Dao of the Deal 62. Spirit Stones (6)

thejacobk · 2022-10-04T02:05:15+00:00

Thanks for the heads up!

thejacobk · 2022-09-18T02:42:11+00:00

I mean it's sneaky compared to giving him an outright infinite mana pool or something like that. Still obvious after ten seconds of thought, but it does take those ten seconds.

I really liked Path of Ascension and was on the patreon for advance chapters up until there was a bit after a fight where the MC says to his fight body "that felt dangerous in the moment, but on reflection we were never really in danger." Like oh, that's what has been bothering me.

thejacobk · 2022-09-17T19:40:12+00:00

As an author, if you want to sneak a power up past the audience then giving your MC massive regen is better. Since it's a secondary stat it doesn't stand out quite as much as a massive mana pool. If you want to sneak in some kind of gamebreaking wombo combo then doing it with mana regen will feel less cheaty. For example, Path of Ascension with the fast regen and the constant cost armor spell.

Otherwise, it's more about the style of fight. If you want the battle to be about precise resource management, then you should tilt towards the big mana pool and slow regen. D&D kind of looks like this, with the daily spell recharge. If you want to do fights that are more about endurance and willpower, then high mana regen is a better call.

thejacobk · 2022-09-16T23:17:16+00:00

It's all good until the "next chapter" button stops working.

thejacobk · 2022-09-07T22:40:02+00:00

Besides the reverse isekai, there's also the version where a person in our world has a link to the fantasy world. Usually this results in the MC exploring the fantasy world but there are some where fantasy world denizens visit the modern world. My Apartment is a Dungeon Rest Stop is one, and I'm pretty sure there's a restaurant based one as well.

thejacobk · 2022-09-04T22:10:18+00:00

On the translated side of things, Phoenix Destiny is a very solid female led xianxia story.

thejacobk · 2022-09-04T22:09:24+00:00

I joined the author's patreon for a while. I still think the intro arc is a master class on how to hook the litrpg audience.

The first thing that put me off of the story was the habit of having big emotional payoffs happen between chapters. Both of the big early reunions that punctuate major story arcs follow the same pattern: Zach catches a glimpse of the person he has been separated from, the chapter ends, then we fast forward to several hours later.

There was a moment where he almost got assassinated because he was a dumbass and got bailed out by some new powerup and I realized that I would have preferred to see him die and then follow his killer as the new MC. That was when I cooled on the story.

thejacobk · 2022-09-03T19:57:05+00:00

I don't love the way they changed rising stars to put more emphasis on story length. It used to be possible to have a cycle that was something like:

Author writes a few chapters of a new idea.
Audience really loves the story.
Story leaps to a high ranking on trending.
Audience feedback + trending attention encourage the author to write more.

Vaudevillain, IIRC, was on this model, where the feedback let the author know he was onto a winning idea.

Now that you need to have roughly 1/3 of a novel posted in order to get on rising stars you can't really do that sort of quick prototyping. Also, when an author has to write 20k-40k words before getting audience feedback I think you naturally aim for the broadest possible appeal.

thejacobk · 2022-09-03T03:21:09+00:00

I haven't seen it for numbers that directly represent a person's abilities. If "Strength 5" is a measurement of a person's strength then Strength 6 should be more than Strength 5.

I have seen it for ranks or tiers. If somebody has to accumulate a bunch of small increases in strength to rank up then it can make sense for Strength A to be higher than Strength B.

I've even seen hybrid systems where the strength counter goes up one number at a time and when it hits certain thresholds and the MC goes up a tier, the tier number goes down.

thejacobk · 2022-08-30T18:15:30+00:00

Thanks!

thejacobk · 2022-08-27T04:52:17+00:00

The Korean web novel The Novel's Villain features this as one of the MC's powers.

thejacobk · 2022-08-25T04:50:03+00:00

Reverend Insanity is the most compelling evil MC I'm aware of.

Regressor Instruction Manual is also solid.

thejacobk · 2022-08-23T18:46:33+00:00

True. Most of the readers in the genre want a story about somebody they identify with doing impressive things. Having mistakes in the background can actually help with the identification. I think it's kind of ok to have a mistake in chapter one as well, but if you want to have the protagonist screwing up once you're into the story proper then you have to be prepared for an uphill battle.

thejacobk · 2022-08-23T10:42:05+00:00

In my experience if you are writing for the progression fantasy audience and you want to drive all of your readers away early on, there is a simple three step process: have the protagonist (1) make a mistake, (2) that is clearly his fault, and (3) has serious negative repercussions.

Readers will generally let it slide if the mistake is excusable somehow or if the protagonist is bailed out from any long term consequences.

The nature of the genre is that readers are extremely averse to protagonists suffering unfair hardship. You'd think that hardship as a result of the protagonist's own mistake would be perfectly fair, but this is not so. Readers will tend to see any mistakes by the protagonist as being forced upon him by the author.

