My one son reads a lot of this, and as I am visiting him in the UK, we’ve been talking about it, and the appeal. I’ve been listening to one of Jake Malory’s LitRPG books as we’ve been travelling (Leicestershire yesterday. Apparently a lot of Freers live there. It’s… very English. Lots of narrow lanes the locals drive too fast down, and little villages and interesting-looking pubs)

I’m not sure it’s for me, although he does a good job. The whole ‘leveling up’ and input from some deus ex machina system to me rob the story of its tension (which, without that, is high). Still, it plainly appeals to lot of readers, so I was trying to learn, to dissect out the elements that make it work.

My son says to me: “Well, if you want an example of an early LitRPG style book: you should try PYRAMID SCHEME.”

Long pause from me. “You mean the book I wrote? Or another pyramid scheme? I know the bloke who wrote that rather well. He’s a bit dodgy and stupid, but he wouldn’t know a RPG if it jumped up and bit him on the leg.”

“Doesn’t stop it being one. The characters are transported from a normal earth situation to what is basically a kind of simulation, with different ‘rules’ that your characters have to learn, to acquire skills, and to beat a series of ‘bosses’, which get steadily harder to beat.”

He has a point. The only difference is the ‘leveling up’ is described and shown, rather than told. So: I kind of have written LitRPG, and moreover, Sprague de Camp and Fletcher (The COMPLEAT ENCHANTER) got there 50 years before me.

The big takeaway I have – so far – is that ever-increasing ‘bosses’ reach an end point in being interesting if your character has ‘leveled up’ with powers and skills. If you are going to write a series of these, you’d probably have to know where the end is before you start, and it’ll take some skilled foreshadowing – Skilled foreshadowing is where the reader reaches the end point – and POST FACTO sees just how obvious it was. So: LitRPG ties somewhat to good murder mystery style…

Always learning. Always working on writing a better book.