Acually, LitRPG goes back about 7 years ... longer if you include Quag Keep, etc. The Russians coined the term in 2010 or 2011, IIRC...
No worries. It's hard when people claim to have invented it, etc. What is LitRPG? A Definition (+50 xp) | LitRPG Reads Basically, three Russians were coming out with a bundle of their stories and decided to call it LitRPG, which is swapped from how we would phrase it in the West - ie RPG-Literature / RPG-Lit Thus a new genre was born! (And quickly people stepped in to DEMAND that to "be litrpg" it had to have this, that, or the other. I try not to argue about it too much.
So, I assume you're a Dragonlance fan? I keep waiting for WotC or Warcraft or someone to do a LitRPG based on their game world. Can you imagine a Margaret Weis LitRPG? *Faints*
"Start low so you can rise," is my usual format. I'm looking forward to listening to FFO on Audible. Just waiting for them to unlock it.
Certainly can be. It can be fun navigating the different kinds of dragons in a world. Intelligent vs bestial. Regional cultures, good and evil, vs what qualities they all seem to have simply because they are dragons. Are you familiar with the Super Powereds series by Drew Hayes? While listening to Heartstrikers, I kept wanting to bring his Angela and your Amelia together for a glorious night of alcohol and super powered magical beer pong. Every time I remind myself that these two characters are written in different worlds by different authors, I grow a little sad knowing that they will never have the chance to become best friends. They are meant for each other.
Back in the 90's there were official AD&D 2nd Ed content books for people who wanted to run their own Dragon Lance games. They had all the major characters' sheets in the back, all the unique monsters, all the unique items, and so on. It also had the stats for the actual dragon lance in case someone wanted to run a War of the Lance game as Huma (was that his name? It's been a while). My friend owned the set and I borrowed them during school every day so I could read them.
I somewhat disagree with the description of what counts as a LitRPG. There are several that don't really deal with stats or the UI at all, or laughably so (Skyler Grant's Dungeon Crawl, Continue Online, Ludus, etc.) Many choose to go a similar route as FFO did where the stats are talked about in general terms, but specifics/the UI are barely there or non existent. It seems there are effectively 2 different cases for what constitutes this sub-genre: 1. A story where people are actually playing a VR MMO and/or who get trapped in said VR MMO, which becomes their new reality. 2. A gameified reality, where a UI exists or some other external entity provides power/structure for progression. In a very loose sense, there must be a progression in which a person gains abilities/skills/materials/soldiers/whatever in an artificial way (e.g. provided a choice to select either ability A or ability B), which is what makes it RPG-like/gameified. This could also be if the book is from the perspective of NPC's in a game because that is their reality. The gameified reality side seems to be taking off quite a bit: you get a somewhat more compelling story because there are more "real" consequences. Some don't even bother explaining why there's a UI over everything, it just is. Aleron Kong's work is arguably one of the reasons those types took off so much, but there's certainly plenty of examples that pre-date his work: Robert Bevan's Critical Failures, Drew Hayes' NPCs, Yahtzee Croshaw's Mogworld, Andrei Livadney's Phantom Server.
Me too, you miss the beginning of one conversation and suddenly your lost : ) Hello to Travis and Rachel by the way.
