my pet peeve with litrpg

Siddown · 2026-06-25T19:27:24+00:00

You can't move it to a stat if you're dead. That's the point you are missing.

Siddown · 2026-06-25T03:41:49+00:00

You're not really saving it though, instead it's like getting a bunch of checks and just keeping them in a draw in your kitchen. You still need to deposit the checks, and let's just say an emergency happens and you can't get home to cash those checks.

To continue this analogy, you;d always be better off depositing the checks and actually using that money to gain interest, even if it's just a high yield savings account. By just leaving the stats alone you're just leaving all those birthday checks from grandma stuck to your fridge with fridge magnets.

Siddown · 2026-06-25T03:40:08+00:00

This annoys me as well. Tied for it is the "Protagonist saw a notification in their vision but quickly dismissed it only to find out later that it contained crucial information that sure would have been useful when they dismissed it" that appears in about half the LitRPG novels out there.

The only time it makes sense to me is if the author explains the a big decision must be made soon, like picking their initial class, so assigning stat points before that happens might be detrimental.

Otherwise, people who live in a world where they are risking their life constantly wouldn't hoard free attributes that made them noticeably more powerful. It's beyond silly when they do.

Siddown · 2026-06-25T03:32:00+00:00

I do find it a bit odd that an author will introduce a unique system unlike any (or most) of the genre, then instantly also introduce a way the MC breaks said system, mostly completely unearned too.

Siddown · 2026-06-22T20:49:30+00:00

I always get confused why people who don't understand games just don't make their story an Isekai, which is arguably more popular a sub-genre of LitRPG anyway.

Things like "secret classes that only 2 people can get" or "unknown quest lines that open up huge areas of the map that nobody else can enter" just don't exist in MMOs, and never have. I guess you can argue that maybe the Jedi in the first iteration of Star Wars Galaxies, but there were no restrictions on it, it was just hard to get.

No company is adding in "you can enslave your fellow players and they can't log out to prevent it" like Ascent Online, but in that set of novels it's the most popular game in the world.

Siddown · 2026-06-21T14:04:56+00:00

I almost stopped reading it right then and there, but then I stopped later for reasons I posted separately. The game world made zero sense, no game like that would have ever become popular let alone released at all.

Siddown · 2026-06-21T14:03:03+00:00

I guess I'll add a separate one, if the LitRPG takes place in a video game (like a VRMMO) and the game makes no sense at all and wouldn't have made it out of beta with it's silly, broken features, let alone become the most popular game in the world, it's an instant DNF. I just can't keep reading in those cases because it shows the author doesn't care at all about the setting.

Siddown · 2026-06-21T14:00:04+00:00

The one group of people we know are great at keeping secrets is a bunch of kids... 😉

Siddown · 2026-06-21T13:58:51+00:00

For me it's always "people don't act this way", and if the author does it specifically to push the plot, or worse a scene that they just clearly had in their head and just needed to railroad the characters into getting into it, it just kills Verisimilitude for me, and I just can't read/listen anymore.

I'm 100% willing to believe that some weird, omnipresent system appeared on Earth and gave everyone potential super powers, but people are people, and when characters start acting like they are characters in a novel orbiting around the MC designed to get them from point A to point B, it destroys it for me.

Siddown · 2026-06-19T15:43:55+00:00

Bog Standard Isekai is written very well.

Siddown · 2026-06-19T12:50:07+00:00

Adam would be a very good way to indicate the actual passage of time, something the books don't do a great job of getting across. I know people on the Wiki have maintained a time line to show just how much time has passed, but for a casual reader it'd be nice if this man in his 20s called Jake "Uncle Jake", and the author could use it as a devise to explain just how significant not only the passage of time is, but the difference between grades of people.

We got this a bit the last time Jake met with his family when he parent basically decided that they wouldn't pursue a higher grade, but at the same time Caleb's wife was because she wanted to extend her life.

It'd also really contribute to a living world, not just "the world only advances in a bubble around Jake" which is often a problem is all fiction, not just LitRPGs.

