Skills/Abilities/Feats: Instant or Earned?

That's true! I was meaning more in the LitRPGs where everyone's "just starting" or "stuck in game" and doesn't have access to the internet, etc. But yes, Wikis and Walkthroughs are definitely something that a lot of gamers use and why I never understand why the books where the player gets in YEARS after the game pulls the "A-ha! I have figured out this combo that NO ONE ELSE EVER did! So I'm now super OP!". Like that is totally not how gaming works at all. There is literally zero chance the "perfect" class/race combo wouldn't have been all over the forums in a month or less! The same with stat tricks of "Oh, if you give a warrior Intellect, they can learn cool spells AND tank" or something like that.

Seriously, if a game has been out longer than a week, there are already going to be so many damn guides telling you a million tricks, combos, and shortcuts for whatever you want to play from healer to tank to PVP master or...whatever!

 

I'm pretty good at world-building and system designs. Its kinda my forte. I'm quite a bit weaker in characterization and plot development, but I think that's more to do with my (relative) inexperience writing longer works. I used to GM a LOT of Shadowrun campaigns, and might break out my old character questionnaire I made all my new players fill out. It should help me put myself into my characters' perspective.

My current book was going to have multiple MC's but maybe that's a bit to ambitious.

Back over to the aspiring writer's forum for me!

 

Hmmm interesting question. Here's a strange thing: I hate character creation, but I love 'let's pick new skills now', and I'm not sure why, so I put some more thought into it.
1) The whole 'who do I want to be' business is inherently awkward, and there's something... self-conscious about the whole process, especially the pondering bit. So I prefer it to be over as fast as possible. I guess it's the distinction between who you want to "be" and what you want to "do", so skill selection doesn't suffer from the same problem. (I mean, in real life we don't really get to choose who we want to be, and when you do in video games, there's always this feeling of ego/alter-ego or whatever, and if the author's feeling a bit awkward about it, the whole process feels awkward) And.... more tangent: to do it well, if you want to ponder it's not going to be surface pondering, especially if you're going to be in this character's body. Ready Player One is good: he made a thinner version of himself -- no shame. That's good.
2) You rarely get to see the whole 'list' of the possibilities, so if you can be 'half-something', can you be half-elf-half-orc, or, half-dragon-half-er.... troll? And what are the differences anyway? And who would want to be a troll, seriously, so why is that in the game? With "pick one skill" -- it's a lot less sloppy, because you usually see the whole list, and you pick one. So it goes into the category of shopping, which feels wonderful.

Sorry I'm under some weird influence of some dubious herb tea and I can't seem to properly get my point across right now.

 

I was a little confused by your post, then I saw what time it was written and realized you were trying to write it at 4:32 AM. So, with thaty said, lets see if I can try to help fill in a little gamer psychology.

Both character creation and skill point allocation can both be about "who do I want to be" and "what do I want to do".

First off, you have to understand, there are 4 basic different types of player in any kind of mass multiplayer game. The Achiever, the Explorer, the Socializer, and the Killer. This video is a fantastic breakdown.



Each one is going to go through the character creation with a different mindset. The Achiever is going to go through character creation weighing the pros and cons of everything, trying to come up with what he considers the "best" overall class/race/skill combo overall. It may not even be geared towards combat, it might be geared towards being the best crafter in the world, or the best merchant. But whichever way that player goes, they're aiming to be the best at it.

The Explorer is the type of person who is going to be looking more at the lore and culture of a race, and trying to find something that matches their vision or fantasy. The may go in with no expecations, see a race of jungle pygmies, and decide "That sounds new and exciting, let's roll with that!" even if the race is in some ways sub optimal. This is also the type of player who rolls the gnome warrior in WoW.

The Socializer is going to look at the races, and generally pick one that is pretty or has a high charisma, especially if the world has realistic NPCs that respond to that sort of thing. If the Socializer is joining the game as part of a group, then they'll be happy to choose whatever race the group goes with. If you're first thought is "who the hell would ever want to be a troll", you may be a Socializer. Trolls happen to be one of my favorite races in the world of Shadowrun, which is kind of D&D meets Bladerunner.

