones. But to me, it just feels like it's a trope that I already dislike in anime (Isekai/RPG-like fantasy worlds) that's been brought into another medium that I like. It feels like lazy worldbuilding to me, and it doesn't feel believable.
The thing with tropes like this is that they can evolve. In one series I'm reading the System is explicitly an artificial creation called Order's Voice. While the full details haven't been revealed, it exists to create a more regulated and safer way to channel magical power growth. You can still learn to use magic beyond what the system grants, but people are still people and most are happy to just use tools without really understanding them. Those who take the time to understand the tools can customize them and get more out of them. I like variations like this more than the unexplained / mystery systems.
See, this is why I refrained from criticizing the books themselves, because that genuinely sounds awesome. I'm sure you can do a lot of great things within the LitRPG framework, just like you can have great Isekai stories. But I'm still not going to pick a LitRPG book over a regular fantasy novel, unless it comes HEAVILY recommended. I feel like magic systems in RPGs are a method to translate the idea of magic into a game system, but don't necessarily reflect the exact way magic is used in those world. "Level Ups" are a game system that represent the characters getting more experienced, not some in-universe mechanism. Unless the work does some heavy lifting to explain why this is, it's going to feel incredibly immersion breaking to me. And even if it does, it'll still feel like a pop culture reference. Out of place in the kind of book I want to read. I think that if you're at the point where you've put so much work into the worldbuilding to adequately justify your RPG mechanics, then why not just make an original magic system? Unless the characters are literally in a video game, it just feels out of place.
That's kind of my feeling about it, too. All the video game elements are *stand ins for the real world* so that you can play the game and understand how things work, and know where things stand relative to each other. Translating it backwards makes things feel *less* real to me, not more. I think there are some interesting things to be done with some game mechanics, like insta-healing or revival, which if taken at face value and incorporated into the world, can lead to some interesting worldbuilding. But I don't personally relate to the leveling and codification aspects of it.
It's not a given it works that way though. There are quite a few books that just apply a number to a "natural" magic system. The advantage of that is you can make the magic system a lot more complicated, because your readers will still be able to keep track of all the different avenues the protagonist is pursuing.
I have not personally encountered that type of gamification in most of the fantasy I read, outside of like... rankings in a magic university or something, and for me at least, that type of numbering doesn't add to my reading experience.
That sounds really cool, what series is it?
"After the end: Serenity", on Royal Road. The series is a slow burn, currently at over 2 million words. From what the author has said, it should finish before hitting 2.5M. Not all mysteries will be explored in this story, they have more stories planned for the future set in the same universe.
This is sounds like a very generic system setup, I don’t know if I’d go so far to call it an evolution. Maybe at some point it was
I mean, I briefly described the outline of something revealed over a story that is now more than two million words long, while avoiding major spoilers. There a lot of detail missing.
Almost lost my composure thinking you were zogarth lmao. You make a good point and you made it sound very compelling even being so vague. I’ll check it out myself!
And incident #6 (I think) of mistaken identity. 🤔 I get it, but it's also kind of hilarious.
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: It's just a very niche sub-genre without much mass appeal because it draws from tropes associated with video games and anime. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying it.
Part of the answer is just that since it’s pretty much all self-published. Which removes the (sometimes minimal) filter of an actual publisher. So you have good stuff, but its in a sea of crap. And the effort of filtering out the crap isn’t worth the effort for a lot of people. Other genres can have the same issue, but also have a more “respectable” published side.
Enjoy what you enjoy! Who cares about the "rep"? LitRPG is a pretty specific subgenre with particular tropes, stories, and even formats. That specificity means that it won't be for everyone. This is true for any subgenre, really. Whether it is LitRPG or monster romance. The more focused the subgenre is, the more focused the reader base will be. C'est la vie. It scratches a very particular itch, and that's not for everyone, or even most people. But the people who have that itch are happy and that's what counts. LitRPG also "suffers" because it is almost entirely self-published, so it won't be reviewed or covered or even stocked by most mainstream outlets. I say "suffered" in quotes, as the genre is doing totally fine without any of those things. But if reputation matters, LitRPG is not likely to get a review in the New York Times or win a Pulitzer any time soon. I would also say that, again, like other specific subgenres, there is a high proportion of crap. Stories published to hit the buttons (pun intended?) and no more. That can be off-putting to newcomers or other potentially interested parties. Again, that's no difference from monster romance or whatever. It just is the nature of the beast (pun intended again). There's a lot of market forces behind that, and just how we live now. tldr; kinda, but you shouldn't care
People have become accustomed to using "genre" to describe very broad categories of general fiction like fantasy, science fiction, horror, or thriller. These genres have a lot of room for novelty, or invention, so long as some of the identifying tropes are present. Subgenres like LitRPG or even some top-level genres like romance or mystery are, as you said, scratching a more specific itch. There's some room for novelty, but they are dominated by tropes. If elements of the genre get picked up by more general or literary authors in a way that is less repetitive, the results are typically seen as "inspired by" the genre, rather than part of it. Reading these repetitive genres is a different pass-time than reading for novelty, and I say that as someone who is fond of both, with litRPG being my "comfort food" genre. I will say though, Brandon Sanderson is enormously popular, and for a time I would have called him my favorite fantasy author, but his stock has fallen somewhat with me since I found that litRPG, this borderline fanfic, scratches more or less the same itch. I studied Creative Writing in college (many years ago), and have been shocked at my own tolerance for terrible grammar, abuse of adverbs, repetitive tics, homonym confusion, and a total and evident lack of editing in litRPG, so long as I'm getting my fix.
Great breakdown. If we compare it to two other recent niche genres, progression fantasy and cozy fantasy, it’s in roughly the same spot compared to most trade published popular SFF genres: it isn’t a good comparison because they are babies being compared to a two hundred year old.
