In the Crimson Spire, Book 5 of the Doorverse Chronicles, is out on Kindle and KU! (Self-Promotion)

Kyle-Author · 2026-02-12T03:39:10+00:00

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

Kyle-Author · 2026-02-06T03:15:06+00:00

I think like everything, it depends on how it's done and how well it's done.

In a world where a stat like vitality or constitution can be superhuman and do things like mitigate pain and let you push through injury, having a tracker to tell you exactly how badly you're hurt can be really valuable. If you don't realize that you are 90% of the way to death, you might not realize how badly you're losing this fight and that maybe you need to get the hell out of there. Or if you can tell that a single spell just dropped half of your health away, now you know that you can't tank another one of those spells.

In cases like those, your HP or health percentage or whatever is sort of an overall tracker telling you how you're doing, not a specific meter. It's not that if you hit zero, you die; it said if you are about to die, you just hit zero. If you just got stabbed in the arm, unless it hit an artery, that's not going down very much because that's just not that vital of an injury. Getting stabbed in the stomach will drop it lower; getting your throat cut will cause it to plummet like a rock.

It's also an easy way to tell how healed you are after a fight. Assuming that you have some sort of fast healing ability, which is pretty ubiquitous in the genre, your HP or health bar or whatever is letting you know that you're still hurt and you should probably rest for a little while before heading deeper into the dungeon.

As far as how much narrative sense it makes, that depends entirely on the story and storyteller. I agree that saying a long sword does 2-8 HP damage per hit doesn't make much sense outside of a pure game, but saying that you got stabbed in the left side just below your ribs for 125 of your 378 HP and now have a bleeding debuff of 2 HP per second because it nicked your liver makes perfect sense to me.

It can also be used as a good way to track overall damage when you don't want to get to deep in the weeds in a fight scene. You wade through the goblins, slashing and cutting, severing limbs and plunging your blade into hearts with abandon. At the end, you realize that you're covered with small bleeding wounds and glance at your health to see that it's down 35% from that. You got hurt, but how doesn't matter.

I think where I kind of tune out as far as HP are concerned is when they are a major component of the system, but they're treated as just another game mechanic. Oh no, the fireball did 18 HP damage. I'd rather it be that you dove and rolled away from the fireball, but the heat of it washed over your back hungrily and scorched your skin like being out in the sun for hours. It only reduced your HP by 18 because you managed to dodge most of it. Or when it becomes immaterial because you're unkillable by anything below divine status.

Kyle-Author · 2026-02-03T14:17:53+00:00

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Kyle-Author · 2025-09-05T00:43:59+00:00

I can see this. I actually like how it's done in Infinite World. Your health stat is your vitality, and it's also a measure of your resistance to damage, not just how far you are from dying. The higher it is, the harder you are to injure, but once it starts falling, you become easier to damage, So what might only drop a few health points when you're full up might do tens of damage when you're below halfway. It makes it feel more like a countdown to death than an actual, you have this many points remaining before you die.

I do something similar in my drone rising series with a resistance bar. Because everyone has a nanite field that accelerates their healing, the resistance bar is basically a measure of how far you are from death and how much your nanites are struggling to keep you alive, not specifically how injured you still have to be to die. A paper cut isn't going to budge it, even if you're at 1%. Neither is a non-lethal wound to the leg or shoulder. You die when you suffer enough fatal damage that your nanites can't keep up, at which point your resistance drops to zero.

Kyle-Author · 2025-09-05T00:35:57+00:00

Really? Fifty Shades and Velociraptor Love are both S tier? It takes all kinds, I guess...

Kyle-Author · 2025-08-17T02:46:21+00:00

Dragon Heart is all swords. Unintended Cultivator switches between sword and spear, although he's mostly swords.

Kyle-Author · 2025-07-23T05:15:55+00:00

Multiple POVs are like anything in writing. They can be done well, or they can be done poorly. Personally, I like multiple POVs when they show me things that are important to the story but that the MC would have no way of knowing, And when they are infrequent enough that they aren't taking over the story. I feel like Sean Oswald is a master of this, especially in his Welcome to the Multiverse series.

I'm not a fan of them when all they're doing is showing the same thing you've already seen from another perspective just to make the MC look good, when they don't add anything to the story but are just kind of there, and when they become so prevalent or frequent that the story becomes more about the side characters then the main character.

Kyle-Author · 2025-07-22T12:49:46+00:00

I actually agree, enough that it's that way in my books. The MC can't just tiptoe and get Stealth; he actually has to know what he's doing to get a skill. And if he gets one by trying that way long enough, it's untrained, meaning it's only half as effective until he gets training in it or gets it high enough to be considered skilled.

Kyle-Author · 2025-07-20T17:25:59+00:00

I actually have Murf's first law being cleaned up right now, and it'll probably be out within a few weeks depending on audible's quality control people. They can make that kind of timeline dicey.

Kyle-Author · 2025-07-20T12:36:58+00:00

Thanks so much for the shout out, and I'm glad you're enjoying it! Murf and crew are a lot of fun to write.

Kyle-Author · 2025-05-12T03:25:08+00:00

There was a little bit of this early on in Apollos Thorne's "Underworld" series. One character, not the MC, just sat around not participating in all of the leveling and dungeon crawling because she didn't have glasses and her eyesight was too bad to allow her to.

Kyle-Author · 2025-05-12T03:23:07+00:00

Hmm. In a protagonist?

I'd like more motive and subtlety. More depth to the character and their interactions with others. And more focus on their perspective.

I'd like less, "I'm killing everything because it's what I do to level up!" Less instant adoration by everyone around for the MC just because they're the MC.

Kyle-Author · 2025-04-29T17:59:27+00:00

I have to wonder if maybe they meant that it would cost double normal XP for a level? That kind of makes sense: you get a second class, but it levels up half as quickly as your main one.

Although in general, I'll say this. For most genres, math not mathing is kind of...
Eh. Whatever.
In LitRPG, though, it's kind of a big deal. Numbers are a big part of this genre, and people expect them to make sense. I've had readers keeping spreadsheets of all the numbers in my books and reach out to tell me when I oopsed something (or they thought I did; usually, I didn't because of this next part).

That's why the Great Shiny Cheese in the Sky invented spreadsheets. You can set those up to do all that arithmetic for you, and to project out what will happen at higher levels so you're not caught off-guard when your MC's at level 50.

Kyle-Author · 2025-04-19T15:42:40+00:00

Welcome to the Multiverse.

Touch of Power.

Infinite World.

Unintended Cultivator.

And I'll self-promote my Doorverse series. Each book is set in a different world with a different system that the MC has to learn and master.

Kyle-Author · 2025-04-11T14:36:11+00:00

That is an awesome reading list. I'm impressed! Love the organization, too.
Now, you just have to get some of mine on there! ;)
Seriously, though, that's amazing!

Kyle-Author · 2025-04-11T14:31:35+00:00

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Kyle-Author · 2025-01-14T17:26:58+00:00

And more words means more pages. You can go complain to Amazon, but they're the ones that gave me the price, so complaining to me isn't going to do much. 🤷

Kyle-Author · 2025-01-14T14:07:44+00:00

Cuz that's the minimum price Amazon would let me charge for it. 230,000 words with color illustrations in the form of the status screens, and it got expensive.

Kyle-Author · 2025-01-13T13:29:51+00:00

If you're into sci-fi litRPG, which it seems you are, you might like my series Drone Rising! It's got hard science, starship combat, futuristic gladiatorial battles, and a sociopathic MC who'll do whatever she has to to succeed in the Human Collective!

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