LitRPG

A sub-genre of fiction whereby characters have access to/awareness of some form of personal stats, as a means to understanding their own personal progression. Modeled after tabletop role-playing games and video role-playing games, stories typically have a fantasy theme, but other themes are possible.

Subjectively speaking, I’d have to say that LitRPG is probably my favorite genre or at least has been one of my more read genres in the past eight years or so since I started listening to it more regularly. Discovered its existence I suppose. Yes, there are some less awesome books, but there are pretty terrible books in a lot of genres and I think if you read enough independent authors then you’re gonna find a few that are just not as good. But I’ve been overall quite impressed.

By its nature as a progression fantasy genre, the LitRPG books have a tendency to be in longer series. Many continuing for quite a while before coming to some sort of conclusion. Some, I’m still waiting to see a conclusion because they just keep going. And that makes the series more of a meaningful unit than the individual books. Often times some of these series are coming from a web serial background like Royal Road or some other platform where they’re being released a chapter at a time. Or whatever unit of granularity that they’re being published and they just accumulate over the years. Then they get chunked up into books. And so, a lot of the series are very continuous. Hopefully the author manages to find an organic finish point at the end of a book. But they are more series-oriented and that’s kind of one of the reasons that I’ve wanted to create my own library tracking tool. I’m really trying to track the series as a first class citizen, just as much as the book itself. And I want to elevate that and be able to take notes and have a representation at the series level rather than strictly just at the book level. That’s one of the main goals of Backstories is being able to provide that series level context.

It doesn’t hurt that the LitRPG books provide a fuel, if you will, to my other main hobby, which is TTRPGs. And so I can often use plots or elements from these books and work them into my homebrew games or have them be part of some character I’m developing for a game. And so there is obviously a natural crossover between the fiction: the fantasy or sci-fi fiction that I’m reading, and the game worlds that I’m imagining characters in or creating for others to play in. And I find that to be quite satisfying.