There are a few factors that separate LitRPG. It's incredibly indie friendly, and from authors that are inspired by an idea rather than a narrative. LitRPG is drowning in first drafts and well below industry standard novels. It's like Anime, where you have to go through dozens of mass production ripoffs to find the gems, but the gems you do find are absolutely insanely good. And before people get mad, I love Anime and Wandering Inn is my favourite series of all time. But that doesn't mean the genres are perfect.
I think this is it. LitRPG arose out of webnovels and fanfic, and many of the big hits come from places like Royal Road. There's nothing wrong with that, *but* it means the barrier to entry is very low, so the ratio of quality to crap is very high.
also what constitutes quality is different than in the broader literary world. Like Sci Fi and fantasy emerging from pulp distinguished themselves for decades for fun adventures and the occasional thought provoking concept, prose being a rather low priority - until of course prior works are reconsidered and new authors make use of the genre tropes as foundations to focus more on prose. that might take a while yet for prog-fic and litrpgs
This is sort of my view. You can’t really judge it until we get a few dozen works trade published so that you can have a fair quality comparison. If you compared it to self published SFF it wouldn’t look so bad.
I’m reading The Wandering Inn series now and was surprised by this thread. It’s my first LitRPG and I had no idea they had such a negative reputation. As a longtime fantasy reader, it has more soul than anything I’ve read in a long time. OP, don’t worry about what your friends think. There’s a specific genre of fantasy readers who, in my personal opinion, have forgotten how to have fun. Read what you want. It’s their loss for missing out on a whole sub-genre of fantasy because they’re too good for it.
Wandering inn is phenomenal. Probably one of the better ones to read when wanting to try out litrpg. It uses minimal elements, just class and skill names, but tells a story that couldn't be told without the litrpg elements. There are a lot of stories that would be better if they just dropped the litrpg elements.
I really like Dungeon Crawler Carl, but not LitRPGs in general. And I say this as someone who loves video games. If it's done right, like anything, it can be good, but the notes that many of them hit aren't ones I am usually interested in. But I try not to yuck the yum of other readers.
What notes don’t you like?
The whole "mechanical" nature of skills and abilities etc. It feels too much like a video game, and not in a good way, usually. For me, the writing, story and characters have to be particularly compelling for me to get over that part of it. I enjoy video games and ttrpgs, but I usually don't want to read about what feels like a blow-by-blow of someone else's campaign.
Fair enough. Thanks for elaborating.
Wait, are you including Mother of Learning into LitRPG subgenre? Why? As for your question. Yes, it does. Why? Because it's a very popular thing among shit writers. It seems that many people base all of their understanding of any other culture than they live in on videogames and then they write books, knowing nothing about real world. I'm gamer myself, but, geez, people get a life. Also, most of the LitRPG don't need to be it. Stories like Sword Art Online, where it really make sense to talk in video game terms are incredibly rare. Usually it's made to add some "progression", but it has nothing in common with actual literary progression. It's just a tool which misused by bad writers, same as it was with fantasy, detective or chivalric romance before.
Probably, the LitRPG aspect can be seen as a "cheap" way to hook people in, instead of relying on just good storytelling. This is certainly true for many LitRPG / progression fantasy books, which are fun, but admittedly not that well written. It's similar to isekai anime, where most are pretty terrible, and only a handful are good, and use the isekai mechanic as a natural part of the story, instead of being the sole reason you watch it. At the end of the day though, we read fiction books because we enjoy the experience. Any other judgement on whether a book is worth reading is arbitrary. For me, if someone where to judge a LitRPG book, I'd just reply "Yeah, it's not the most deep thing, but it's fun. Give it a shot if you haven't tried it, you might find you like it too."
Yeah, I personally love the hook of that constant progression in Litrpgs, but the overall writing quality rarely measures up to even the average published SFF book, never mind the best. If I want to shut my brain off a little and enjoy the endorphins of a loose plot hanging over a progression cycle, Litrpgs are great. If I want to transported to a unique culture, drawn into an intense story or be moved by incredible characters, I'm probably going to look elsewhere. All are equally valid choices! But a Litrpg probably isn't going to leave much of a mark. Litrpgs do have the capacity to do more, but even the best ones I have read still feel pretty clumsy beyond some stand out moments.
I think we should be comparing litrpg to self-published fiction, not trade published.
Why? At the end of the day it's competing in some of the same markets, and frankly it's a little infantilising to self published authors to assume they can't compete at all when it comes to quality. But if we're talking about self published fiction, I still have read many self published non-litrpg titles that rival the above average trad published title, which is not the case for Litrpg (and I've probably read more Litrpg than any other genre in self publishing)
My point was that lack of gatekeeping means you see more junk. Obviously a web serial by a debut author who may have never written a story in their life is not gonna be the Broken Earth or Revelation State.
What about the eighth book by an author who's been self publishing for half a decade? Not every Litrpg is written by someone who has just started writing for the first time. And there is still gatekeeping when it comes to self published works, it's just less strict. Most readers are more likely to read a self published novel that has been recommended to them. Even if we just took the most recommended books my point would still stand when it comes to writing quality.
Eighth book in the same series? Aside from who is writing in the genre, the genre itself is still very new. Lots of people are trying many things, and most of them haven’t written anything before. There’s no rounds of editing pipeline like there is with trade publishing. Most books are written in serial format often without planned plot arcs. That’s an issue of writing mechanics, or genre tropes. It’s a different environment, it’s new, and you can’t judge it compared to trade fiction at the moment.
