I Push litRPG on Everyone. Here's What's Wrong With It.

October 6, 2026

I’ve been handing people litRPG books for three years now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at reading the face.

There’s the face that means they’re going to love it. And there’s the other one — the polite one, two weeks later, when they hand the book back and say “yeah, I gave it a shot.” I’ve seen that one plenty. For a long time I told myself those people just hadn’t found the right book yet.

Some of them hadn’t. But some of them had, and the genre still wasn’t for them, and me insisting otherwise was just me being a guy who can’t take a hint.

So here’s the post I owe them. Six times on this site I’ve told you to read litRPG. This is the one where I tell you what’s wrong with it.

Quick bearing for anybody who’s new: litRPG is fiction where the characters’ world runs on game rules — levels, stats, skills, the stuff that would be on a screen if you were playing it. The full plain-English version is over here if you want it. You don’t need it for this post.

The four complaints, stated the way the critics state them

I’m not going to soften these into straw men so I can knock them over. That’s the oldest trick in the book and everybody can smell it.

One. The stat blocks stop the story dead. You’re three pages into a fight, it’s working, and then the page turns into a spreadsheet. Strength up two. New skill unlocked: something. A box of numbers where a sentence should be. Critics say it’s the literary equivalent of a cutscene you can’t skip, and that a writer reaching for a stat block is a writer who couldn’t be bothered to show you the character got stronger.

Two. The prose often reads unedited. Because a lot of it genuinely is. Repeated words, flabby dialogue, a scene that goes on four pages past its point. People who read widely pick up on it in the first chapter, and once they’ve noticed it they can’t un-notice it.

Three. It’s wish fulfilment with the mask off. An ordinary guy gets dropped into a world that measures his worth with a number, and the number goes up forever. Critics point out that the protagonist is very often a man, the world very often rewards him in ways it rewards nobody else, and attractive characters very often arrive in quantity and without much reason. Fair warning attached: in some corners of the genre, content shows up that nobody told you was coming.

Four. Nobody mentions the series is twelve books long. You get recommended “a book” and you’ve actually been recommended a season of your reading life.

That’s the list. Now let me do the part that’s actually hard.

Three of those are fair. One is a sampling problem.

Here’s the thing I didn’t understand until I went and looked properly.

A huge amount of this genre is published as a free web serial first, chapter by chapter, and only becomes a book later. The biggest home for that is a site called Royal Road. I pulled up its best-rated list while writing this, and the numbers tell you everything about how this stuff gets made.

The top-rated story on the whole site runs 2,932 pages across 109 chapters. Fourth down the list: 3,451 pages across 413 chapters. And that fourth one’s title, right now, literally includes the words “Vol. 1 Stubbing October 17” — which is the author telling his readers that the free chapters are about to be pulled down, because the first chunk is going on sale as a book.

Sit with that for a second. Four hundred and thirteen chapters, posted a few a week, for years, written to a deadline the author set in public and has to keep hitting or lose his readers. That’s not how novels get written. That’s how a newspaper strip gets written.

So complaint two — the prose reads unedited — isn’t really a complaint about the genre. It’s a complaint about which tier of the genre you happened to pick up. There’s a free-serial tier, written fast and in public, where rough prose is the honest price of admission. And there’s a finished tier, where somebody has gone back through it with a pencil. The two look identical from outside. Both get called litRPG. Both get recommended by fans with equal enthusiasm, including by me.

The best proof of the gap is a book this site already won’t shut up about. Dungeon Crawler Carl started as exactly that — an indie web serial — and it’s now a 464-page Ace hardcover with a maze printed on the case. Same story. Completely different object. If the version you tried was the raw one and you concluded the genre can’t write, you reviewed the scaffolding and skipped the house.

That one’s a sampling problem. The other three are real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Why these books are so long, and it isn’t an accident

I want to show you something, because it explains more about this genre than any amount of literary criticism.

Amazon has a subscription service, and authors in it don’t get paid per book sold. They get paid per page read. Amazon’s own help pages spell it out with a worked example: in a month with a ten-million-dollar pot, an author with a 100-page book that a hundred people read all the way through earns a thousand dollars. An author with a 200-page book, same hundred readers, same completion — two thousand.

Same readers. Same story, told at twice the length. Twice the money.

I’m not accusing anybody of anything. Most of these writers are working extremely hard for a living that would make you wince. But if you’ve ever wondered why a genre built on things gradually getting bigger also happens to produce the longest books on the shelf, you don’t need a theory about artistic vision. The payment structure is right there in writing.

