LitRPG

Short for "Literary Role-Playing Game", LitRPG (or alternatively GameLit) is a literary genre about characters playing within a role-playing game or virtual reality environment. The story tracks the progress of the characters gaining experience and leveling up along with their exact stats. This often involves a full character sheet for the readers like those displayed to players in a game.

LitRPG blends traditional narration with elements of a gaming experience by describing quests and Sidequests, an Achievement System, Hit Points, and other events typical of video games or tabletop RPGs. Expect to see mention of Gaming Stat Tropes and explicit Min-Maxing. The narration in a LitRPG work must abide by the rules of a game while filling it with conflict and drama. The important part is describing for readers the experience of playing that game and its associated mechanics as if the reader could play it themselves.

LitRPG works are typically set in a game invented for the work, and commonly feature advanced VR technology or outright Brain Uploading, though sometimes the existence of the game mechanics remains completely unexplained when overlapping with the RPG Mechanics 'Verse trope. LitRPG's use of gaming mechanics and attributes sets them apart from traditional game novelizations, which are simply story adaptations without the mechanics. Expect to see lots of Cyberspace, virtual reality gaming, and getting trapped in the game. Consider brushing up on Video Game Culture and Role-Playing Game Terms.

LitRPGs tend to fall into several broad categories that can, and sometimes will, overlap with each other:

• The Virtual Reality LitRPG: The character is inside an actual game. Being trapped in the game is common, as are uses of Brain Uploading, but not actually required. These stories also tend to have some form of Plot Parallel between events in-game and those in the "real world" though it varies on how significantly the latter events tie into the former.
• The Gamer LitRPG: Based on The Gamer, a character suddenly gains RPG abilities, with them typically being the only person with such abilities. Quite common in fanfic, since it can easily be applied to any world or character. This is also common in isekai LitRPGs, as a character is Trapped in Another World and their New Life in Another World Bonus is a set of unique RPG abilities.
• The System Apocalypse LitRPG: A sudden apocalypse kills a majority of the world's population, but the survivors gain access to "the System" (names vary), which means RPG abilities. The nature of the apocalypse varies drastically; sometimes it might not even be related to the emergence of the System.
• The RPGVerse is a world that simply works on RPG mechanics and the residents are aware of it, although they don't always know why (though its usually explained In-Universe as devised by the gods/God). This one often turns out to be the Virtual Reality setup, with the eventual reveal that they are either NPCs, players who have forgotten that they're logged into a game, or are digital echoes of the original players.
• The Meta LitRPG is similar to the usual RPGVerse, but with the caveat that the characters don't know their world runs on RPG mechanics. Usually the characters will have stat sheets, health/experience points, and other RPG systems, but these are maintained by the author entirely out-of-universe (with status updates appearing as side notes or parentheticals) and the characters never acknowledge them explicitly. Many works in this category use Haara Brightwater's formatting style thanks to her stories being some of the first popular examples.

See also A Dungeon Is You, Campaign Comic, Deep-Immersion Gaming, Role-Playing Game 'Verse, and RPG Episode.

Not to Be Confused with a role-playing game that's lit, fam.

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Fan Works

• Fallout: Equestria generally operates on real-world logic (magic and the like notwithstanding), with game elements such as the main character's Heads-Up Display being a Diegetic Interface, courtesy of her Magitek PipBuck. It's played straighter with the footnotes at the end of each chapter showing her level up and/or acquire a new perk, but it's mostly to add a little flavor to any skills she learns or sharpens during the story.
• Harry Potter and the Natural 20 is a Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons Crossover that has a character from the later universe being transported to the former and teaming up with the Trio. A plotpoint is how Milo's Wrong Context Magic works completely different from everyone else's.
• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What? is a Worm Sequel Series that sees Taylor reincarnated as a sentient dungeon in an alternate fantasy world that acts as a Role-Playing Game 'Verse.
• The Naked Jedi is inspired by Vow of Nudity, and uses the Star Wars: Roleplaying Game system to chronicle the adventures of Nue Jedi Knight Sarza Zarazell, a Zeltron.
• Vow of Nudity gives its protagonist a character sheet, and the series uses dice rolls and D&D mechanics to see whether she succeeds or fails at whatever she attempts. (The character herself doesn’t seem to be aware of this facet of her existence, with the LitRPG mechanics only happening in italic sidenotes.) This series led to a fair amount of imitators writing in the same LitRPG format, some of which are set in the same universe and listed on its Trivia page.