The Killer is going to pick races that give them the best chance of dominating other players. Whether it's because of natural stealth, size, or strength bonuses, Killers are out to pit themselves against other players and make sure THEY come out on top. Again, something like a troll/dragon hybrid sounds terrifying, and right up this player's alley.

When it comes to skills, every player, depending on their type, is going to approach it differently. Ash Ketchum (Achiever) is going to try and acquire very different skills than Freiza (Killer).

 

**sips some of Windfall's tea**


Whoa... that's got some kick!


**All of Herko's Ducks receive a -20% penalty to their Gettinnarow Skill!!**


A'ight, now we are both under the same caveat (fair is fair! =), methinks Trevor's got a point, in basically that, at least from the point of view of a Min/Maxer, things like Skills, Stats, Character, Race, etc, are just a bunch of variables that we tweak/chose to make our characters do whatever it is we want to do. So pondering whether to choose to spend points in Strength versus Intelligence is (broadly speaking, of course) no different that pondering whether to choose a high-Strength, low-Intelligence Troll, or a low-Strenght, high-Intelligence Gnome (or a Warrior versus a Mage). In the end, it's about optimizing my build for whatever end I'm after.

On the other hand, players more on the Roleplayer end of the spectrum may prefer Trolls due to how they are portrayed in the Lore, who they are aligned with, etc, even if it's not an objective advantage (and, in those cases, I fully agree with you: it's just a matter of taste, so the MC should just go "I prefer this, let's roll!")


**sips some more tea**


I think? =)

 

Okay, the alleged anti-anxiety effect has worn off so let me try again

What I'm trying to get to: why skills-selection usually feels great but character-creation feels terrible in most books

Character-creation has the following problems:
1) Most of the time the races don't really make sense: they're there simply because 'Tolkien/D&D has a lot of races' and because most games have them. When the author has not done any world-building to include these races into the lore of their world in the first place, it makes character-selection ring false, because the author doesn't even know why certain races are there in the first place and therefore cannot 'sell' them convincingly. I have yet to read a book where lizardman sounds remotely attractive.
[Imagine a skills-selection scene where the MC gets to choose between a) Throw Rocks b) Stomp Enemy's Foot c) Kick Shin d) Soul-Shattering Divine Fist -- it's a no-brainer. If you have the MC actually 'seriously' think about taking Throw Rocks, I just can't take the whole scene seriously any more (unless you can make Throw Rocks really interesting, then I applaud you, but most of the time authors just don't bother developing 'choices that the MC are not going to choose', but still forces MC to go through some unnatural 'decision making', which makes me cringe and cringe]
To solve this: don't beat around the bush. Don't try to force the MC to think about the choices if you can't do it convincingly. It's better to just be honest and go "I didn't understand any of the other races and I'm a wuss, so I picked human" OR "I just picked half-elf because it sounds cool"

2) It's impossible to make the readers fully understand the related lore and racial benefits, and most of the time the MC ends up making blind choices, or choices that seem arbitrary because readers didn't get to see the whole list.
[Imagine if a skills-selection scene is something like "There were ten skills to choose from, and I ended up choosing Super Speed, because that would be useful" -- it doesn't feel like shopping anymore, and the scene feels arbitrary and meh.]
To solve this: "There were long lists of possible races, and I looked through them all. One spoke to me: Hill Dryad. They are an elusive race who live in small communities and are attuned to natural magic. That sounded good. A tight-knitted support network and long walks in the woods sound like something I would want to be doing. This game, I decided, will be a refuge from my chaotic life." (There, you grounded it in emotions -- it's an emotional choice, not a rational one, and you don't need to explain emotional choices) OR, if you're min-maxing, just don't take pages to do something, just "I went with Lizardman because it gives me the greatest speed and agility", you know.

3) Most of the time I feel like the authors are just trying to get it over with and get to the story, and the whole thing feels like it's one of those "this is what we have to do" and it carries through into the reader experience.
To solve this: If you're not invested in a scene, just don't even bother writing it, because readers can tell. Just do: "Five hours later, after looking through all the choices, I'm a proud Level 1 Gun-slinging Underhill Hobbit."

