You should read (or listen) to Dungeon Crawler Carl

[HaroldTheHobbit]

I can enjoy old D&D novels, Black Library stuff etc, but LitRPG like DCC is utter crap imho. It’s like ordering an elaborate chocolate dessert, but what you get on the plate is white sugar and unrefined cocoa beans.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

LITRPG is a genre of fantasy inspired by games and their rules, their universe generally includes a 'canon' rules system, although how that happens and how fundamental to reality that actually is differs between stories. The game rules do things like give the characters Skills, Feats, and Spells that give them an essentially magical ability to do things they didn't know how to do, but again, it varies a bit.

• In Dungeon Crawler Carl, there's a specific set of circumstances that see's the characters enter a system of classes and levels, and the source is abundantly clear.
• In the Wandering Inn, people level right as they fall asleep and it's accompanied by their own voice in monotone telling them what they gained based on their life experiences and what's important to them and the internal minutiae of some mysterious system, it's the whole world and basically no one questions it although some people have recorded and analyzed what the system does and passed that knowledge down.
• There are also worlds where the rules are canonized as a way to talk about more organic things, like the amount of magic you have and such. My Pathfinder setting works like this-- level refers to an 'aura level' that are just the thresholds where your growth is noticeable, and ranks of spells correspond to how much magic (which can indeed be measured in units) is flowing through the caster at the instant of casting, and [Double Slice] the feat is recognized as a specific magical signature associated with some techniques, even HP corresponds to the physics of how the magical world works (it's the reason you don't suffer the effects of individual wounds because it diffuses damage across a magical network that permeates your body until your body collapses all at once, just like 0 hp and death saves would imply.)
• Sometimes, it's just a bit, like Order of the Stick.

Reminds me of Erf world

 

[TwoSix]

Heh, gotta be honest, I really love LITRPG-- I didn't think I would and there's a lot of it that's decidedly amateurish (in the sense that places like Royal Road are similar to fanfic sites to begin with) but The Wandering Inn, Dungeon Crawler Carl, and some of the higher quality litrpg anime won me over completely-- its every bit as good as other fantasy when done well.

"Worth the Candle" is my vote for LitRPG that's also really thoughtful about what the genre means and what it's trying to accomplish.

The Wandering Inn would be my other example, but you already mentioned it. It's also extremely difficult to recommend simply due to its monstrous length.

 

[Reynard]

For the record, it isn't the "go into the world of the game" that makes me dislike the genre so much. The Guardians of the Flame is one of my foundational fantasies. I love portal fantasy. It is the incorporation of the game rules that bugs me.

 

[Pedantic]

For the record, it isn't the "go into the world of the game" that makes me dislike the genre so much. The Guardians of the Flame is one of my foundational fantasies. I love portal fantasy. It is the incorporation of the game rules that bugs me.

Amusingly, I have precisely the opposite problem. I'll take rules for days, but I despise a portal frame narrative. Either the whole experience becomes more artificial, feels like a lazy exposition device, or it feels like it's wasting my time until the character finally becomes sufficiently integrated.

 

[Pedantic]

"Worth the Candle" is my vote for LitRPG that's also really thoughtful about what the genre means and what it's trying to accomplish.

The Wandering Inn would be my other example, but you already mentioned it. It's also extremely difficult to recommend simply due to its monstrous length.

I really wanted to like the Wandering Inn more, but it's a bit too meandering for me. It does that thing where the characters feel like they're just stirred around together to see what comes out, when I really need a bit more plot.

 

[TwoSix]

I really wanted to like the Wandering Inn more, but it's a bit too meandering for me. It does that thing where the characters feel like they're just stirred around together to see what comes out, when I really need a bit more plot.

Fair. But those are the elements I like! Some of my favorite chapters are the ones focused on random characters in a side story.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

"Worth the Candle" is my vote for LitRPG that's also really thoughtful about what the genre means and what it's trying to accomplish.

The Wandering Inn would be my other example, but you already mentioned it. It's also extremely difficult to recommend simply due to its monstrous length.

There's always the Gravesong books as a shorter gateway story to the Wandering Inn!

I'll take "Worth the Candle" as a recommendation.

 

[Pedantic]

There's always the Gravesong books as a shorter gateway story to the Wandering Inn!

I'll take "Worth the Candle" as a recommendation.

I'll reconsider it! I'd pushed it off the list for the portal fantasy reasons listed above.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I really wanted to like the Wandering Inn more, but it's a bit too meandering for me. It does that thing where the characters feel like they're just stirred around together to see what comes out, when I really need a bit more plot.

That's actually my favorite part of it, and while I still love it, I'm getting a bit of plot fatigue since volume 8 hit the gas and hasn't really stopped since with regard to the main plot stuff (even though the plot is good) that had been a slower burn of foreshadowing and churning background elements before.

To kind of use your comment as a jumping off point-- there's something distinctly appealing about this kind of sandboxy writing style where it plays with a lot of plots and characters and develops them slowly, you never really know what's going to happen next and the characters feel more like people who are just living their (fantastical and interesting) lives so the story feels more... authentic? It feels like a story about the real world, which is a sequence of events, rather than a scripted plot. (edit: to be clear, despite having the kind of banter I like, DCC is more plot centric)

It ties to something I think I was feeling before, where I was getting frustrated with epic fantasy that was too plot centric, and too focused on saving the world-- I was literally reading Brandon Sanderson doorstoppers which were fun reads, but somehow still felt like the characters didn't have time to breathe or get to know each other despite it being so long, I was reading the Heralds of Valdemar and realizing some of my favorite parts were the characters bumming around the collegium, having a comfortable time traveling together, or the fluffy rest sections in Hawkbrother enclaves or that my favorite part of wheel of time was the banter.

So all the putzing about the inn, characters trying out business ventures, growing slowly, having intimate moments, silly powers, flashing to other plots you have no idea how could possibly eventually intersect with the inncrew and interesting provactive explorations of the world and the system that underlies their lives and growth, all combined with the important matters brewing in the background really worked well for me and still felt worthwhile in a literary sense. I honestly think some of these books and the cozy fantasy genre, are kind of backlashes to books becoming too driven by plot, instead of having it grow organically from the characters and setting, it feels like a new movement, to refer back to something I've brought up in other contexts about competing artistic movements.