Authors, Why Do You Write LitRPG?

What about me you ask? Do you dare to ask me such an easy question? Do you not know who I might one day be?
Heh, I kid.
I love games and books, it was got me writing in the genre it will be what keeps me in the genre.
The community is amazing, some times a little scary in their desire for more books but amazing.
I've loved games since I was 6... yeah 6 and frogger on the old Atari. That only expanded as games did, when my father bought me an old used copy of Advanced D&D for my 13th birthday and ran a home game for me and my sisters, that became my bigger love, table top roleplaying will always top my list of loved games, the system can change but a group of people around a table or lounging in a living room will always make me smile.
The money is nice, I didn't start writing for the money, I really never though I would have more then a few dozen read my book when I published the first one. The second book did less then the first but by then the urge to write which I had kept at bay for years by puttering with short stories had already gained a hold on me. Alpha World opened my eyes and gave me the idea that maybe I could make a living out of just writing. Even then it wasn't until a year plus later that I'm pulling the trigger, because the money is finally looking like it might let me do what I dreamed of doing when I was younger... Be an author.
As for something else, that's easy... I have too many stories in my head and this helps. I run table top games and use the stories in my head to run the game to give the system some meat so its fun and entertaining and not just kill/loot/repeat. Writing lets me share those stories with more then just the 4-8 people who are with me on that day of the week. It's humbling to think that thousands of people want to read what I put out, even if a small but very vocal minority hate what it is.

 

Honestly, the community is amazing for me. I love games and writing, but I doubt I would have made it this far if it wasn't for the community. I've made allies here, and I want to be a part of the community for a long, long time.

 

I love reading especially fantasy and science fiction. I love games and gaming of all types. I love tabletop games, roleplaying pen and pencil styles games and DMing and playing weekly cycling through Rifts, Nightbane, WOD Vampire and Weirwolf, as well as super heroes and cyber/runner games. I enjoy video games and once I started reading litrpg I was hooked. Finally I decided to try writing one and here I am.

 

I'm getting ready to write in this genre because I'm pretty sure God wants me to.

Weird, but true.

My great big goal is to become the Chic-Fil-A of writers. I want my products and customer experience to be so good that even if people completely disagree with my philosophy and get mad at me for not being open on Sundays, they keep coming back again and again.

I think that LitRPG is going to help me along that road. We'll have to see.

Shard Warrior, Rick Scott's Book 2 totally got me hooked on the genre. I spotted it because the cover was a little cartoony and its rank was really high at the time I was looking. I opened it and read a little and was literarily horrified. STAT BLOCKS! EXP! "Dexterity +2" *snort* "Vorpal Sword of Wounding" *Double snort, glasses push*

I put it down.

But, I couldn't get the fact that it was ranked like #93 on the whole Kindle store out of my head. So, I gave it another chance, and I was totes hooked furshur. I gave up my pretensions and just let the story flow. It was spec-tac-u-LAR.

Who hasn't made up stories in your head when you're playing games of how you'd want them to go? Who hasn't daydreamed of awesome loot drops? Who hasn't killed that one guy in Diablo II three hundred and forty times just to get one Buriza for that one Amazon build that was basically invincible for awhile? Ooo, and if you could get those gloves that added frost damage and slowed everybody hit by your arrows... *drool*

Yeah, so giving this a genre a try was a no brainer.

Now that I'm deep in the planning stage of my new series, The Divided Lands, I'm soooo loving it.

 

I’ve been a gamer my whole life. I was never good at sports and spent a lot of time building computers, playing games, writing and drawing. When I wasn’t gaming I always had a book or movie in hand. I wrote my first novel when I was around 13 called Avalon, an adventure story that was all about mechs and superheroes in space. In high school I was in a metal band and wrote lyrics and drew merch. I went to college for graphic design and 3D development and programmed a FPS in the unity engine as a demo before pursuing graphic design full time in a corporate setting. For awhile I would work all day and play video games at night writing when I could. At first it was a short story (and a film script) here and there but after years of research I started my first scifi novel incorporating elements and a setting I would love to see in a film or video game. At the same time I was active on wattpad and working with some other authors on a great collaborative project.

Life had its highs and lows and eventually I finished my first novel and began work on my second. After watching sword art online and log horizon and being introduced to gamelit by a friend I started researching and developing my own. A second book series that would have stats, a virtual world, dungeons, monsters, side quests, and lots of loot.

Gamelit seemed like the perfect evolution for me as a writer.

For me writing is my passion. I suffer from sever depression and anxiety and without it as an outlet I don’t know if I would be able to cope. It feels like a calling when I’m sitting at my desk with my dog or cat laying by my side and I can just breath and let the story flow for hours on end. I don’t know if I’ll ever make money from it but it is without a doubt something I could never do without and so long as my day job doesn’t kill me I’m never going to quit.

Create. Inspire. Evolve.

Thanks for reading,

Panda of the Apocalypse

 

I love creating things. As a child and teenager I was very into arts and crafts, including writing. As a reader it was primarily science fiction and fantasy, although I do enjoy historicals, and yes as a female I do read romance, lol. LitRPG and Gamelit I only discovered in the last couple of years, and I just celebrated the 2 year anniversary of my first sale as a writer, and in June it will be the first anniversary of my first published short story.
I need to get back to my writing grindstone, as I'm working on some LitRPG shorts as well as 2 novels.

 

Forgot to mention that I'm also a big gamer, just don't have time to do more than 2 of my favourite 3 things a day, these are write, read and play games.

 

I don't have anyone to play D&D with any more, and I need to inflict my nerdiness on someone, somehow.

 

Well apparently the answer is I can't help myself.

Know how I said I was going to wait before wading into the waters of writing LitRPG? Finish up some of my other WIPs first, do some research?

Yeah, no. Started outlining a LitRPG book today. XD

As for the reason it appeals to me as a genre...well it was probably inevitable. I'm a lifelong gamer; I love SFF and already write in those genres and basically read them almost exclusively. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Can you make it a part of the forums somehow? That would be cool if it was somehow tied into here, or people could look at transcripts of sessions or something.

You could generate content while gaming. Talk about a win, WIN situation...

 

I've DM'ed a few times, and had a dwarf eaten by a dire giant hamster. Fun was had by all. We could always put it on Discord as a text chat.

 

I had most fun GM'ing Paranoia. That's the only one I kept all the stuff for, sold the rest years ago. I even had the Hollow Earth stuff, as well as the complete Dragon Warriors set of books. The gaming shop in Cork must have loved me that week.

 

Happiness is Mandatory.

 

I write litRPG because I'm a nerd. In all honesty, I was already writing stuff and self-publishing. I stumbled on litRPG by accident one day and the rest is history. Mostly.

I've played video games for almost as long as I can remember (cut my teeth on my dad's copy of the original Final Fantasy for the NES) and I tore through a ton of Forgotten Realms books when I was a teen. Strangely enough, I didn't play my first tabletop game until I was an adult. My first ever character was a human barbarian that got backstabbed to death during a Shackled City campaign. I don't even think I got to level up.

I haven't had a good tabletop group in years. It would be hella fun to do some sort of voice chat game. There are plenty of people doing Tabletop streams on Twitch. Most of them have some sort of software set up, but I don't think it's a requirement necessarily.

 

A life of video games and D&D did this to me. Fantasy world rule-sets where individuals gain quantifiable skills and progression have overwritten a large section of my mental space, and any world that does not offer these things is lacking.