4) Most of the time I feel like the author is self-conscious about the scene because of self-inserting and they hate to admit that they make their darling go with a certain choice because the race is good-looking/has unrealistic muscles/frail-yet-intelligent-just-like-me-who-is-a-nerd. This comes through in the prose where the MC is 'rationalizing' their choice, but we all know it's just self-insert fantasy, and this is the WORST CASE OF CRINGE!
To solve this: The MC is not you. Be honest about exposing their insecurity.


Other ways to do it
- Turn character creation into a shopping list like skills selection. "Based on your answers on the questionnaires/brain scan/randomized package to make the game balanced racially, here are four races you can choose from..." Then you can really see all the options available and you can pick. The reader is fully involved in the process and the scene is interesting.


Character creation has the potential of being very interesting, but usually it feels random and arbitrary, and I haven't seen one where the MC goes through 'pondering' where it's done convincingly.

Hope that makes sense?

 

Gotta confess... not 100%? (but I may still be over-tea'd! =)

If I'm following you correctly, seems to be above all a problem of execution in the books you've found I guess?

For example, I'm not entirely sure how a list of 10 races and the MC saying "I took Lizardman because it has the highest Dexterity" (with a solid explanation for why the MC wants their toon to have high Dexterity) than, say, a list of 10 items and the MC buying the one that grants the most Dex, or why the MC puts a lot of stat points in Dex, or any other list of 10 choices in which the MC goes for the one that maximizes Dex?

(I get a hunch that the problem you've found thus far is that the Race choice tends to come along with a lot of poorly-written Lore, while the a choice of skill or gear is usually more technical in nature?)

I guess what I'm trying to point out is: if the MC chooses from a list of 10 widgets, then a list of 10 gadgets, then a list of 10 kuzgets, isn't that three instances of "choosing from among 10 items", and should therefore be roughly equal in all cases? Why if widgets=skills is it interesting, but if widgets=races it is not?

Sorry if I'm too dense, just truly interested in the topic! =)

 

Yes, you're exactly right. There's nothing wrong with character creation itself, but it's often executed poorly and cringe-inducingly that I usually prefer to skip it.

Okay, let me try again:

I think the problem is this:

Fantasy races are inherently problematic. Most of the time they're a straight import from Tolkien/D&D and Tolkien really had the whole world's back story there to support why these races in the first place. This is what D&D kinda glosses over, and therefore modern fantasy goes with "races because there are supposed to be races" without actually thinking about why there has to be these races in their world.

Now, in a video game, it's perfectly fine to have these races without realistic lore, because, well, it's designed that way. So writers often import these races straight to their game without further thought other than the MC's choice.

Still, there are several problems:

- It's fine if the author actually shows all the available races, and then have the MC pick. However, I suspect that authors often have this uneasy feeling related the concept of race, and so oftentimes the author simply doesn't even show all the available races (laziness, sloppiness, bad writing), but simply has the MC pick whatever they want to pick from a list not visible to the readers. Also, no rules seem to govern 'half-ing'. And, really, when you go down to the dirty details about races, there's a lot of ick. Can you be half-human half-gnome? But gnomes are so small, how does that... uh... work in the process of baby creation? But, okay, you can be a half-elf? So elves and humans can breed, but not humans and gnomes? What about elves and orcs? Like... just thinking about it opens a whole can of ick and uncomfortable feelings, so most writers avoid it by... simply not thinking about it. This leads to the problem of the writer actually not even knowing what races are available in their world in the first place, which is why they don't show the whole list of playable races, which is why when MC picks 'half-elf', it feels sloppy.
- It's way easier to write a list of interesting skills than a list of interesting races (because you're talking 'species-level' complexity here, and if you don't import from Tolkien, you have a lot of world-building to do) Most writers simply don't bother and just have standard races, which is fine, but which is already inherently boring. (So if you have standard races, it's best to just make character creation as short as possible and be done with it)
- To clarify: "I took Lizardman because it has the highest Dexterity" is perfectly fine. The problem is some authors don't even do this. They just have the MC pick 'human' or 'elf', while 'lizardman' or 'unicorn person' is a random choice that's just put there for show as 'choice not to be chosen because the author doesn't even know how this works', so this sloppiness makes the whole scene of the MC picking human or elf feel off.

Okay, so, to conclude: races are just much more difficult than skills to be done well.

Hopefully that makes more sense now?

