Is It Hard to Write LitRPG?

Easy

Let me open by reassuring everyone who thinks LitRPG is a shabby, fading, dying genre — obsolete as a pager or a fax machine. Just add elves, some numbers, a divine quest, and you're done. Trivially easy. Its popularity is in free-fall, readers sneer and won't buy, colleagues from loftier genres smirk down at it, and anyway the genre died the moment its founders moved on to other things.

Why I'm writing this

Okay — now that the genre's detractors have wandered off, having stuck the knife in on the way out, we can talk seriously. Of all the books I've written, only my very first has nothing to do with LitRPG. My books get read, and I'd place myself somewhere in the genre's second tier as an author. Every book of mine has hit Amazon's top 1,000, and some even the top 500. Not the point.

The point is that with that experience I can say a few things about the craft. I keep seeing posts in writers' communities about how "low" the genre is and how easy it is to break in. Supposedly any kid who flunked literature can play a bit of Skyrim and start cranking out LitRPG — and, what really enrages the critics, people read it. No — worse: they buy it. I'll leave aside my usual reaction ("Easy, simple, and it pays? Then go write one yourself!"), because I already know the answer: "I respect myself too much to churn out that kind of thing." Fair enough. Point to the skeptics.

What I haven't seen is a reply from established LitRPG authors. Every author is inspired by someone. I could have been inspired by Remarque, Fournier, Proust, Huxley, or Eco — but I only read them. The urge to actually write a book came only after I read the LitRPG authors who built this genre: Dmitry Rus, Vasily Mahanenko, Artem Kamenisty, the Zaytsev brothers (no, not related), Georgy Smorodinsky, Mikhail Atamanov, Alexey Osadchuk.

I reread all of them, and as a hardcore gamer I felt things few other genres can trigger — watching a hero level up, waiting on the loot drop, anticipating a new instance. That's the real thrill of an MMORPG. Only someone who spent weeks wiping on a raid boss, finally downed it, and saw their item in the loot list can understand the appeal of LitRPG. (The good news: a skilled author can transmit that thrill even to a reader who's never played a day in their life.)

The first difficulty

Back to the question: writing LitRPG isn't hard if you have real RPG — ideally MMORPG — experience behind you. (Someone once claimed on a pirate site that I have no idea what World of Warcraft is. Ha — I sank twelve years of my life into it and was the world's #1-ranked player by WoWProgress in 2012.) You need that experience to know what's what and why, so you don't flounder on the slang, the mechanics, the situations. No experience? Write something else. Anything but LitRPG — you can't fool a reader who games.

There's a widespread belief that you can write LitRPG by taking your elves-and-orcs story and sprinkling numbers on top. Nope. I've seen plenty of attempts to court the LitRPG audience that way, and not one of them broke into the charts. Bolting numbers onto fantasy simply doesn't work.

The second difficulty

The second difficulty is that you genuinely have to design an entire world from scratch — and not just the world, but the mechanics. The physics. The rules. Normally, designing a whole world is a job for a team of game designers on serious salaries, or for a rare genius like Tolkien, Martin, or Nick Perumov.

When a first-time author with no audience starts writing LitRPG, they often wave it off — "good enough!" — and invent rules on the fly. That can survive one book, but by the next they've forgotten their own rules and the contradictions start. In book one the hero dies and returns as a ghost who has to run to his corpse; in book two he respawns on the spot. "What gives?" ask the attentive readers, and the author slaps on a patch: "That was the old version of the game — after the update, respawns work like this." Readers forgive it once, maybe twice, then the inconsistencies break their patience and the author loses them.

There are always countless such details. How is damage calculated? What does armor do? Is there magic resistance — general, or per school? Are quests mandatory? How do skills level? Abilities? Perks — wait, aren't those the same thing? Do stats grow from training, or only from spent points? How does reputation work? What's the in-game currency, and its exchange rate to real money? A gold piece equals a dollar — and you hand out fifty gold for one sandbox quest? Where's the logic? Fine, money aside — what about physics? Can I lift any object? Break it? Food, drink, sleep — how does any of it work? Every LitRPG author runs into these questions, because when the hero isn't off doing heroics, he still has to live, talk, make friends — and that needs the everyday rules worked out. The game world demands both a setting and a mechanic.

RealRPG is easier in one way — you don't invent the world, you describe the real one — but you still have to design the mechanics. Zombie apocalypse hits, most turn into walkers, a few stay human and become players. How much XP, and for what? What do levels give you? Without a worked-out mechanic, you won't get a real series.

The third difficulty

This is probably the hardest stone in the road. Set aside, as a given, the ability to write competently and tell an interesting story — the most tedious part of any LitRPG author's job is the math. No other genre, not even the mystery, demands such careful bookkeeping.

The hero sneezes, earns a sliver of XP — log it. Not in the book; in a file. I use a plain Excel sheet. All those calculations, formulas, and shifting stats really do eat time.

But here's the crucial part: the hero finds a club with +5 Strength, and that has to show up in the story. In games, gear matters — every stat point changes how you play, makes life easier — and the same must happen on the page. A normal book shouldn't have scenes that don't move the plot. A LitRPG shouldn't have numbers that don't. Beginners make two mistakes: they bury the hero in loot and lovingly describe it, then forget it a page later — or they skip the loot entirely. Sometimes an author forgets the quests the hero has piled up like free swag at a conference, and is lucky to remember them by book five. That comes from not keeping logs — not the in-story kind, but the author's own ledger.

I once ran a company of more than a hundred employees with contracts worth millions, and the accounting there was simpler than the math in my main series, Disgardium.

"A low genre"

Disgardium is set in the year 2075. The real, non-game side of the hero's life matters to the plot too, and it needed its own design work. My single file describing the worlds and mechanics reads like a book in its own right. But that's hardly interesting to the genre's opponents — it's so much easier to spread the good word that LitRPG is simply "low."

Fine, call it low. I think that means two things: a low barrier to entry and an unsophisticated readership. I won't argue — both are true. In theory any schoolkid could write LitRPG, because they've no life experience but plenty of gaming. That same kid won't write a mystery or historical fiction — those topics are foreign — but games? They've at least watched SAO and played an MMO.

The trouble is, no schoolkid has ever finished what they started. The full series that became classics of the genre were written by adults. The authors I listed above, who inspired me, are almost all older than me. In their series they didn't just write about the game — they told fantastic stories. Finished stories.

So the next time you catch yourself thinking LitRPG is easy to write, go ask them how they wrote their books.

You'll hear a lot of things. But not one of them will tell you it was easy.

Want to see what all that bookkeeping buys? Read the opening chapters free. If you'd rather start with the math-heavy flagship, that's Disgardium — and Books in Order maps the whole universe.

→ See the genre done right — start with a free story: Free Story.