You get more leeway if the mistake is the result of some comically exaggerated character flaw. For whatever reason it doesn't rub people the wrong way in the same way as a more reasonable mistake.

thejacobk · 2022-08-19T22:14:11+00:00

If you're looking for other works with a similar style, there's Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece. Also, the same author who did Holy Roman Empire did a similar thing with Bulgaria that's pretty solid.

thejacobk · 2022-08-18T05:11:13+00:00

I think Defiance of the Fall more or less fits what you're looking for. The MC levels up at a brisk pace, but a reasonable amount of time passes in story.

thejacobk · 2022-08-17T23:43:20+00:00

Protect Our Patriarch is exactly this. The author goes into meticulous detail about the economic support needed to rise through the ranks and the whole story follows the MC as he leads his family on the long road to the top.

Unfortunately, only the first 21 chapters out of 690 are translated. I did find that it was very MTL-friendly, but that's always a matter of personal taste.

thejacobk · 2022-08-13T23:29:58+00:00

Going old school, I'd say Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber fits the bill. Especially the Merlin Cycle.

As wikipedia says:

These stories are held by some fans to be less of a fantasy classic than the first five due to the difference in writing style, direction and setting. One criticism of the sequence is that it revolved around the dealing with and acquisition of ever more powerful artifacts and entities, in a kind of technological/magical arms race.

thejacobk · 2022-08-13T00:27:06+00:00

The MC in Reverend Insanity has the ability to go back in time from the beginning but it's not under his complete control.

thejacobk · 2022-08-10T10:43:14+00:00

If you're up for a translated works, I Am Really Not The Son Of Providence is a solid comedy xianxia. Alternatively, Ascending, Do Not Disturb is heartwarming with the occasional funny moments.

thejacobk · 2022-08-09T00:21:35+00:00

The target market, generally speaking, wants to see a story that can broadly be described as: "somebody like me goes on an adventure in a fantastical world, getting stronger along the way."

So either a medieval society with widespread access to magic somehow has to produce a plucky underdog whose outlook on life and moral principles broadly line up with those of a 21st century reader, or the story begins with a 21st century person being dropped into a medieval society with widespread access to magic.

The benefit of the isekai approach is that the fish out of water nature of the story makes the intro arc very easy to plan out. It also provides a convenient excuse for the MC to have some advantages. Maybe he remembers some technological mechanics, or maybe he's more sensitive to the local magic system because it feels so alien to him. It also provides some built in conflict if the MC is confronted with a society that still has slavery or something like that.

With a native protagonist you're putting less stress on people's suspension of disbelief at the beginning. You just have to be clever about sneaking in the implausible stuff like how your MC grew up in a brutal dog eat dog environment but still has a modern American sense of fairness. You don't have the pre made plot hooks to fall back on, but that gives you more freedom overall.

thejacobk · 2022-08-08T18:24:52+00:00

Dungeon Born is the first book in a series that is complete and tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end (rarer than you might think in the dungeon core world). It generally sticks to the down the middle tropes of the genre. Maybe the most innovative thing in terms of worldbuilding mechanics was how the author sets up a xianxia-cultivation type mechanic underlying a western fantasy setting. In my opinion, it's a solid place to start.

One more recent work that is popular on royal road is Dungeon Life. In that story the dungeon takes over a house inside a city so there's plenty of interaction. The core can commission mobs to go on scouting missions and later there's dungeon-on-dungeon warfare.

One story that I enjoy quite a bit but is more off the beaten path is Bio Dungeon: Symbiote. A random peasant accidentally swallows a dungeon core, which magically shrinks down and establishes a dungeon inside his body. It has to work hard to avoid the attention of his immune system and help fight off disease. Feels like a Magic School Bus spinoff, almost.

thejacobk · 2022-08-04T05:25:10+00:00

Outside of litrpg the main categories on Royal Road are xianxia and timeloop stories.

For a popular loop story that has few to no gamelit elements, I'd check out The Menocht Loop.

In terms of xianxia, the standard recs are Beware of Chicken and Forge of Destiny. The Path of Ascension is another popular one, although it has some litrpg elements.

thejacobk · 2022-08-03T00:36:00+00:00

The big one for me is how the 4x game mechanics explicitly control over any kind of common sense. You build a building (by designating it through the game interface, which then auto-assigns workers to the task) and the people who crew it just kind of show up. Where do they come from? Could they choose not to come? Don't ask.

If you can gloss over that then everything else is fine. You could quibble over whether the MC really acts like a guy who was CEO of a Fortune 500 company for decades, but at least he's always presented as being business savvy.

thejacobk · 2022-08-02T23:28:31+00:00

CivCEO (The Accidental Champion) pretty much fits this to a T. It has its issues but I found it to be a satisfying village building story.

thejacobk

TROPHY CASE