(And thanks for asking questions -- typing answers help clarify my thoughts to myself as well!)

 

Ah! Gotcha; makes perfect sense now!! =)

Exactly the same deal over here, so thanks to you!! =)

Specifically, I think I'm beginning to sort of, kinda, maybe blurrily being able to put my finger on something that has been on my mind for some time, which crudely and broadely could perhaps be summarized as: Shouldn't LitRPG Worlds be Badly Written?

**sips the last bit of Windfall's team**

Stay with me for a bit, I beg you!

It's a bit like this: I absolutely, completely, 120% agree with you that it's easier to make a list of cool skills, than it is to make a list of interesting races...

... because races are two things, as noted above: a bunch of Stats/Skills/Numbers-that-affect-game-mechanics on the one hand, and a bunch of Lore on the other (while bona-fide Skills are just game-affecting numbers)...

... and, naturally, creating just the number part (Skills) has to be easier than creating the number part PLUS the lore part (Races)...

... but that's actually also true for real videogames, right?

So, if real videogames sometimes (usually?) have really sloppy races & worldbuilding even when they have solid mechanics, should LitRPG worlds on purpose try to stick to (at least a bit) to that sloppiness?

Or, on the contrary, should we try to make our LitRPG worlds as solid as the best examples Fantasy and Sci-Fi provide?

(To put it crudely: if most videogames have some ridiculous race, like Lizarmen, that make little sense with the Lore but it's there just as a thin layer of sloppy lore around some mechanics, shouldn't LitRPG include those races, since up to a point we are trying to mimic real videogames?)


In short: should LitRPG's races strive be as cohesive with the lore as the best "Lit" examples, or should said races (to a point) copy the more sloppy racial tropes of "RPGs"?

 

I get exactly what you're trying to say, and I'd say there are two routes, depending on the tone you're going for:

1) The serious route: if your LitRPG is trying to do something serious and believable -- on the 'heavier' side of scales -- then I'd say go for more believable races, because it helps your tone.
2) The self-aware route: if you're imitating the real 'video game' experience, then go for some video game insights. If your races are sloppy, have characters actually comment on it. "Only idiots choose to play Lizardman" / "This race is OP" / "There are no female dwarves" / "Who designed this crap!?" You know, stuff like that. Then it's awesome. [I'll give real props to Amazons of Icehelm here in terms of self-awareness gold]

Most LitRPGs are kinda stuck in between, in that they don't know how self-aware the characters should be about the fact that they're playing a game. I'd personally like to see much more of 2) -- but most stories end up 'trapped' and then become dead serious. Like, where are complaints about glitches, about face-rolling, about things being unbalanced, about how I've grunted for this freakin' sword for a month and it never dropped, and all the incessant and unreasonable whining from the player base?

Then there's those that are straight portal fantasy or the world suddenly has stats, which needs a different kind of treatment.

I'd love to see more stories with games that actually work as games -- not MC breaks all rules! Really, no AI-giving-people-unique-quests either, because that destroys the game. At that point, why not just make it a fantasy, or portal fantasy, with gods, you know... (but that's just my personal taste) I want people to be able to get the exact same quests by doing the same things -- then it's interesting how you see the MC 'break' this rigid structure (or learn to thrive within it).

Last tangent: and if you go the gods route, at least have some explanation of why stats. Like, the god says "I happen to luuuurrve math, so now everyone will see numbers everywhere so they can crunch properly!" -- just give me that one line, and that will make me happy.

Sorry -- the last bit had nothing to do with your question at all.

 

Aye, but (and I still can't put my finger on it) it's a bit like videogames, as a genre, and even those that are well-written, are a bit more... dunno, outlandish may be the word? Not sure how to word it correctly, but a general sense that, when comparing Literature to Videogames, games' worlds tend to be more lax about their lore's rules, so to speak (like there's a higher chance a game will have some race that makes not much sense, when compared to a book).

Of course this is a broad scale, and a handful of videogames have extremely well thought-out worlds; just saying that if we were to build a Make-Sense-O-Meter that works for speculative fiction, and measure the MakeSensiness of all Fantasy books, and all RPGs, the average is gonna be higher for books (even if a lot of books will fall on the Utter Nonsense end of the scale) and lower for games (even if a couple of games may reach near-Tolkien level of consistency).