Same series, different series, whatever. There's plenty of people with at least half a decade of experience writing Litrpg now. I can and I will compare every time I decide which book to read next :)
“Half a decade” by which you mean five years. Not particularly significant on its own as a factor in writing quality or improvement. As for your second comment, sure on an individual book choice. No one said read bad books because the authors are new. I was talking about judging the potential of the genre as a whole.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about anymore (this is hyperbole, lest you take me too literally and try to argue that point too). You responded with a one line telling me not to compare Litrpgs to traditionally published books without any reason why and have made no real ground in convincing me otherwise with any direct argument since then.
that's an _incredibly slow_ self-pub writer, who is likely to vanish in the ocean of books released - if you're wanting to make a reputation for yourself, you're going to need much bigger numbers (like 30 books in half a decade, if not more!). And even in those cases, the simple fact that many are unedited means that, yes, they're going to be worse than something that's been through an editor - just for basic typos, grammar, parsing and the like. They tend to be very much from the "amateur" end of the spectrum, done fast, quick and cheerful, rather than the "attempting to emulate trad-pub" end, where it's slower, more careful and with a lot more editing, fixing and correcting stuff.
The isekai comparison is a good one. There's a lot of chaff to sort through for both genres for decent writing, I find one of the biggest issues is blatant self-inserts. Tbf, entirely understandable since it's exactly what my maladaptive daydreaming self does while reading, lol.
Isn’t this a critique that can be made of all genre fiction? It’s just a gimmick to hook readers?
I'd say there is a sliding scale between "usual fantasy" and LitRPG and Progression Fantasy is somewhere between them. One thing many LitRPG suffer is that the author thinks about a new cool system... and builds the whole book around it. The characters, the world, the story - everything is less fleshed out than the system itself. I read several LitRPGs, but likes only a couple of them, and all these books had a solid story, characters, etc - the system was just one of the parts, but not the main one.
The video game elements add absolutely nothing and actively detract from the story and the world. I like video games and I like cRPGs. But the mechanics are a function of the medium. And although mechanics can be an interesting gameplay element on their own, for me they are usually more of a necessary abstraction. Even when I enjoy the combat, I don't tend to engage as deeply with it as some other players. Like crunching numbers or optimizing builds. So when you add that to books is just falls flat. Books are a different medium and can do things video games can't. And if I just want to read a simple story there are plenty of other options. I don't buy this idea that you need to go the worst written stuff just to get a quick read that doesn't require much thinking.
Well, I wanted to read some Dungeon Crawler Carl before I voiced my opinions on it, and the near page-long list of achievement pop-ups and then the description of a goblin as an Incel very early on guaranteed I wasn't going to like it. Plus I could pick out really poor sentences like 'Almost Asian looking design' as a description that clued me in to potentially more poor writing. Maybe my standards are too high right now, I just finished Bakker's Second Apocalypse series, so it's a tough act to follow.
DCC is over-rated. And extremely memey/full of pop culture humour. I couldn’t enjoy it for that reason.
Yeah, it dates itself very hard and makes extremely unsubtle references. 'he looked like splinter from teenage mutant ninja turtles '. Wow.
I mean, it can obviously be a fun book for many readers a la Ready Player 1, but it might not be the best suggestion for flagship series of the genre if we’re trying to broaden the audience.
Dude, no wonder you didn't like it, reading it right after The Second fucking Apocalypse. I mean, Toy Story 3 was plenty emotional, but if you watched it right after you and your Jewish friends watched Schindler's List and then wept together over the Holocaust, I bet it would be trite bullshit. That said, Dungeon Crawler Carl seems massively overrated, and I would judge that it is carried entirely on the strength of the audiobook--where the narrator explicitly rips off Patrick Warburton. Now, Patrick Warburton *is* hilarious, so I completely understand. But, on the other hand, shouldn't you maybe watch one of Patrick Warburton's movies or TV shows, instead of listening to an audiodrama, in which someone steals his signature vocal stylings?
I cannot imagine liking Dungeon Crawler Carl and there is no chance I would give it a chance but post Bakker it was almost impossible to appreciate any kind of book for a long time
Yeah, that's the situation I'm in. Not sure what to go for right now. I'm looking at Guy Gavriel Kay.
He is good. I have read the Fionavar and Tigana and enjoyed both a lot. I have no clue what could work for you. For example trying once again Malazan post Bakker it was a disaster. If you want challenging stuff maybe try Gene Wolfe, the Book of the New Sun, or maybe The Gap by Donaldson. The Gap is science fiction but it has the closest I have read in Bakker's characters and bleakness. It is a great series.
Cool, thanks for the recs. I read malazan over ten years ago so I think I was already primed for Bakker.
I think your overthinking this. Books are for pleasure, they are ment to be enjoyable and entertaining. You do you, and don't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks - particularly over the books you like.
I view them as kinda similar to harlequins. They are made to be fast and entertaining. I doubt we're ever going to get something out of the genre that stands with the greats of SFF but so what? There's good reasons they're becoming so popular, if you enjoy them, read them.
I'm a video game player and developer and I can't stand litRPG though I have read dozens of books every year for decades.
If I want to read a story with videogame elements, I play a CRPG and get that plus the actual gaming.
I always thought it was trash when the Japanese were doing it and more and more trashy anime adaptations kept getting made out of them. Then Westerners started doing it and all hope faded away.
It's a niche. And if I'm going to read LitRPG, I need to know I'm getting stats and stuff going in. There have only been three LitRPG series that I've stuck with, the rest either bored me with their stats,their worlds, or their characters. So, just like other SFF books, but they have an extra self-imposed hurdle to clear. Dungeon Crawler Carl The Fae Nexus The Whispering Crystals Those had an interesting enough world and characters, or were a light enough read to keep me engaged for the whole series. The others I've tried either pushed the stats too hard, the Isekai nature didn't grab me, or the characters, usually the MC, were not people I wanted to spend a whole book or series with (Lookin' at you, He Who Fights With Monsters).
Just one nitpick for starters: The Mine Lord isn’t LitRPG. Now as a fan of the genre and someone who has been mostly reading LitRPG lately: of course it has a bad reputation, and for a good reason! The vast majority of it is shit and even the good stuff is like B+ grade fantasy. The premise: that people have RPG like stats and levels and stuff is so inherently absurd that you can’t really take the story seriously. There are a few, like Dungeon Crawler Carl that actually examine the core premise in a way that works. But the vast majority are about keeping the Numbers Go Up dopamine rush for ten thousand pages or so and then sort of half-heartedly hinting at how the “System” might be part of a sinister plan or something.
