Yeah, two chapters seems a bit much. Really all it needs to do is set up the mechanics of the game and give maybe a teeny tiny bit of the lore.
Its not straight character building, its kind of a trial system. They get certain things based on how they progress through this puzzle like dungeon that starts off their introduction to the game. I'll do some beta testing with it before I go live, but I think the story moves quickly and people get exposed to deeper plot threads to come. If not, no big deal, I cut down on some things and introduce it later as it comes up. This book I think will be much longer than the books in Office Wars.
When you say beta testing, do you mean that you're going to have beta readers check out the story or are you actually going to game play the system you've created?
Play on words, I meant beta readers, but it would be cool to have a game developed off of it. It is something I would play haha. I build business apps, so not really games. I've dabbled in it but the amount of time needed is beyond what I have at the moment. I did write a Pong game for my kids to play. They played for thirty seconds and said 'This is boring.' and left the room...
Ah, so something along the lines of the book "Sufficiently Advanced Magic" - you might want to give that a read actually. It's a solid light/soft litRPG and it sounds like you're trying to do something along those lines. Edit to add: here's the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B06XBFD7CB
I'm really weird when it comes to LitRPG (especially considering my particular subgenre). I just started adding stats to the book, but I don't like adding too many stats. I felt that it bogged the reader down and I really want them to get invested in my story. However, I think that you can have a really crunchy book with an amazing story. Then again I like creating a story where characters aren't super powerful and have to struggle like heck through the game in order to solve whatever problem I decide to throw against them. Sometimes I secretly wonder if I hate my characters. I enjoy game world where magic is very special and hard to get, same with magical items. So I don't dole these out too much. Growing up I had a Game Master who would always give out tons of magic items and the game wasn't fun. That may have had an influence on me. Though I'm gonna start another LitRPG series pretty soon where magic items and gold are more common. I'll also do a character sheet so the player can make their own character. I've written Choose Your Own Adventures in the past and I'd like to apply those skills to a story. But I do agree that some tropes should be hit just to get readers immersed, like character creation, getting items, finding out what those items do, and so forth. Heck a story just to find out what a magic item does could be fun.
Yeah @Alara Branwen monty haul campaigns aren't very fun. I was in one of those where the DM started us off at level one by literally stumbling into a dragon's den where the dragon died of old age. Thus, we got its entire hoard. In our first gaming session. I didn't go back for session two. You shouldn't feel obligated to put things in just so it meets some arbitrary genre definition or because it's conventional. It's *your* book first, and ours (the readers) a distant second.
The Day One stories for characters don't really interest me that much, the best part about them is that they introduce game mechanics and lore and the character, and the more "LitRPG" experience and "Game" Experience a reader has the faster they can jump into a story about a Veteran player rather than a totally new starting character. So LitRPG has set up this genre definition and bulky game mechanic system that makes the story format vastly favor the stories that introduce all of that stuff through the view of a first time player. In my book I argue that if you do away with the bulky redundant stuff, the tropes of the genre flip on their head and favor Veteran players over newbies just because the learning curve is steeper at the low end and game information isn't force fed to the players at any stage. I do agree that whole stories could be focused on items, and gaining the knowledge to "identify" stuff if it takes on a crafting bent or actual appraisal skills as a merchant. Or whole stories could not be dedicated to that and it could be a detour like Quidditch in Harry Potter. I needed a reference for some choose your own adventure format stuff, so I went to gamebooks.org and got lost in there. Its not TV Tropes, but its still nerdy fun. Any of those your work, or did you just write Choose your own adventure stories for yourself?
The problem with that, @Matthew James, is that every story needs exposition dumps in there somewhere to tell the reader about the world. Without exposition, a reader gets lost and has no clue what's going on or why. It doesn't matter what genre it is, or even if it's fiction at all. Every narrative requires exposition, period. And that is why authors go for newbie characters and "day one stories". It disguises the exposition dumps and instead of breaking immersion by using the "as I'm sure you already know" storytelling device, it aims to educate a new character instead. It's a thin disguise but it satisfies the requirement for exposition without making the reader sit back and think "hmm, this character should be annoyed that they're being told this for the - likely - fifty millionth time and it's not believable that they don't just tell the lecturer to shut the hell up." Imagine what your reaction would be if for the next year or so, every hour on the hour, someone helpfully "reminds you" that fire is hot. That's the equivalent of explaining base game mechanics and world lore to veteran players. As an author, one of your main goals should be to get your reader lost in the story and suspend disbelief, and characters acting believably is one of the things that NEEDS to happen in order to foster that suspension of disbelief. I suppose you could use a narrator, but that has its own set of problems and also tends to break immersion on its own.