Again, not a clue where this hunch comes from (other than "played lot of games, read quite a few of books", but that's anecdotal at best). Just a general feeling that games (and perhaps LitRPG?) have, as a genre, a bit more room (perhaps because players demand it?) for cool stuff just because it looks/sounds cool, without having given it that much thought about consistency.

(As a very silly example: Lizardmen with frikkin' laser beams may be something that, were I to find them in a Fantasy book, as a reader I would probably go "yyyuck", while if I find them in a game my gamer self may very well go "whoa, cool!", even if I know that they make no friggin' sense. So I'm wonderin if, in LitRPG, I'd go for "yuck" or "cool", and as of late suspect I'd go for the latter, provided the rest of the execution is okay of course =)

 

Okay, we have a situation here where I'd have to VEHEMENTLY disagree. If you compare ALL of videogaming to just the Fantasy and Sci-fi genres, then you'd be correct. But Pong and Mario Tennis serve a very different function that Tolkien's worlds. Also, for every thoughtfully built world or universe (Tolkien, Star Wars, Discworld), there are hundreds of thousands of novels and series that do partial or no world-building, Or just do it badly.

Here's the rub. For LitRPG, you should not be comparing literary world building to video games, you should be comparing it to the world building you find in MMORPGs. This particular sub-genre of video games is ALMOST ENTIRELY BASED ON WORLD BUILDING. Let's take World of Warcraft for example, arguably the biggest MMO ever. When the game first started, there were 8 races total, divided into 2 major factions, the Alliance and the Horde. Each race had a starting subzone that gave you a feel for the lore and culture of the race and faction through your interactions with the NPCs and the quests that you obtained and completed. All of this in the context of a larger conflict between the Alliance and Horde that helped drive along the story and Player versus Player conflict. All the MMO's I've ever played (Everquest I and II, Asheron's Call, WoW, Elder Scrolls Online, EVE Online, the Star Wars MMO) ALL have a absolutely massive amount of world building, because they had to. The players are exploring every corner of that world. In novels, the author can give us more of a 'guided tour' of the world, hinting at things just outside the realm of the character's experience without actually having to CREATE those people, places or things.

This world building is at the core of what makes an MMORPG an MMORPG.

With that said, if a writer of LitRPG fails to properly world build (either because they are lazy as writer, uninspired, ignorant of the need, or uneducated in how to) then it very well may not be a very good work. That doesn't mean we should expect that from the genre, or that we should expect that from ourselves as writers. Let's elevate the genre as a whole and start creating some original and interesting worlds our characters (and readers) can live in and
thrive.

 

I have to disagree with the second part here. In a videogame, it is most certainly NOT okay to just drop in absurd races without realistic lore. That is the epitome of BAD MMORPG design. Even in a tabletop adventure like D&D, there are huge amounts of lore written for the races to help players better understand them. A lot of this lore is written in supplemental handbooks, but that's more due to marketing decisions and space limitations.

Now to paraphrase you... Fantasy races are inherently difficult to creatively design and write, because of the world building involved to come up with unique races not built on tropes or already established material.

Here are a few tips that have helped me design fantasy races for my current WIP.

1) Base races off of SKILLS
Pick an iconic skill in your game. What would a culture based around that skill look like? How might they physically change to adapt to be better able to use that skill? What tools might they develop? Examples of this would be Melee Weapons (Orcs), Archery (Elves), Mining (Dwarves), Tinkering (Gnomes), Sneaking (Goblins). This may seem a bit backward, but can give your race unique flavor and culture.

2) Base races off of ENVIRONMENT
A race that lives in a swamp is going to be very different than a race that live in treetops or a volcanic wasteland. Again, think about how skills, culture, physiology and technology might have evolved to help a race survive in their native habitat.

3) Base races off of CULTURE
"Race" in a non-fantasy sense usually refers to people of a different ethnicity. Use different cultures to provide variation for your characters to choose from in character creation. Think of the options a character entering into a world based on Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire might have. The starting stat bonuses, skill bonuses, and zone, and lore would all be radically different for a Dothraki player than a Wildling.