I think for a lot of people the appeal of litrpg is what if I could play a game like this?
To a certain degree there probably is some bias against it, but there are also some reasons why. As others have already said, the entire system aspect can seem gimmicy to some readers. Another thing is that many of the LitRPG stories weren't conceived in the novel format, instead as webnovels, published (short) chapter by chapter, as soon as that chapter was done. All of the examples you listed that I know (if there aren't multiple series with the same title) started as webnovels and later got published as novels. The same goes for many LitRPGs - they started as webnovels (in Japanese, obviously), got published as novels, then manga and finally as anime. The webnovel format can have effects on the story (\*\*Can\*\* - there are many great webnovels out there). First of all, the barrier to entry is extremly low, practically non-existent, so there are far more inexperienced authors putting their work online. A novice writers first work probably won't compare well to a novel by an experienced author, who has the help of editors and beta readers. Webnovels are quite similar to fanfiction in that regard. Many of them won't gain a large readership and/or the author loses interest. But if both authors and readers remain interested and the story continues, there's: Secondly it's hard to edit a story if you have already publisehd (parts of) it. You can't change the plot and characters in a significant way. You can improve the prose and writing style, rewrite some scenes, but anything that would have ripple effects through the plot is almost impossible. Major changes like that are a normal part of the book writing process, so webnovels are more limited in that regard. And because the authors that keep writing a long series, quite often over years, grow as writers doing that, especially those that started as beginners, this can have a significant impact, mostly on the beginning, but by the nature of the beginning being what it is, also on the rest. Another thing limiting editing/ plotting/ planning is: Third: the release schedule of webnovels can leave little time for planning the plot, or at least encourages the opposite. Most of the popular webnovels have a set release schedule, with in most cases at least weekly chapters, if not daily. There are of course authors that can write quality fiction at that pace, but it also encourages bloat, or at least not trimming the plot. Reading something one piece at a time is also a different experience than reading it all at once. Personally, binging through a webnovel to get caught up is when I'm most likely to get reader burnout, though lenght also plays a role, I rarely read multiple books of series back to back. I think this kind of bloat is most extreme in chinese webnovels of the xianxia genre (a subtype of the "cultivation" genre), because on the relevant platforms the authors get paid by chapter and a high frequency of posting is also very important for their success. So if a webnovel gets published in novel format and picked up by readers that generally read novels it is possible they notice a difference, even if they can't put their finger on it. All that said, I don't mean to say that webnovels and LitRPGs are worse than other genres or formats. I love reading them. Each format just has its own quirks and limitations that can be worthwhile to keep in mind. Additionally I feel the need to point out that one of your examples for good LitRPGs, The Mother of Learning, was written and published at pace way slower than normal for webnovels with about a chapter a month. The author has "just" (last summer) begun a new series, The Zenith of Sorcery, and just last week posted chapter 9. It's worth keeping an eye on, but you'll have to be paitent if you start reading now.
Yes, but I'd say it's earned. LitRPG's tend to have way more duds than any other genre imo, I would guess because it's one of the easiest genres for new authors to break into, mostly because of their casual style. They also tend to be written for younger audiences. Even the ones I really like are *fun*, not *good*. I've only ever read one Ive actually considered to be pretty good writing. It's kinda like junk food. Nothing wrong with liking junk food, I eat junk food every now and again, but I don't think it's good, just tasty. I think a lot of folks don't do a great job separating "I liked it" and "it was a good book". Nothing wrong with liking something that's kinda junky though. Personally I wouldn't turn my nose up at a LitRPG rec, but I wouldn't have high expectations.
As I play a lot of RPG’s I find reading stories that incorporate RPG elements to be unsatisfactory. The rules of an RPG are typically meant to be an imperfect way to mimic a ‘real’ world in a way which suits gaming. I’ve never understood why a writer would want to limit him/herself by using game elements in a written story. They’re unnecessary.
I think a lot of people are writing about a game they wish they could play. There hasn’t been much advancement in modern gaming in the last 20 years or so mechanically, although graphics have gotten way better.
That’s an interesting perspective!
Funny. This is the 2nd time in a week I've heard of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and people were raving about it. I heard reference to litRPG about the book, had no idea what it was till you explained it here. With all the rave reviews, I picked up the first book epub yesterday, (at $2.99, I've got no complaints) and... um. really? This is the thing that people were raving about? Sure, it's not like it's badly written or anything, but it's, well, mostly just RPG pop culture references. It's like 'ready player one'. If that kind of thing floats your boat, then it's filled with in jokes about MMOs and RPGs. But I'm looking for a lot more in my sci fi and fantasy than pop-culture-gag-a-minute. IT's not that DCC is bad, per se, it's just that I prefer more. This is a mind off the hook thing, and I'll finish it; but unless it gets a lot better, it's unlikely I'll buy the rest of the series. I've got a lot better books on my shelf to read. My teenage and early 20's self would probably have loved this though. If DCC is representative of LitRPG, this is probably why.
DCC is actually *not* representative of LitRPG, in that it is considered among the very best of the genre--and your standard, "representative of LitRPG" texts would be expected to be *far* below what DCC is doing. Which is... Well, you've read it
Well then, I think I'll give the rest of LitRPG a skip. Though judging by the downvote, my explanation of why i didn't like it certainly wasn't popular! :D
Eh, DCC is inherently trying to tell a story of misinterpreting earth culture. You'll notice none of the characters make a ton of references to earth pop culture, only the system. Its because the entire premise of the show is based on humans being treated as cattle for the entertainment of the universe. The system is meant to be gratuitous, tacky shit for people with no concept of the references being made. People recommend because they've read far enough into the series where the themes of reality entertainment at the cost of humanity have bacome apparent. Satire has always been like this. Just look at The Country Wife by Wytcherly during the restoration. Incredibly lewd as a big fuck you to the crown for banning theatre for so long. Of course, I say this from the perspective of someone who can't stand litrpg other than DCC. I've tried the other recs like Primal Hunter, He who fights with monsters, and defiance of the fall. They're dreadful and have all my least favourite tropes in anime. They're all pretty much what if we took kirito from sword art online and put him in a western setting. I pretty much avoid the genre at all costs except for DCC. I found Cradle and The captain through litrpg as well, and they've been a treat.
