I prefer symbols being implemented or this is from this stat. There comes with so much confusion of what author thought vs reader thought.
Loose, lose, loss and many other forms of words with only subtle lettering changes making new meanings.
Sometimes its difficult to tell that wasn’t a joke but I thought it was! Or I thought it was serious, but its a joke.
I flirt this way, so I thought that was a flirt. Nope.
I flirt that way, it was a flirt.
I like symbols as I tend to not see eye to eye with various writers thoughts.
My favored list written elsewhere. Longer, darker, romantic styles. Couple dark ones however miss a mark and ended up never finishing, stopped at chapter 1.
I definitely help with trends.
Edit: Presets are very very iffy and need very specific factors to be interested.
Sex sells. Always has, always will. There’s a reason why the people making bank off of Kindle self-publishing are mostly romance writers.
Even earlier. Mass Effect 1 was 2007 and romances have been a huge selling point in RPGs ever since. Romances did appear in BG2, but I don’t think they sparked the kind of immense interest that they did in ME and onwards.
Now they’re just a standard of the RPG genre. You don’t have to include them, but they’re wildly popular and you are shooting your sales in the foot if you choose to leave them out.
I, the Forgotten One, Whiskey-Four, and Fallen Hero would beg to differ, imo. The Marshal, Whiskey, and Sidestep are all very much preset characters. You can define some things about them, but only within some pretty strict limits. Even if you don’t count them you’ll find things like Blood Moon having a relatively defined protagonist. While they’re not nearly as pre-defined as Sidestep or the Marshal, there is still a pretty solid core of personality and traits that all MCs from that game will have in common with each other.
And length, eh. These aren’t just stories. They’re games, and as such they’ll get judged by a separate set of metrics that include things like “replayability”. And a longer game just feels more replayable. More room for branches. More room for content you haven’t seen yet. More reactivity to choices.
It’s a genre that combines RPG gaming elements with the plot of a novel, but without reader interactivity like we’d expect here. The most common trope is the ‘isekai’ where the main character gets taken from the real world into a videogame or fantasy world where they suddenly have powers, stats, and can level up.
These books are ridiculously popular, selling millions of copies. Romance is still king (queen?) but LitRPG has been insanely popular for the last 5-6 years or so.
Here are my favourite examples. Look at those beautiful review numbers. **breaks out in a cold sweat
That was before I realized I was still wanted here for another project then Werewolves 4 plus my Patreon. If I ever want to get my LitRPG empire off the ground, I’m gonna have to get back to work on my cloning machine!
Of course you’re still wanted here! Even after you finish Werewolves, I hope you’ll keep writing interactive fiction because you’re amazingly good at it.
In ITFO, you can customize the MC’s name, gender, physical appearance (Height, skin tone, hair, etc) fighting style as well as the name and gender of his or her mount. I wouldn’t really consider the Marshal to be a preset character compared to say… the fixed player characters in Nuclear Powered Toaster.
Whiskey and Marshal (especially the first one) are more preset characters than Sidestep, imo. I mean mainly the details that allow the reader to have some sense of control, that let you feel mc is your own.
Let’s see, vices. In FH you have four options, in W-4 MC was an alcoholic and now they’re teetotaller, no choice in this. Relationship with Ortega - past partners in fight villains, friends or something romantic was going on. Ulysses is always MC’s ex lover.
Sidestep’s past is set and certain things they do as a villain but - at least in my case - FH feels much more interactive than two other games.
Oh man, do i hate these (since it largely frees the author from having to come up with a plot other than “the numbers keep going up and brrr”) It’s like Progress Quest: the Book and/or Anime adaptation and “ridiculously popular” is right in every sense of the world.
So that’s what this is called. Will sound silly but I recently started playing a legit game and was trying to come up with what the style was called, as it’s a game and the framing device is you’re playing a game (like with other NPCs being other “players”). I compared it mentally to a different game, one based on an isekai, but that one makes sense as the property already has that context. Either way, same concept as what you’re saying taken to the comical conclusion of playing a game that’s a game, and I had been trying to figure out what that particular style would be called
I was trying to work out why there was a flood of new webcomics being pushed a while back which all had that same “level up” in a “chosen one in a VR game” or the “transported to a real life interactive story/video game/world” theme. There were so many of them with really similar themes, some seemed interesting, but a lot seemed to run out of ideas and sort of circle rather than advancing the plot. I didn’t realise they were that popular though. BTW He who fights with monsters looks like it might be a kinda fun read though.I might put it on my to read list.
Okay, now I want to see a “chosen one of a videogame ends up in real world”, except now I’m picturing Tron, which means I must have completely mixed up my want-sees.
It’s a very popular genre from what I understand. There’s a lot of anime and manga about it, and if you go somewhere like Royal Road you can see hundreds of them.
So all those Korean isekai webtoon with RPG genres are LitRPG? Damn, no wonder the kind of Solo Leveling and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint both succeeded and sold very well