Literature

• All The Skills - A Deckbuilding LitRPG: Arthur can gain experience and level up skills due to the legendary Master of Skills card that he has been lucky enough to pick up. Other cards can give other RPG-style powers, such as one that gives its owner quests and rewards them with magical items on completion.
• Allworld Online is about a laid-off teacher named Olivia who gets offered a paid job as a beta tester for a Jane Austen inspired world created within the VR universe. Then a glitch causes players to start disappearing and Olivia is unable to log-out, leading her to investigate the mystery behind what's happened.
• In the world of Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest; Ordinary High Schoolstudent Hajime and his class of Jerkass classmates are transported to have character classes and Levels along with stats. The title refers to him going from the one the worst stats and having the "useless" class of Synergest to a cynical One-Man Army after being left for dead by the bullies of his class. Specifically his Synergist's transmutation ability and 21st centruy knowledge allows him to create a number of weapons and equipment that gives even more of an advantage such as firearms and magic-powered vehicles like a motorcycle and a Hummer.
• Awaken Online: A scholarship student named Jason is unfairly expelled by the Sadist Teachers at his school of rich Jerkass students on the day the game is launched. Having reached his Rage Breaking Point, he ends up taking up the role of a Villain Protagonist Necromancer ruler of a city of undead. The real world plot involves the game's A.I. Controller named Alfred accessing the players' memories to customize the quests in order to help get over real-life issues to remove obstacles preventing from playing the game more. Then the first book ends with Alfred contacting Jason directly to ask for a favor...
• Blue Core: "Blue" is the name eventually given to the unnamed amnesiac individual who finds himself reincarnated as a dungeon. Unlike most In-Universe and typical of this genre, he opts to empower individuals rather than monsters to act as his agents while investigating the Depletion which is eroding the world's magic.
• Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense. is what happens when someone with no knowledge of video gaming accidentally Min-Maxing her avatar, literally dumping every stat point into Defense. Within only a few weeks, Maple effectively becomes a Hopeless Boss Fight who repeatedly unlocks new, insane forms to transform into. Later her best friend Sally does something similar with her Agility, essentially gaining Super-Speed while they recruit into their guild, among others, a pair of twins who did the same with Strength.
• Book of the Dead (2021): A young man receives his primary Class — but instead of becoming a Wizard as he had hoped, he receives the highly illegal Necromancer class. Rather than burning out a part of his soul and giving up on his future, he decides to keep the class and go on the run, hoping that by doing enough good, he'll someday be accepted. The rest of the world isn't so optimistic.
• Bushido Online follows the story of a MMA fighter who is rendered blind when an opponent uses an illegal move on him. His friend and manager gets him into a program that tests the titular game on individuals like him who can see inside the game. Despite never playing video games before, he does alright for himself except for the part where the gets himself in the middle of a war between rival clans...
• Chaos Seeds, also known as The Land series follows a man who is transported to "The Land", the game world of his favorite MMORPG. Renaming himself "Richter", he forges a kingdom for himself to survive while learning of his nature as a Chaos Seed which gives incredible but dangerous powers. Like potentially causing The End of the World as We Know It kind of dangerous...
• Chrysalis (RinoZ) follows the typical "protagonist dies and reincarnates into a fantasy world that runs on 'The System' that they can exploit." Only in this case it's at the bottom of the food chain in an ant colony. Yes, really.
• The City and the Dungeon
• Core of Fear
• Deadworld Isekai
• A Dearth of Choice
• Defiance Of The Fall
• The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life: The world is invaded by demons, the protagonist promptly dies, but before the demons can devour his soul, they're interrupted and the soul gets accidentally attached to an apple. Seventy years later, the System comes across his partly rotten form and decides he must be a Dungeon Core of Apple Electronics...
• The Divine Dungeon
• Djinn Tamer
• Doomed Dungeon
• The Dungeon Calls For A Sage
• Dungeon Crawler Carl is an anti-capitalist exploration of a universe where the powerful beings of the galaxy regularly harvest worlds by killing 99.999% of the inhabitants and forcing the survivors into a gameshow where 99.999% of them will die while the galaxy cheers.
• Dungeon Core Chat Room
• Dungeon Heart
• Eden's Gate by Edward Brody follows a man named Gunnar Long who joins on a one-way trip into the fully immersive MMORPG of the titular Eden's Gate, trading his mundane everyday life for a new one full of fantasy and adventure. While dealing with the in-game threats, Gunnar must also deal with a threat on the outside from the government who want to shut the game done as more and more people clammer to join.