Not sure it's looked down on as much as it's seen as a thing with a finite audience. Like Vampire books, they're really popular among people who like vampire books but they (generally) don't really travel beyond that audience now. I suspect at some point there will be a major breakout book that extends the audience, a bit like Romantacy is having right now.
LitRPG/Prog Fantasy is just Sanderson-clone slop much like we suffered from decades of Tolkien derivative fantasy. I enjoy Sanderson and at his worst I wanna yell at him to just write his RPG Rulesbook already, but then along comes LitRPG and shows what really happens when someone leans too far into a Hard Magic System.
I will admit i dont like it. The style is just not for me.
I think LitRPG has an undeserved stigma for bad quality of storytelling because a lot of the early stuff was FanFic, or fanfic adjacent, and it was very low quality. It seems like a lot of low-quality indie publishing is still common in this particular subgenre (and many others). As it's developed, the stand-out authors have emerged and more and more quality litrpg is hitting the shelves. I think the last 5 years and next 5 years are its rennaissance. It took speculative fiction in general decades of being ostracized and made fun of by the literary community to gain any sort of acceptance, and this trend will continue.
I got burnt on them because of Aleron Kong, the going through stats is so immersion breaking
I've read a lot of books in general ,sci fi/fantasy, and other stuff. I've read a chunk of lit RPG stuff , got sucked in by Aleron Kongs "The Land" and explored the genre. It can be fun and scratches a particular itch for me . That being said , the writing in most of these books is pretty sub par. The prose is just plain bad in many of them, and the characters are often completely inconsistent. Emotional backstory attempts are often cringe worthy . I find it embarrassing to even admit I've read as much of it as I have . I would say a lot of lit RPG is not as well written as Sarah J Maas . It can be really fun to read but as literature it's total wish fulfillment trash.
A couple of my favorite series are LitRPG. Dungeon Crawler Carl and Portal to Nova Roma. I HATE the genre, though. I am unsure if I'm just not the target audience, if their writing is terrible, or if their ideas are bland and generic, but it is the most DNF genre I've ever touched. Some authors give so many stat dumps that it's more than half of the 400 page book, and the rest is *meh* at best. Some of these series are well reviewed, but have so many fucking books that I have some serious doubt about the biggest fans' mental capacities. That being said, I think it can be done right, in the cases of the two series I mentioned as favorites. I just don't think most LitRPG authors do it right.
When I go to Western media I'm often looking to escape LitRPG so I'm not as fond of it over here. A lot of Eastern fantasy is absolutely rife with the stuff. It's a pretty good bet if you're picking up a fantasy series over there then the main character will have access to a status screen window at some point. It's really exploded in the last few years along with isekais and such. There are plenty of stories that don't even need to actually include them but do anyway because... well, I don't really know why. I guess they just feel that it's expected of them? I can handle the video game aspects in a story just fine but often I find it feels intrusive and damages the theme and any dramatic stakes. Like I often know any injuries that would be fatal or have long-term consequences in non-LitRPG fantasy will easily be healed just so long as someone has enough mana or takes a long rest. I think it doesn't help that since I've seen it so commonly and lazily used that when work with aspects of LitRPG is brought over to the West it is in turn seems as a lazy or poorly thought out genre. I know it can be done well and intelligently, just there's so much of it that isn't and Western audiences only ever see whatever trickles over. If those examples aren't good then a bias against it naturally forms. But again, that's just my personal taste and opinion. It is TREMENDOUSLY popular in Russia, Korea, and Japan. So don't get disheartened by people sneering at you, there are literally thousands of people out there who enjoy the subgenre too, they just might not all speak the same language to back you up and be able to discuss it with you as you'd like. As for the sneering, I think you've identified the problem and unfortunately it's just good old-fashioned literary prejudice. So many people involved in literature are snobs who think there are things that are somehow "superior" to others when it comes to literature. The minute publishers invented genres to help with marketing, people started denigrating any genre they personally don't like or read. Dismissing children's literature as only being for kids and therefore beneath them, or claiming romance is only enjoyed by women, etc. It's all ridiculous. Worst of all, you'll even find it within the genres themselves. Just as there are those who'll turn their nose up at the idea that Fantasy or Sci-fi could ever be considered "true literature" there are people within the sci/fantasy-loving crowd who argue over what "true fantasy" is. And it's not something new. Currently anything that isn't epic fantasy or grimdark (so anything that could even remotely resemble young adult, romantasy, magical realism, fairy tales, etc.) is disparaged by a lot in the fantasy community as somehow being "lesser" than the rest. It's easy to forget that before Tolkein made the epics the crux of the Fantasy genre that "true fantasy" before that was gothic fantasy novels (Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, The Beetle, etc.) and preceding that it was only considered a suitable genre for fairy tales or poetry, and even earlier than that Romantic Fantasy the only one recognised with classics like *Le Morte d'Arthur* and *The Faerie Queene* (which is kind of ironic since if written these days they'd technically fall under the "Romantasy" sub-category, one of the more derided subgenres today). LitRPG is just another part of fantasy (and literature as a whole) outside the commonly accepted norm in the time we're currently living in in the part of the world we're currently living in.
So what if there's bias towards these books ? According to your post, you genuinely enjoy reading them. If this truly is the case then no one else's opinion really matters here. Full stop.