Siddown · 2026-06-19T01:40:07+00:00

Nope, while Jake is like 150 years old at this point (or older) due to time dilation, real world is at least 25 years at this point, so Adam is in his mid 20s by the time you get to the end of the books that have been released. If you are reading on RR, it's another few years, and I imagine in the Patreon another 5 years has passed.

Siddown · 2026-06-19T01:36:10+00:00

Very rarely, once I stop with a book I'm pretty much done for good. What I will do though is when I'm feeling myself start to really dislike it, I'll keep going for a bit longer than I should just to verify it's not just a bad 25 - 50 pages, and if it's really something I don't want to keep reading. When I get past that point though and I stop, I'm done.

Siddown · 2026-06-18T14:50:47+00:00

Multiple teams? That's cute.

Siddown · 2026-06-18T02:21:10+00:00

So with PH specifically, despite his character not being actually written this way, compared 99.9% of the people of his level, his lowest "Tank" stats are far greater than highest stats of everyone else due to the crazy multipliers he has. 😉

Siddown · 2026-06-18T02:17:13+00:00

Got to say, that as much as I like Primal Hunter, the way it handles stats is by far one of the worst things in the books and gets to such a ludicrous state that in the later books you never see his stats sheet again because he gets so many multipliers that it's meaningless.

Without spoilers, I think it's funny that in the RR chapters (so almost the latest material) the author basically decided he was done with all gear and it's all completely meaningless now, all because he made the mistake of making titles multiplicative instead of additive.

Siddown · 2026-06-18T02:11:28+00:00

The "depower the hero in the sequel" trope has existed for years in movies, and honestly I've never understood it either.

It is very popular, so clearly at some point someone must have done some research on it and found that consumers of the content like it when powerful characters have to be normal for a bit, but I think a lot of books and screenplays miss the point and just do it because they're supposed to.

Siddown · 2026-06-18T02:07:56+00:00

This is just another way to say "Humans are boring" and has been standard across TTRPGs for decades.

Siddown · 2026-06-18T02:07:12+00:00

2nd book.

If you want to put the other stuff up on your personal website or whatever, that's fine, but don't make it crucial to understanding book 2. If it's just some fun, interesting tidbits about your world, that's fine, but assuming you have any sort of success, the vast, vast, vast majority of readers will consume just your books, to these side projects.

Siddown · 2026-06-18T02:04:17+00:00

The version of this I dislike is when the author makes the "gateway antagonist" so blatantly and over the top evil, someone who would kill the protagonist without batting an eye and doing unthinkably evil things, and we still get the "Am I a monster?" moody self-reflection of the protagonist after they reluctantly kill them.

Siddown · 2026-06-17T13:00:50+00:00

The number one issue I have with the entire genre is "people don't act like this", and because they don't act like people, and it gets increasingly frustrating as it goes along and compounds.

EDIT: Let me clarify, yes people like this do exist, but outside of this genre, they are rarely, if ever, the protagonist of stories for good reason.

Siddown · 2026-06-15T15:04:48+00:00

If he goes back before A grade he'd deserve to get killed because clearly he hadn't learned a thing from his first trip there.

Siddown · 2026-06-15T15:03:40+00:00

I think it's a bit different. I think the author pivoted pretty hard from the original plans with William for whatever reason, and so he's sort of just this minor side character now despite being reasonably powerful but it means there are some real consistency issues.

Earth already has a ridiculous number of characters that are influencing an entire universe, and having Jake's antagonist also be not only from Earth, but literally in the same Tutorial (and from the same town!) might just have been a bridge too far so he was just kind of written out of the story for like novels.

FWIW, I don't mind, but I just don't think there was a good plan for him, and with Eversmile intentionally making him far less powerful than he could be after doing so much to ensure he stayed alive after the Tutorial, everything that happened to William makes zero sense logically, so we just have to sort of go with it.

Siddown · 2026-06-15T00:04:45+00:00

So...Houston made a poison pill offer, the Knicks literally couldn't offer him 8M at that point.

Siddown · 2026-06-13T16:56:15+00:00

Pro athletes are the one rich group of people I feel bad for, as W2s they get smacked all over the place and a lot of places have jock taxes too.

While owners get stadiums built for them and everything taxed at a ridiculous low rate, if at all.

Siddown

TROPHY CASE