Just a Quick Rant...

Okay, your consciousness had just been uploaded into a game which is to be your new home. You've experienced pain and had experienced players tell you how dangerous life in the game is. As a part of this new game life, you can level up, gaining more health, more mana, more power in your base attributes, and more skills.

You know what makes a lot of sense: not really doing anything proactive to level up. Sure, you keep running out of mana in fights, but why bother concentrating on trying to get more points to increase that pool? Sure, every time you use that spell, you gain experience and it levels up, making it powerful. There's no reason to take every opportunity to grind that spell, though. Who cares if it increases in power? Might as well just kind of take things as they come.

Just saying...

 

I get that I like the leveling up mechanic more than a lot of other LitRPG readers do, but, if an author is going to minimize it, I think it should at least make sense in the context of the story. Battle Spire minimized it, but that made sense. If all your opponents are, like, a thousand times more powerful than you, making yourself 5% better isn't all that helpful. For the book that I just read, it felt like the writer really wanted to tell a fantasy adventure story and the game mechanics were just kind of there because LitRPG.

Argh!

 

I hope it does.

I was just reading the third book of the Station Core series, and, let's be honest here, the writing isn't exactly going to be winning any awards. I just read several very long chapters of telling that should have been boring as crap. There was no tension. Since everyone could respawn, there were no real stakes. Since there was leveling of abilities and base building activities going on, though, I enjoyed what I read.

For me, leveling up is a very strong tool for LitRPG authors to use.