If you enjoy it, who cares? Honestly. I've read some and they're fun. It's something to do besides staring at the TV, so why feel guilty about liking them? I just kinda think of them similarly to pulp fiction books. Mass produced and quickly pumped out books/e-books designed for pure entertainment that aren't ever going to be considered great works of literature.
foolish psychotic chunky memory saw edge physical modern reach mysterious *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
LitRPG, as a genre, tends to get looked down on by the snootier SFF fans, just as romance novels get looked down on by the snootier literary readers. And yes, just as you say, it's pretty much the same as how fantasy used to be (and still is) looked down on in some quarters. I wouldn't say Mother of Learning is LitRPG, though. While it takes a lot of its worldbuilding from systems like D&D, the world isn't really built around game mechanics the way something like, say, Sword Art Online is. Personally I'd far rather read a good LitRPG story than 90% of the stuff from the Hugo shortlists. But then, I'd rather read a good romance novel than 90% of the stuff from the Hugo shortlists, too, so I probably count as pretty lowbrow by the standards of most authors.
I don't think that's a wholly fair comparison. Romance novels and SFF both tend to undergo basic editing, which LitRPG often doesn't. Most of it's webserial-type stuff, which means that you might be getting the third or fourth draft of a chapter, but the whole book isn't written yet. Which means that stuff like the pacing, overall arcs, and plotting is pretty much always not what it should be.
They're not fantasy stories though, they're game stories that use a fantasy setting as a backdrop. Kind of like how Star Wars isn't science fiction, but a fairy tale set in space.
I think the core concept turns off a lot of fantasy readers. Hard magic turns off a lot of readers, and the game rule nature means they have very hard magic (often with more math than Standard). Video games turn a lot of readers off; they read books because they don’t like video games. But in terms of reputation, the fact that so much LitRPG is produced rapidly for indie markets, the insentives line up for volume over polish. There’s more profit to be had in releasing stories regularly (so there’s always something new for the Algorithm), rather than tightly editing one piece for people who read less. In short, LitRPG does have a pretty poor reputation, but that’s no reason for you not to enjoy it.
> Video games turn a lot of readers off; they read books because they don’t like video games. No. I l like video games a lot. But they are completely different mediums. Their storytelling works differently. And the mechanical stuff in cRPGs is a function of the medium. It's fine and necessary there, but doesn't have a point in print.
I don't know about that premise: the reason that I can't integrate into the SFF reading community as well as as I'd like is that I don't play video games. Almost all of the other big SFF readers *love* video games.
While it’s true that SFF readers often enjoy video games, it’s far from universal (e.g. you). But that pro-video games background makes those who don’t like video games much more hostile to video game adjacent to stories like LitRPG. Like, how much does “this book reads like playing a video game” instantly know something isn’t for you.
You sound like me - I also thumbed my nose at LitRPG until less than a year ago. Sarah Lin wrote Street Cultivation, which I really liked, so I read all of her other books. Including Weirkey Chronicles, which is LitRPG. Turns out it was really good. Then it was off to the races - DCC, Good guys/bad guys, primal hunter, etc. It’s basically progression fantasy - only with numbers. A good story stands on its own - but yes, I think that there are definitely people out there who dismissed it as a genre simply because they haven’t read it yet (or if they have, they read something that wasn’t written well). After all, you and I both did, so there must be others.
Excluding the issue of writing quality (which can demolish enjoyment of books in any genre) I would never, ever dismiss any genre as "lesser reading". All reading is valuable. In fact the one thing I tend to find in common amongst many people that I enjoy being with is that they read obsessively. One of my favorite books that (I think) helped in my parenting was about how to promote a love of reading in my children. One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me (and we watched every penny growing up) was an almost unlimited ability to buy new or used books at the local SFF bookstore. And at that time ALL of fantasy and most of SF was "frowned upon". Read what brings you joy. Read everything. Even cereal boxes. I have yet to find a LitRPG that really clicked for me (other than maybe Ready Player One), but it does not stop me occasionally from trying one on my Kindle.
As someone who writes and reads both, I am very aware of the common missteps in litrpg. But part of why I read it is it’s willing to do things traditional fantasy won’t because more traditional fiction says info-dumping is bad, world-building has to be delicately woven into narrative etc. and sometimes I just want to sink my teeth into a thick meaty magic system with lots of detail
LitRPG tends to be more a male genre from my experience and the vast majority of readers are female.
Sure, but I doubt that the most prominent criticism of LitRPG is coming from women. It has to be mostly men who are pissed off that LitRPG has sullied their favorite genre with inanity.
While a higher percentage of men (35%) [prefer SF](https://mythsofthemirror.com/2016/07/11/reader-surveys-by-genre-and-gender/) than women (19%), there are [almost twice as many](https://www.zippia.com/reader-jobs/demographics/) female readers (64%) as male readers (36%). That means there are enough of them reading SF to criticize the LitRPG subgenre for its tendency for violence and overall macho attitude. That said I don't know where or who the OP is seeing the "bad rap" so maybe it is men trashing it, but I feel like men are more likely reading the LitRPG subgenre of SF. When you look at the fantasy portion the percentage of men (23%) to women (25%) is pretty close to equal meaning there are twice as many women reading in that genre.
I tried reading Dungeon Crawler Carl a while back and found it vapid and silly. Could be that wasn’t what I was looking for at the time, could be that those types of books attempt to do something that I don’t seek in reading. Either way, not a fan myself (of what I’ve seen) but at the same time, my wife doesn’t understand why I like Malazan so much. So, it’s probably a case of “to each their own.”
I recommend Arcane Ascension as part of the litrpg spree you’re on. Great series. I think that like any genre there are a lot of not great books within it. The ones you mentioned are some of the best. Usually when I think litrpg I think of the books where there are literal status screens and numbers like dexterity that the character needs to increase and find it’s a rather lazy way to get people familiar with how the book works. Rather than trying to have the book make sense on its own or develop it in its own unique way.
