I've been reading litRPG lately. It's a genre of books where the hero has stats for a variety of reasons Usually, he's playing a game, usually a VR game and usually an MMO. I'm a little concerned that all these baby authors think an RPG is invariably an MMO...and few of them seem to have any idea what actually goes into making a game...and they are all very positive about in-app purchases. Kids these days.

Anyway, I've mostly been reading these because they are all Indie-published and so very cheap. I'll warn you if you go looking for these--very few of them are any good. Here are a few stand-outs:

Threadbare by Andrew Seiple: The story of a teddy bear golem that's trying to look out for his little girl owner. He is very brave and good! It's a bit like Winnie the Pooh + D&D.

Life Reset by Shemer Kuznits: This one's about a guy who is playing a VPMMORPG (of course) and gets his brain scrambled so that he has to deal with the NPC interface. Has lots of city building stuff.

Ritualist by Dakota Krout: This one has a disabled guy who decides to move permanently into a virtual world (which is of course an MMO). Lots of stats and spell creation. There is occasionally a weird fanboy-like mention of Elon Musk, but it is very rare (but very inexplicable).

Forever Fantasy Online by Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach. The main character is leading a raid in a virtual reality MMO (of course) when suddenly everything seems real. I recommend this because I liked the set piece moments a lot (see giant skeleton on the cover). But this is still the first book, so it remains to be seen if the series is good.

So, there are a lot of these in Russian as well. The translations to English when they exist are generally poorly-done. Also, these tend to have a lot of "bro" culture. However, the native English speakers often have grammar so bad that they might as well be a bad translations. And these have bro culture and/or high school drama (bleh!) too. So the Russian novels...are not worse?...for English readers.

One E. European series that has an OK translation is The Mirror World series by Alexey Osadchuk. The main character sells himself into indentured serventhood inside a VRMMORPG (of course) to pay for his daughter's medical bills. He lucks out of this and grows increasingly powerful over the course of the series (the daughter only ever gets a passing mention). The game devs, all the characters, and the game world have an amusingly bleak and mercenary view of life; it's very Rus...er...Ukrainian.

Okay, I did an excellent job of recommending these to you, didn't I! Seriously, they make excellent brain candy. So, have you read any litrpg, and if so, what are your favorites? Does the whole equating MMO to RPG thing bother you, or is that just me?

Very interesting! I've never heard of this genre until now

As far as I understand it, the genre and the name of the genre comes from Russia, where its particularly popular. I've only recently discovered the it thanks to an recent Audible sale, where I got bought:
The Land: Founding: A LitRPG Saga

It's ridiculously good, all you have to do is listen to the free sample. The narrator is particularly good, one of the best on Audible, making the story even better. I'm about a third in, and while it does has fetch quests, it also has city management. From the free sample, which is just the prologue of the book, you will get the impression of a MMO, but the twist is that the main character gets ?teleported/summoned? to an actual world called "the Land". The initial interaction between the characters does sound like leet MMO gamer talk, but once he reaches "the Land" the meta dialogue is much more restrained. It feels like a proper fantasy story with occasional meta humor from the protagonist that goes unaddressed by the other characters native to the world. Several times the protagonist is embarrassed by his use of meta humor since it's inappropriate, considering his circumstances, which I find, makes the character engaging.

I don't know how true the series holds throughout, but as far as I got, I find the explanations for the game mechanics very well explained and much closer to a proper D&D campaign, than a generic MMO.

By the way, there a currently 7 books in the series, and I think the author is still not done. I usually like to wait for a series to be completed before I dive in, but The Land and Helldivers(which is post-apocalyptic science fiction, not litRPG) are so good, that I just couldn't wait.

There is a bunch of "Choice of..." games on Steam. They are like Choose Your Own Adventure books, but your choices get locked down as you go according to the stats you accumulate.

LitRPG books aren't gamebooks, they're actual novels about characters in an RPG, as separate supernatural entities, like in Order of the Stick or the Goblins webcomics. Sometimes novels about gamers (like Ready Player One) get the label, too, for marketing reasons, but the purest expression of the genre deals with an independent world that works by (C|TT)RPG rules for no reason.

(Note: despite living in Russia, that's all I know about the genre. A journalist I follow who sometimes posts insane popadantsy covers has recently diversified into LitRPGs.)

I could see this genre being taken in some interesting ways. For example:

1. The stats could be anything, not just those that would work in a video game, or what you'd expect in an actual game. For example, you could have stats like happiness, current grade average, self-esteem, number of hair curls, or anything else the author could think of.

2. Since there are no mechanics that use these numbers (and hence, no balance is *required*, though an author might decide that stats follow certain rules), the numbers don't have to be reasonable. You could have stats that go into the octillions, for example, or even as high as Moser's number or various infinities. A stat could even go negative or even not be a real number. Imagine a demon whose power is 2 + i, and whose conjugate power (whatever that means) is 2 - i. (i = sqrt(-1), or one of them, anyway) One other idea that could be used; maybe those rules are buggy, which some players might get bitten by or try to use to their advantage. For example, maybe if a stat could somehow be reduced below 0, it might underflow, and some character might intentionally try to injure themself in such a way that that would happen.

Of course, we could also use something like item duping as a plot point.

(One other idea; perhaps only part of the book would work like a LitRPG; the game might take place in the real world, but have parts that take place in a virtual world. I once read a book like that, though it didn't have stats.)

@goldfishfingers, I hope you enjoy!

@MadalinStroe, yeah, apparently it's from Russia and from Japan. The Japanese books don't seem to have made it to English yet. The Land is really well-written. I feel a little awkward about them because if you read the author's bio and look at his picture, you can tell the main character is supposed to be him! Eh, they are still great, though.

@Kyle and Sabin_Stargem, I see what you mean about CYOA. I should have added that in LitRPG, the characters not only have stats but know about them and can be seen leveling up and allocating points.

@Sabin_Stargem, the Choice Of company has a strange system wherein they contract out each game to a different author. I like the Choice of Robots book/game a lot, but I have been reluctant to buy others because sometimes the quality seems to vary so much. Do you have a recommendation?

@Starmaker, true, a main component of the plot is usually interacting with game systems. If you are allergic to bad writing but are curious, you might try Threadbare. It's actually good as a novel, not just "for the genre." As a journalist (writing book reviews?), you might need to start with a Russian novel, but I can't really tell how well-written these are. The translations are usually really, really bad in English, and I assume they are losing a lot.

@dtgreene, a lot of the books do use glitching in the plot. So far, no one has ventured outside the rational numbers for stats. :) I personally wish the genre would expand to cover other types of games. The authors write like they've only ever heard of WOW and PUBG sometimes.

Reminds me of games like Disgaea where the characters were aware of in-game stats. In Disgaea 1, the characters comment about a certain superboss being level 4000, and in Disgaea 2, one character complains about their level suddenly dropping to 1.

Don't have much experience beyond the Robots one, but I will take a guesstimate: They offer two trilogies, one about Samurai and the other called Daria. I am guessing that those are longer and more thought out, with Daria importing your character data between entries. If I go back into Choice Of... games, those are likely candidates.

It's a nice read sometimes, but the genre could use some evolution.

You should read Morningwood: Everyone loves large chests. It's a bit naughty, punny and funny. It's about a Mimic turned adventurer. (so basically Luggage's evil brother).

The sequel, Fizzlesprocket, is still mostly funny but unfortunately too gory for my taste. But the first one I can recommend.

I just for the first time read a book from this genre a few weeks ago. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it and it was better than I thought it would be. Here it is:

https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Thief-LitRPG-Traveler-Adventure/dp/B07955PYRT/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1534964884&sr=1-5