First, let’s talk about RPG – Role Playing Games. What is that?
35 years ago, when I was in university, I ventured into one of the campus buildings on a Saturday. I don’t remember how I knew to go there – must have seen a poster somewhere on campus – but I walked in and joined a game with a bunch of strangers called Dungeons and Dragons.
Every Saturday, for a couple of hours in the afternoon, we’d all get together and sit around a table. There was a person called the Dungeon Master (DM) for short, and he ran things. All the rest of us were players.
Each of us had a character that we played every week. On the first week, we gave the character a name, picked their race and their profession, rolled some dice to determine his or her ability scores, all written on a piece of paper called a character sheet. Ability scores (also called stats) were things like strength, dexterity, intelligence, charisma, etc. As you performed certain tasks in the game, you gained experience points. And at certain levels of experience points, your character gained a new level.
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was a Role Playing Game (RPG).
Every week, we’d play the same character as the team progressed through a fantasy story. We’d encounter some other characters along the way (called Non Player Characters or NPCs), like the bartender or the town mayor. These people would ask us to go clear out the gnomes from the forest, or go clean out the monsters from the caves, or go save the princess from Bowser in the castle.
Let’s say that during the game, you encountered writing in a strange language above a door. The DM might roll a 20-sided dice to determine if you are intelligent enough to read it based on your intelligence stat.
This was an experience that hundreds of thousands of people around the world shared back in the early 1990’s. Before the Internet, we’d meet in person for a few hours a week to play a game. And that same game can last months or years among the same people.
I only lasted a few months at that D&D game. I can’t remember why I stopped.
Fast forward to 2024, I have found a literary equivalent to D&D. It’s called LitRPG.
LitRPG
LitRPG is a style of fantasy novel that involves a character (or characters), with a name, a class, a race, and stats. Typically, the character must embark on some quest that requires them to get better. They must improve their stats, defeat enemies, learn new skills and spells, etc.
In a LitRPG book, every once and a while a character might gain a new level. Every book typically invents their own new system, and doesn’t follow the D&D rules. The D&D rules are copyrighted, after all.
Progression Fantasy
Some books don’t follow such a strict set of rules. The character might still have some overall quest, and might have some loose method for knowing how strong they are, but there’s no concept of points or stats. They don’t know that they gain 66 points for killing that monster, and there’s nothing generally informing them that they have advanced to a new level and what specific new powers or skills they have gained.