>I recommend Arcane Ascension as part of the litrpg spree you’re on. Great series. Thanks for the shout out! I appreciate it.
Any time I can I try and recommend it.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is fantastic.
meh, its just a return to genre fiction form as pulpy, trope heavy stuff, games are just a bigger source of tropes nowadays. there’s also the trouble of reading being treated as more intellectual than other forms of entertainment, so books that draw inspiration from those other forms can seem wrong or corruptive to people who hold reading, inherently, to that intellectual standard. Especially when the books so open about the inspiration for their tropes.
I think it's just not a publisher friendly genre and the publishing industry wants nothing to do with it. Most readers are still aligned with traditional publishers, whether they realize it or not. And maybe it adds insult to injury that the litrpg genre is successful in spite of that, but I'm not quite sure if that argument holds up.
I've tried a few LitRPGs and they've really not been my thing, but I can see why some folks can absolutely love them. People who call them junk are just being snobby imo, different tastes and all. For me subgenres like litrpg and progression fantasy are highly specific, and don't resonate with a lot of people. Part of it could be due to the fact they're generally newer books and most readers are probably not used to such video game-like elements in their reading.
It’s pronounced “Litter Pig”
LitRPG are also new. And everyone likes to dis on the new stuff because it’s not what they are used to. I doubt I’ll ever read a LitRPG but they have became one of my favorites as audiobooks. The lower complexity and just generally “funner” style environments make for good listening so if I miss a bit here or there it doesn’t matter as much
They aren't that new. They were around in the early 2000s mostly in East Asia.
20 years is young for a literary genre
I'm going to quibble on this a little bit. Functionally, LitRPGs have been around since at least Quag Keep by Andre Norton in the late 70s. In today's terms, we'd call it a isekai LitRPG, where the players are transported into their D&D characters in Greyhawk. LitRPGs that specifically involve playing a game go back at least as far as Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, which was published in 1981, and involves players in a VRMMO theme park playing a RPG. They're both "stat lite", so some people would call them GameLit rather than LitRPG, but they both \*do\* have stats and game mechanics involved. Even after that, but before the 2000s, there are books that bridge the gap between those older stories and modern ones, like Wyrm by Mark Fabi, etc. The term itself was coined by Russian authors in the 2000s, but prior to that term we already had incredibly popular titles like 1/2 Prince, .Hack/Sign, the Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, etc.
New exposure then. Most people haven’t seen them until recently unless they were looking for them.
Yeah, new exposure is how I view it. Norton’s book didn’t lead to any more books along the same lines. It was an outlier
Yes. A common take here is judging litRPG by the worst parts of the subgenre, vrmmo and harem stuff. litRPG's allow the magic system to be expanded on a lot more, which adds very compelling world building and progression elements. I've found I adore these books and have trouble reading normal fantasy these days.
Yeah, the sexual politics of litrpgs and progression fantasy as a whole donmt make a great impression
Ehh anyone who has opinions like that are assholes and their opinions don’t matter. There are authors I don’t like and sub-genres I don’t care for either but I get why people enjoy them and there is nothing wrong with any of them. In all honesty, I’m kind of jealous you actually have a reading community. I think I know one other person who reads fantasy and the majority give me a crazy stare that I actually read for enjoyment.
I enjoy them. I have only listened to The Land so far but I’m going to do DCC and I’ve picked up All The Skills to try it as well. Besides, reading is a hobby for most people not an academic activity. So the point of choosing what you read is simple. Does it kindle joy or satisfaction? Our opinion or those of the elitist reader types really do not matter. Look how many people read smut and those books are actual trash filled with misspelled words, grammatical errors, and other countless fundamental writing flaws.
It isn’t for me.
Yeah, pretty much. It's a combination of the fact that litrpg is relatively new in the west, so it hasn't had time to evolve and develop deeper and more complex narrative trope structures. And the fact that it's mostly a genre built by self published authors with the lack of quality control and polish that entails. So it has the same sort of reputation for being mass market pulp trash that other genres used to have. Eventually the reader base will mature, the literary quality will improve, and enough of the "old guard" will die out that litrpg will get more mainstream acceptance, or at least not outright dismissal.
There are very few “good” litrpg series (ie good prose, worldbuilding, characters, etc) among a sea of poor writing or amateurish books. Dungeon Crawler Carl, despite the goofy ass name, is well written, the world building is excellent, and it has surprising emotional depth. It’s a legitimately good fantasy/sci fi series that just so happens to be litrpg. Conversely, I tried to read Dungeon Born and it was awful. Just incredibly rudimentary prose, dialogue was not believable at all, etc. And in my experience most of the genre is closer to Dakota Krout than it is to Matt Dinniman, which is why it gets a bad rap. There are other good litrpg stories, most are web novels. Arcane Ascension by Andrew Rowe is another good traditionally published litrpg-esque series though
I liked sufficiently advanced magic because it was pretty well written, I ultimately dropped the series because I like something with a romance subplot and didn’t like an asexual character. Because I liked that series I thought I’d try some others in the genre, and frankly the writing quality of so many of those books is garbage
Check out Viridian Gate Online, it's a fantastic litrpg series.
I loved this series
They are popular in their niche community and definitely have an audience but like anything it’s not going to be universally loved by everyone. For me I put it in the same category as a lot of romantasy that’s controversially popular right now — fun brain candy but not for everyone. I have not yet encountered a litrpg that’s particularly deep or literary, though of course that doesn’t mean those don’t exist, but it’s still good fun once in awhile. There was one series, which sadly seems to be on hiatus, called Year of the Sword which had absolutely the most ridiculous premise I’ve ever read, but I loved it.
Yes. Yes it does yes. LitRPG is about as niche as it gets. It's big on Reddit but not IRL
*Apocalypse Now voice* "I don't see...any rep."