• Everybody Loves Large Chests
• Factory of the Gods
• Falling With Folded Wings: The System uses a level-based system where people gain a class at level 10, then further refinements every ten levels after that. Towns can also level in their own way, based around a central citystone. Unlike most LitRPGs, the series provides an explanation for why a nigh-omnipotent entity like the System would bother to provide energy and instruction to mortals: It's a parasite, helping them grow so that they can feed it more energy. There's a reason many quests involve turning things into the citystone.
• The Greystone Chronicles follows Alexander Greystone and his friends as they test new VR technology his father has developed for the game Io Online which has reached Oasis-level importance in society by the time of the story. While building his kingdom in-game, Alexander deals with the threat of an Evil Luddite group that's resurfaced with a vendetta against his family's company who owns the game. Oh and his father's an Honest Corporate Executive that developed the pods to potentially cure neurological injuries, disorders, and diseases...like the one that killed Alexander's mother and eventually him unless it works. And by the later parts of the series there are hopeful signs it does.
• He Who Fights With Monsters
• Piers Anthony gave us the story Killobyte, in which a few players get trapped in a video game by a douchebag hacker and have to fight for their lives from within the gameworld.
• The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor
• The Life Reset series concerns a player name Oren who starts out as the head of a major guild in the game of New Era Online before he's betrayed by his inner circle and has his avatar changed into a low-level goblin. Against the advice of a friend who works at the game's company, Oren completes a quest as the goblin, instead of rerolling his character. He's successful and starts leveling up but this causes a glitch that leaves him trapped in-game until the company can get him out. And that's just the first book...
• Mind Games follow the days follow in the wake of one Saturday morning when suddenly magic started working and electronics didn't, the wildlife started mutating into monsters, and everyone gains RPG style powers and abilities. The disruption in communications and the lost of modern technology with above mentioned results in society collapsing as the main characters deal with their new world mechanics.
• The Misplaced Dungeon
• The Mook Maker
• Necrotic Apocalypse
• Nigmus Online takes place in the titular game and follows a player named Liam whose bullied by his Jerkass coworker into playing it and unlocking a special hidden class. He meets a girl named Kathy whose debilitating disease leads her to undergo a procedure that has her brain permanently hooked to the immersive VR technology at the cost of never returning to the real world. Then Liam's Psychopathic Manchild of a coworker breaks in while he's gaming and kills him, somehow Brain Uploading him into the game as well half-way through the book.
• Noobtown
• Only Sense Online is more a Slice of Life approach where the main character Shun joins the titular game but do to the game misidentified his sex and a typo, he ends with a female avatar named Yun. He's blackmailed by his sister, a hardcore gamer, into keeping it and decides on a support style of play despite being told that such a character only had "trash" skills. Thanks to Achievement In Ignorance (due to never playing a video game before), Yun discovers numerous uses for the skills through Level Grinding as well as deeper levels to the game's lore.
• An Outcast in Another World
• Phantom Server
• The Primal Hunter
• Prophecy Approved Companion follows the story of Qube, the Chosen Companion to the Chosen One. Said Chosen One manages to save her at the beginning of the story from her Plotline Death, which proceeds to make the game more and more broken, in part as Qube begins to be more self-aware about her world and why the Chosen One acts so strangely.
• The Ripple System: Earth-blood Online is the newest and best VRMMO, an evolving world with full sensory input that is just like real life, but better. There are no real fantastical elements here, no world-ending threat or people being trapped in the game. The protagonist just hates his life in the real world and has enough money to move into the game full time. It's also notable for being much closer to a real MMO than many examples in the genre; levels, cooldowns, stuns, and other gameplay mechanics are an important part of every fight, and guild politics are definitely more like what you would see in an MMO than something closer to real life. For example: Ambushing a guild while they're fighting a boss is a dick move. Declaring a full war in response is a much bigger dick move, but still treated as reasonable. Corpse-camping a player until she cries and telling her she's not allowed to play the game any more is absolutely not reasonable, and the biggest guild in the game goes to total war over it.
