What follows is personal opinion.

LitRPG is often a fun read. It mixes genre with gaming and some writers can do really interesting things with that. Others… not so much.

I started on a science fiction litRPG book on Friday, and I had to abandon it a few hours later and return it because it simply didn’t work. Looking at the reviews (I check them after I read a book) I gathered that the author has a successful fantasy litRPG series, and knowing that I suspect that they simply went, “I’m going to do that, but in space” and it did not work.

Here is why.

When an author starts a book, they have to establish the tone and the setting in the first chapter, I’m generous and I tend to give books two chapters. What the first two chapters of this book gave me was a space fleet arriving into a new system, back story about how humanity accidentally discovered space travel and they were on the “low tech” side of science fiction. Then a space battle following those rules (why the alien ship didn’t have anything more high tech than the humans… irrelevant?) so, a “real” science fiction setting.

Then they introduce the litRPG aspect, dungeon core, and things stop making sense. Suddenly we have magical nano-tech, an alien symbiote that that somehow knows everything about human culture, kobolts, fantasy races in space, the ability to power organic being with ‘energy’ (no need to eat) and, the final straw, to me, experience points. Which is explained as the character learning and becoming ‘better’. Only they get experience points when they kill someone. How does that lead to learning anything?

Now, this isn’t a case of the universe suddenly changing, System Apocalypse litRPG works because the entire world changes to become a gaming system. Here, it’s made clear that only the character and his ship have become so. Everything else is supposed to run normally.

When the character was told that he’d have to create “mob bosses” because “explorers” would board him looking for loot that he’d create and he needed to defeat them to become stronger. (which is around the point that experience points were explained) I had to stop.

So, what’s the problem here?

Well, it’s a problem of not taking into account the consequences of decisions, in this case the authors’. You can’t take a fantasy dungeon core setting and just transpose it into science fiction without changing anything and expect it to work. Science and magic are not the same.

Could the author have made it work? I don’t know. I don’t know what they were going for, I don’t know their motivations in writing it. The next question is “could such a story be made to work?”

I believe so. I wouldn’t be surprised that other authors out there have made it work. But even if no one has, I think it can be done, and I have an idea how.

Yes, that means I’ve added a new story to my queue. Who knows when I will get to it.

Other than that, the weeks went well. so with that. I, will wish you a good day.