I think if every author took the time to really delve into these issues when world building instead of just ripping off tropes we've seen a bazillion times, then the genre would be better for it. Just my two cents.

 

Ooopss... yyyep, my bad there: I should have stressed that I was talking about RPGs, not just all the games (just like I was talking about Fantasy & Sci-Fi, not every book).

My bad there, sorry for the confusion!

Fully agreed on this; my point (which I stress again, is more like a blurry, foggy half-hunch, and nowhere near a solid, well thought-out point!) is that, were we to judge such worldbuilding by logic and internal coherence, as a broad rules RPG games (even the best) are lower on the scale than SFF books (again, comparing with the best).

Probably because games need to focus on mechanics and balance, so in turn gamers give devs a bit more leeway here.

For example, take Elves in the Lord of the Ring universe. In the novels, there's absolutely no doubt Elves are a "superior race": they are faster, nimbler, better-looking, longer-lived than humans; and even between humans there are some bloodlines that seem superior to others in an objective way (Aragorn, for example, is a lot older than average humans due to his bloodline).

In a game, though, if you make those races available to players, you need to balance them somehow (else everybody picks the objectively superior race).

So that's more or less what I'm sort of trying to form some more coherent thoughts: Blizzard has spend gazillions of dollars and man-hours in WoW, so if we were to judge them by the amount of details, probably WoW is superior to Tolkien's work, simply because there's an army of people working on WoW and, as you correctly point out, we can walk around every square inch of WoW while we can't do so in Tolkien's books...

... yet I'd argue that the level of internal coherence in Tolkien's books is superior, not just because the guy was a genious, but because games have other requirements (fun game mechanics, different race/class combos being balanced, the "whoa! cool!" factor, etc).


Again, still not sure what I'm trying to put my finger at; just saying that, while races in a SFF book should make perfect sense, I'm not 100% sure they need to do so in a LitRPG novel (for clarity: "make sense" strictly from a logic/narrative coherence point of view)

Sorry for the long, mostly pointless rambling; I've drank all the tea, so I don't even have that excuse anymore! =)

 

I sorta see where you're coming from, but I just don't understand why you couldn't have a cohesive world AND fun/balanced mechanics and gameplay. Might it take time and resources to create? Sure, but it's possible. The two qualities are inherently different, but not opposed.

It just seems like you're giving LitRPG as a genre a pass, like it doesn't have to live up to the same standards of creative world building that are hallmarks of Sci-fi/Fantasy AND MMOs, which LitRPG is arguably a fusion of by definition.

When it comes to having a superior race (like elves in Tolkien) I'd have to argue superiority is subjective. Longevity doesn't mean a thing if you are a character in a game and unlikely to die of old age. Beauty? Superior only if that's what's important to you. Tolkien's elves were by and large a fairly xenophobic caste society. I wouldn't want to be a character at the bottom of that totem pole. It all depends on the outlook of the individual player, what type of player they are, and what they're looking to get out of the game.

 

What if Tolkien had been the Lead World Designer at Blizzard?

 

Just to be extra-super-clear on this (since, as we all know, "race" and "superior race" can be an explosive subject in online exchanges), of course I mean "race" strictly in the gaming sense, and "superior race" as in "objectively better because it has higher stats all across."

For example: in Dungeons and Dragons, Elves received a +1 on Dexterity, but suffered from a -1 in a different stat (Constitution, I think? I cannot remember), so all in all they would be balanced when compared to other races a player can choose.

But in Tolkien novels, there seems to be, in my humble opinion, little doubt that in every metric that would translate into game numbers (Str, Dex, Cons...), Elves are superior to humans (this is probably taken to exageration in the movies, and even more so in the Hobbit movies, with Legolas being close to a super-hero! =). And, again in the novels, when they are described as "beautiful", it's done so with admiration by pretty much every non-elven character, and positively so.

So, yeah, of course it's a matter of opinion, but there's no doubt in my mind that Tolkien very much sees, and wants readers to see, that Elves are superior to other races in that regard (although, yep, it's not all good, they can be xenophobic, etc).