Swinging swords and using fire balls is self explanatory, the constant Interface Activated Action reminders are obnoxious, not exposition. Establish them once and move on unless bringing it up against enhances the story. The Combat Log reminders, that are page eating and word count swelling, are often present in games where the enemies physical condition changes with the progress of the fight, because its a fully realistic world even though the game uses a formula combat system for deciding damage (after combining in some game physics based information I would guess from the players action, with deflections / weak hits being factored in also, other wise soft ball pitched cannon balls would deal cannon fired cannonball damage). For a veteran player, the combat log is redundant based on their knowledge of what happens to the creature they are fighting when they hit certain benchmarks. Even better if LitRPG didn't require crunchyness and just let people one hit KO things they had mastered killing without need of over powered items. I'd rather know the lore based weaknesses of an enemy and read about it dying in real time than have some author cheat me of all that after getting me into this battle by saying "# dmg dealt, # dmg dealt, # dmg dealt" monster dead; after that all I know is that the thing dies in three hits. The veteran players start in an adventure, they don't need the game tutorial, if they restart a character in a new game and think "hey I can skip the tutorial" and they miss some major game transition point because its a new game, they just look like a fool. Its not like the story has to be about a re-rolled character. Conveying information in the midst of combat is easy as hell, the only strength of the LitRPG system is that it gives writers the option of doing away with easy to convey but unwieldly information, when the fight is something that doesn't really require more detail. The 3 hit KO with little detail is great in that case, just don't build up the epic struggle for survivle in an unarmed fight against a wolf, then blue ball me with a Combat Log accounting right after the MC grabs a rock and bashes some brains. ~_~ I don't think arguing against veteran character POVs and non-first person perspectives, while saying that objective third person narration or limited character PoV third person narration comes with a whole host of problems, is a great stance to take in a thread about Obligatory tropes. As that in itself is an argument for limiting LitRPG to First Person accounts with crunchyness and newbie protagonists. If steps can be taken to make Veteran PoV stories better, while doing the necessary leg work to suspend disbelief and keep readers engaged, and it actually gets the job done, then whats wrong with that? It will just create a whole new host of "Obligatory" scene types to go along with Asians jonesing for rice in LitRPG portal stories and Russians being sexist alcoholics... in game or out. I'm saying: Crunchy + Game Interface + UI / Tons of skills and magic abilities to master via Game Prompts = Day One Newbie favoring format. Game Physics Combat(no formulas / hidden formulas) + No Interface + Skill based alternatives to every form of non-combat related Game Mechanic for players (identify/appraisal, crafting, orienteering etc) + Hidden Menu / Real World Prompts (your house is on fire, or your fire alarm needs new batteries) = Veteran Player favoring format. You take a newbie and throw them with the veteran in a less game-like world, they have a teacher and a similar story arc, but the features are very different. As you cut out the newbie, the veteran can provide their own exposition at an advanced level. "This is the best method, and thats believable because I just used it to get an awesome result" vs "Let me trouble shoot this shit until I master it, and you can learn along with me." One story type favors veteran exposition, the other doesn't. If I and other authors are required to write in that other format, then we literally can't write an equally good story as the Newbie Day One story with the "accepted" format! Because the form does not favor the necessary stream-lined exposition. One story type is good for veteran protagonists, ones not! You agree with me on that point, obviously, but for some reason after reading my response you think I need to understand the format which I specifically state is not good for a Veteran player perspective. I know this! It drives me nuts! Then I explain why it drives me nuts, and you tell me the reason specifically why it does! I feel like Bill Murray in ground hogs day lmfao.
My entire argument is this: by limiting yourself to veteran protagonists, you make the necessary world building exposition break immersion. This is why books - not only in the litRPG genre - have inexperienced protagonists at the start of the book; what I'm assuming you mean by "day one stories". It is impossible to have a veteran character in a world they are experienced in have a believable exposition dump. I didn't mention anything at all about literally anything else in your post and have no idea how you got any of that from mine.
From all the Russian stuff I've read, I would be disappointed if it were not. It just... wouldn't... feel... genuine. And I've read the history of the Gulag, Disinformation, and A History of Russia: From Peter the Great to Gorbachev. And if I remember correctly I made it half way through a book about Stalin and Hitler. Lot's of similarity but I just couldn't bring myself to finish the book. Having an interest in Russian history made me appreciate all the Russian LitRPG all the more.
I'm assuming these are obligatory things, but what you DON'T like to see in books. Or at least that is the vibe I got.
Yeah, it seems like casual racism is something of a national pastime for Russia in general. It's getting better though, as internet access becomes more and more widespread (currently about 50% of Russians have access to the internet. Dunno how much of that is broadband vs dialup, but YouTube makes a difference). The more cultures you actually interact with, the harder it is to be a bigot.
I've read it, but fail to see a game world there at all. I do not care about stats or skills ups per se, but at no time did it feel like a game world to me. To me it was a good fantasy book, but I struggle with it being an actual LitRPG. Not that I would penalize it for that. I liked the book a lot, until it started breaking its own world building and then I struggled with it. Personally, I might read the second one, but the more I think on it the chances are I won't. Some of the continuity stuff was just too much for me to overlook. While I could see you drawing some parallels, this story takes place in a virtual game world, and the trial is part of the character building process. It helps introduce the world and how skills and magic work, along with giving the character the starting attributes and skills they earned. Each player goes through the same thing, so they could in theory make all the same choices and create the same initial builds, so no character is OP but there are some rare combinations that people overlook. I made a lot of rules for myself to follow. So for the character building, while 2 chapters, is only about 6k words, so they are lighter and chunks of that text are skill / item descriptions. Sorry, I keep derailing this thread. Ok so another scene that has to be in LitRPG is the human vs. NPC scene. How a book handles it is important because I think making exceptions that are not explained are world breaking. In Office Wars I basically say all my NPCs are AIs so they will react and respond to people in a way that is more human than not. In fact, the AIs know they can die and fear it and will make choices based on such. I also state that some NPCs have low level AIs that are not fully aware, but a player can awaken them by forcing an interaction. That awareness could come from a question as simple as asking the NPC what their name is. Once the script triggers, the AI is then aware and reacts accordingly. This cannot be reversed.
I didn't mean in terms of it being a litRPG, although I'd class it as that (if only for having some defined mechanics), but rather in terms of the initial trial being used as a sort of character creation.
Yea, I definitely can see the parallel. I am just making the distinction that this will have a clear game like setup. Including being able to adjust their look and choose a race etc.