That’s complaint four, and I’m conceding it completely. It’s also why I wrote a whole separate post that does nothing but count — how many books, how many hours, whether the author has actually finished. I’m not going to repeat those numbers here. Go check the shelf before you step on it.

The stat blocks: when they’re the point, and when they’re padding

This is the one I’ll actually defend, with conditions.

A stat block is doing real work when the number is information you’re supposed to act on. You’re reading a fight, the character has to pick between two bad options, and the numbers are the evidence you’re weighing alongside him. That’s a puzzle. Some people love that. I’m one of them — I spend my working life deciding whether a beam will hold, and a book that lets me do that for fun is a book I’ll follow anywhere.

A stat block is padding when it tells you something the prose already told you. He trained for a month and got stronger; here’s a box confirming he got stronger. Nothing happens in your head. It’s a receipt for a transaction you already watched.

Here’s the honest part. Plenty of books in this genre do the second thing, routinely, and the fans have mostly stopped seeing it — the way you stop hearing the compressor in your own shop. When a new reader says the numbers pulled them out of the story, I believe them. They’re not failing to appreciate it. They’re noticing something that’s there.

And if the numbers are the only thing you disliked, there’s good news, which is that there’s a whole neighbouring aisle with none of them. The three labels and what separates them sorts that out. The short version: you may want the climb without the scoreboard, and that’s a thing you can just go buy.

The wish fulfilment: it’s real, it’s catalogued, and you can screen for it

I’m not going to argue this one down, because the genre itself documents it.

Royal Road lets authors tag their stories, and the tag list is a tidy little X-ray of what the genre is actually made of. Alongside the ones you’d expect — Progression, Dungeon Crawler, Cultivation — are tags like Attractive Lead and Competing Love Interest. Those are not accusations from outside. They’re labels the writers put on themselves, because readers want to be able to find that, or avoid it.

Which is also the practical advice. If that strand isn’t what you’re there for, you can read the tags before you read the book. The information is right at the top of the page, free, and almost nobody checks it.

What I’d push back on, gently: “wish fulfilment” gets used like it settles the argument, and it doesn’t. Half the fiction I love is wish fulfilment. Every thriller where an ordinary guy turns out to be competent under pressure is wish fulfilment. The question isn’t whether a book is giving you a fantasy — it’s whether it’s giving you one you actually want. If this particular fantasy, a man becoming measurably better than everyone else forever, isn’t it, then the complaint isn’t really that the book is bad. It’s that the book isn’t for you.

Which brings me to the part I should have been writing all along.

Who should skip litRPG

Not “who should try harder.” Who should skip it.

Skip it if what you love about reading is the sentences. If you’re the kind of reader who stops and reads a paragraph twice because of how it’s built, the odds are against you here. The genre’s strengths are structural — momentum, payoff, the climb — and its prose is mostly a delivery truck. There are exceptions. You shouldn’t have to go hunting for exceptions to enjoy a genre.

Skip it if you want a book that ends. Most of these don’t, not for a long time, and the ones that do took their authors a decade. If you read one novel a month and like finishing things, this genre will feel like a job.

Skip it if a number on the page breaks the spell for you. Not “if you dislike numbers.” If seeing one yanks you out of the story, that’s not a preference you can train away, and the books that avoid stat blocks entirely are a small slice of a big genre. Go read the neighbouring aisle instead and you’ll get most of what makes this stuff good with none of the thing that bothers you.

And skip it if you only tried one book and hated it — but try the other tier first. That’s the one exception I’ll fight for. Read something from the finished side, where an editor has been through it, before you write off the whole shelf. One more book. If it’s still not for you, it’s still not for you, and I’ll stop.

So why am I still recommending it

Because when this genre works, it does something I haven’t found anywhere else: it makes getting better at something into a page-turner. Not winning. Getting better. The slow grind where a guy who was nothing becomes slightly less nothing, and then slightly less than that, and you feel every increment.

I framed houses for eight years before anyone let me run a job. Nobody writes novels about that. This genre writes about almost nothing else, and the first time I hit one that got it right, I sat in a parked truck in a cold Regina lot for forty minutes because I didn’t want to stop.

That’s my honest pitch, and it’s smaller than the one I usually give. It’s one specific pleasure, delivered unevenly, at considerable length, by a genre that is still mostly figuring out how to be good.

If that sounds like a bad deal, it might be. You’re allowed to hand the book back. Just hand it back for the right reason — and now you’ve got four of them to pick from.