On the opposite side, in an MMO all races gotta be, roughtly speaking, equal; to avoid making them strictly equal, we get a bunch of Bonuses and Maluses (so maybe the strongest race is the dumbest, or the quickest is the weakest, and so forth), restrictions (so Race A cannot choose class B, or Class C seemingly cannot pick up weapon D for some reason)... and that is, always IMHO, where things start falling a apart a bit on the strict Logic/Makes-Sense scale.


I'm progressively beginning to think that the key of what I'm trying to get at may be this:

Fully agreed with the fusion part; my hunch is that such fusion may still need to preserve the shortcomings of one of the genres (so, if I want to have "Superior Tolkien-type Elves" in my story, they either cannot be a playable race, or all players have to be Elves... or I just gotta stick to the MMO side of the fusion, do some hand-waving, and ignore that bit of internal inconsistency, hoping readers will react more like gamers at this point, and just willingly ignore the hand-waving to keep the story going).

... aaaaaand we are soooo far from the original topic so as to have reached another galaxy, I'm afraid!! =)

 

I completely agree that the whole LitRPG sphere needs better world-building (and game-building) -- but sometimes you're just unlucky enough to be trapped in a badly designed game, which can be hilarious.

I think I understand what Herko's point about the fact that there's something inherently 'silly' (if you will) about video games, which transfers to stories about people playing video games, which is exactly why I think we need this scale:

<--- serious ------------------------------------ facetious --->

Because "serious gaming" and "messing-around gaming" give different feelings, and "game becoming real life" and "game is just a game" are also very different and require different treatment of tropes. In a way, LitRPG is unique in that it needs two planes of reality, and that gives rise to all sorts of interesting questions regarding how characters deal with these. At its best, I believe it can ask some very interesting and deep questions that other genres can't, but we're not quite there yet.

I play WoW and the whole lore is a complete mess. I mean... who is it again that's the great hero who defeated the final boss and saved the world in every expansion? Wait... you mean, everyone? Now dungeons and instancing is a whole different issue we can talk about, because you have to decide 1) why dungeons are stuck in a time loop and 2) where loot comes from and 3) are we doing it seriously (like characters are supposed to believe that they're following a linear quest line) or are we doing it 'game-style' (I'm farming this dungeon for this ingredient!). Then, it's also about how much you actually RP?

And, you also have to make a distinction between whether you want to be art or pop entertainment, because sometimes readers want to read about a D&D campaign (with badly designed races and all that) -- because that's also a kind of aesthetics in its own right. You know, maybe 'cheesy poppi-ness' is what some readers are after, not well-thought-out fantasy.

 

I prefer the one where you earn your abilities. I'd especially love a game where you're given a mana pool and you basically have to figure out your own abilities, including creating your own and saving them. Hence why I keep returning to that concept in my story ideas.

You can certainly read a spellbook and figure out how to do a certain attack or cast a particular ward, and you can learn a particular skill from some old master... I just want to do the creating myself for once. That's how I'd treat true meaningful success in a gameworld: not if I have a million gold coins but if all the noobs are desperate to use techniques I've created. But I can't do that if the only abilities you can use are the ones designed with the game with maybe some token "spell-creator" function.
The only reason why you can't do that already in RPGs is because of technical limitations— you can only use the attacks and defenses that come programmed/printed with the game— but you won't have those in the future. LitRPG is the perfect way to show that off.

 

Yeah, this! =)

I mean, there's a lot to be said about why videogames may have that quality (a combination of factors from Game Mechanics always having prevalence over the Lore, to some gamers not giving a damn about the Lore, to a lot of game writing being just plain bad, to gamers in general being a bit more after the "whoa! cool" factor while readers being a bit more after the "gotta make sense!", and a long list of etc), but I get the feeling that such "silliness" is, by now, part of videogames' aesthetics.

Which does not mean a game is going for humor (a game's world may be grim and dark, and have Lizardmen).

Basically this:

I mean, if for whatever reason (and using again the same example), say that Lizardmen become a staple of Fantasy RPG videogames, even when they make no bloody sense; in that case, methinks that LitRPG should do well to include them (as a broad rule, not always of course).


But yeah, something having to do with a certain "aesthetics of silliness", for lack of a proper term; I have a hunch is actually the "whoa! cool!" factor taking over the "waaait just a minute... how does this even work?"; I'll leave it to Windfall to come up with a proper scale for that! =)