• Rise Of The Living Forge: The Hero of Lian loses his paladin class and starts over as a magical blacksmith.
• Saga Of The Soul Dungeon
• Saintess Summons Skeletons takes place in a medieval fantasy world running on RPG rules, governed by a system that even the gods can't ignore. It follows Sofia, a teenage girl native to that world, whose attempt to unlock the necromancer class goes awry when a god happens to select her as their next saintess at the same time, resulting in a system error that leads to her becoming a new class called a saintomancer. She's promptly kidnapped by a Corrupt Church that believes she's a regular saintess, and they plan on imprisoning her for the rest of her life to bolster the country's strength by forcing her to use her saintess abilities to kidnap random people from other worlds (including Earth) to serve as heroes. However, as a saintomancer, Sofia only has weird or broken abilities like Summon Blood and Heal Undead, and realizes she needs to escape before she levels up enough that her kidnappers realize she can't do the one thing they want from her.
• Sentenced To Troll: Chad, a player with major anger issues, gets in trouble with the gamemasters and is sentenced to a month of full-immersion therapy in the game Ise of Mythos. Playing as a forest troll, Chad deals with Jerkass "hero" players and learns of the in-game culture the trolls and other monsters have.
• Silverglade, a Dungeon tale
• Skyclad (2018): A woman named Morgan Mackenzie is transported to an alternate Role-Playing Game 'Verse and due to the circumstances at the time (she was in the bath) along with the Narrative Filigree nature of the world, all of her powers, skills, level and stat bonuses involve her being naked to work. Hilarity does not ensue as she has to deal with all the perils of a typical Isekai story while left completely naked.^note According to the author, he wrote it on a dare from a friend he couldn't write a good story with a nude character without it turning into smut.
• Small Medium
• So I'm a Spider, So What?
• Stonehaven League: Devon, a veteran gamer, is offered a job as a professional player for a new MMORPG called Relic Online which is run by two Artificial Intelligences each represented in-game by its life-giving God of Good and destructive God of Evil. Her quest to restore a Lost City dedicated to the former is complicated by the actions of the latter when it promptly goes Off the Rails thanks to its arrogant and short-sighted programmer. This includes using the implants in the professional gamers to create a demonic second avatar that runs while they sleep which leaves at least one in a coma after getting trapped in the demon's realm and Devon's attempt to attack her settlement in the third book.
• Sufficiently Advanced Magic (2017)
• There Is No Epic Loot Here, Only Puns
• This Trilogy is Broken!:
  • This Quest is Bullshit!
• Threadbare is a story of a world generated by computers where the NPCs became true AI and the humans retreated to leave them in peace, where the rules shifted from old-school D&D to a more CRPG style in the recent past and everything went to shit.
• Tower of Somnus
• Travelers (BlueCoffeeJava)
• Tree of Aeons
• Viceroy's Pride
• Viridian Gate Online: In the early 2040s, an asteroid is rapidly approaching the Earth with it being clear that life will be wiped out. The main character is a man named Marcus who lucks out in a lottery to join Viridian Gate Online by means of a permanent Brain Uploading. Along with the in-game dangers, Marcus must also deal with player killers who take joy in their new environment, and developers who want to recreate the class differences from the real world.
• The Wandering Inn

Manhwa

• Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon: An unnamed low-level Skeleton Soldier dies and finds himself back on the day he was first resurrected 20 years before, gaining the ability to "level up" and increase his stats thanks to a "blue window" he can see. Late into the story it turns out he's the only one who can see it, which is an important plot point which involves the System and the Powers That Be who want the timeline the Soldier's trying to change follow a specific series of events.

Webcomics

• Artificial Incident: The prologue has the main character, Kevin, quite his job and decide to become a professional game streamer based on his female character Kaylin.. It ends and the story begins with "Kaylin" suffering a blackout before waking up before awakening with little to no memory of Kevin's life. Over the course of the story it turns out the "players" disappeared two centuries before and Kaylin a century before that. Then Kaylin meets Mike, a cyborg from another video game that was based on Science Fiction rather than Fantasy.
• The Gamer centers on Han Jee-Han, an 18-year-old Ordinary High-School Student who breaks The Masquerade discovering that monsters and superhuman abilities exist. His ability manifests as a living Role-Playing Game character including having stats, levels, and can level grind them by completing tasks. Unlike most other examples of LitRPG, Han Jee-Han is the only person whose power works that way making him a Outside-Context Problem for his enemies.

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