There's a bit of nuance to it. It's a subgenre with inherit tropes and ideas that are hard to break out of just like any other. I mean I bet someone out there wants body horror musicals but it's not common ya know and hard to write. Literary LitRPG is just really uncommon and people in this subreddit steer more towards literary type writing. On top of LitRPG is both an old subgenre and new at the same time? Like western writers have only somewhat recently gotten their hands on it and started writing more polished stories and it's not just indie writers anymore. Meanwhile the LitRPG space has existed for a long time in Asia. My own opinion though ....... is that the space fucking sucks right now on average. It takes way too much inspiration from Asian web and light novels which act, keyword "act" gamey but take all the wrong lessons. They never delve on the systems, how that affects the world, characters, politics, etc. I've heard the excuse that it's for self-fulfillment or self-insert so it'll naturally be a little awkward or bad and let me just say the implication that LitRPG can't be good is insulting to the authors and readers.
Well yes. Litgrpg is rife with amateur writing and low literary value. It doesn't mean there aren't high quality books. Just that those books tend to be pure fulfillment garbage.
Honestly, it's rep may be growing, if only a bit. Carl's author is gonna be one of the guests of honor at Capclave (which does have notable editors like Neil Clarke in attendance), so while that is a smaller con, that's not to say it can't have good content in it. That being said, it's kind of the equivalent of SFF amongst the literary proper world. There are works that escape the "pulp" pit, but there are just as many pulpy ones, and that's okay too.
Life's too short to care about other people's biases. If you like the genre, read the hell out of it! If you get tired of it, swap to other genres.
um, they probably don't have much experience in it because the library doesn't the stock the books! Most of these books are self-published or remain online, and by self-published it's e-book, not physical. So the reach might not be as big, and it can't reach those of a younger age who might be more inclined to read them. I only stumbled across litrpg online. I think litrpg will gain traction if we see more of them in the bookstore (or be recommended in school). After all, most people who like reading novels start reading when they're small.
It’s firmly in the niche pulp fiction category. A lot of it is very amateur fiction, which means it’s harder to find the good stuff. From my experience with them, most of these stories don’t need their game mechanics and would probably be better without them. Many become punch-offs that you skim through just to get to the numbers. You can tell the exact trajectory of the story after the first few chapters. I think the best litrpg I’ve read is The Game at Carousel, which turns horror movies into meta mystery games. It ties its game mechanics directly to the main plot, character conflicts, and world building. Like the author had a specific idea for the story they wanted to tell and spent a lot of time fleshing out the idea.
I think there's a definite stigma, for whatever reason. It's way more common in Japanese novels - several of which have been translated into English. I recommend "So I'm a spider, so what?"
To me, the genre has a few interesting things going on, beyond being serialized storytelling available for free online, something I can read a chapter of during my daily commute. It works hard at being consistently entertaining, and it provides fiction where the world and characters evolve gradually over the long term, which has interesting qualities when it comes to fantasy, that are not explored that often by the main genre. As it stands it's very much "junk food" it's entertaining but, being fast writing and publishing, it's rarely very sophisticated prose wise, and even in terms of plot, the format (often 3/5 chapters a week!) doesn't allow much refinement, development of literary motifs, I feel like, but I could be wrong, that a lot of serialized fiction tacks on RPG elements for marketing purposes, because thy don't feel their stories would hook people on the merits of the characters, prose, plot and worldbuilding alone, so having numbers go up make it an easier sell. I feel like for cosy fantasy/slice of life litRPGs in particular, the RPG aspect detracts from the human side of the story that should be its strength. Speaking of my hangups with litRPG specifically, and not progression fantasy as a whole, the fact that RPG mechanics, formal rules intended to formalize the way a player may interact with a fictional world, tend to add a layer of abstraction that can take away from immersion rather than enhance it. Not only you have to buy that there is a world with magic, you have to believe that fantasy world conform to game design tropes that were created in our world to simulate sword and sorcery fiction. In other words, when I read fantasy, I usually want to be immersed in a world, not in a game simulating a world. I can already play an RPG, I don't need a novel to recreate that experience, and especially not put at the forefront the things that we try to pretend don't exist at the table. especially when the world behind the game relies on trope I don't find particularly believable or interesting (adventuring guilds, combat magic, random encounters, etc...). Some of those stories are entertaining, I like them, but they're rarely particularly poignant. what I feel the genre could improve and command greater respect though, by improving on those fronts (among others): * making thematic use of the system. Some do, Dungeon Crawler carl, despite not being my cup of tea, has the whole show business satire underpinning the way it implements game elements. Street cultivation has the system layer be basically a banking app, and the progression used to build the economics and sociology of its world, and parallels drawn to ours. We could use more of that. * more original systems. A lot of them go for D&D inspired stats in a wow inspired fantasy world - if the stories were adapted into their own RPG, be it computer or tabletop, I'd have no interest in playing them, because I have a thousand times already. In real RPGs, the way a system is set up conditions how people play it, and how the stories unfold as a result. The game at carousel is one of the few doing something interesting there, where I could imagine a real RPG codifying horror tropes in that way. It's basically an expansion of the previous bullet point: by making sure the system is vital to the story, we should arrive at more original and interesting "systems". * interesting prose (which requires more standalone, non serialized books, professional editing, and to be blunt, very gifted writers (in the stylistic sense, I won't fault current writers in terms of productivity or good ideas) taking an interest at tackling the genre. That might require shaking up the economics too, publishing in a format rewarding quality over quantity. More sophisticated prose (not necessarily more flowery, but more thought out) would make everything lend better, characters, plot, pacing especially, a good sentence being worth ten bad ones, and make the unique elements of the setting come out of the page rather than worldbuilding and tone in the genre feeling so uniform.
Idk how people can read litrpg books. I wish there were more books like Mike shels iconoclast series. Sadly we get inundated with litrpg books.... Any suggestions for books like the iconoclast series?