Magna Carta: LitRPG Ed

Can't Get Enough

1. Stranger in a Strange Land

The whole Stranger in a Strange Land is fantastic, I absolutely love it. The genre is much older than the whole Isekai anime milieu, dating back to things like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a New England Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and technically, Rip van Winkle. It's the Fantastic Voyage adventure without requiring a ship or traveling over oceans.

2. Genre Fantasy

Genre fantasy is like tacos or chocolate cake, each time it's about the same, but through slight changes and different ingredients, you can get something new. It is going to take a lot for me to tire of unlikely heroes confronting their own weaknesses and failures to overcome arrogant and seemingly unstoppable evil.

3. Exploring Strange New Worlds

This one is straight on the nose, and few things get me excited quite like plunging into a new realm. One of the downsides of heavier fantasy literature is its size. Malazan is breathtaking, and so is Westeros, but they are enormous, the books are long, and they follow many characters through many paths. The LitRPG is a snack-size heroic adventure, recklessly plunging into half-cocked, half-cooked realms and adventures.

4. Maximizing Unusual Skills

It isn't uncommon for the protagonist of LitRPGs to have an unusual skill. This skill is typically maxed out, and it allows them a different approach to overcome foes. Now, in more cliche isekai, these maxed-out skills are magic or combat where they cannot be defeated and the game becomes an increasing escalation of power to threaten them, rather like Superman stories. The most popular version of this is the protagonist's superpower being Excel or otherwise being a nerd accountant. It is even more interesting if the hero has their maxed out skill as Fishing, Storage/inventory, or as is currently on the up and up, cooking.

5. Unusual Characters

it can get interesting when an author brings in non-human and non-demihuman races into their stories. There is plenty of room in genre fantasy for elves, dwarves, orcs, and dragons, that road is broad and long. Heroes who befriend lamias, wooly mammoths, sentient slimes, golems, and the rest, that's going to get interesting, plus it is a lot harder for social justice weeabos to pick something you wrote and tear it apart by claiming that your World of Warcraft x Warhammer 40k inspired orcs are actually a poorly rendered racist stereotype of insert social/ethnic/whatever group de jour.

Drives me Batty

1. Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

This is a cornerstone of the more true-to-form LitRPG where stats are recognized and have visible numerical values. I am sure this is less distracting in written form, but in audiobooks, listening to a narrator drone through a list of stat, numbers, modifiers, etc is eating chalk dry.

2. User Interface Window

It is also a common trope for LitRPG protagonists to literally have a pop-up window that only they can see and they manipulate it with their minds. When Tony Stark uses a holo-projection to brainstorm and look at patterns and plot devices, its pretty cool, but see-through screens are really only useful for jet fighter HUDs, and other game systems freeze the game while accessing the magic scroll, pip-boy, or whatever other interface gimmick is used.

3. The Heroic Thumb

I have long since lost interest in the generic NEET hikikomori types who populate anime Isekai, the animated version of the LitRPG, and the current hot thing. Average looks, self-doubt but not too much, exceed without too much effort, they power game through the adventure. There is no risk to the character, you know they are going to win in the end, and they will do it easily, usually by hacking the system somehow.

Yawn

4. InstaHarem

I have nothing against the harem aspect of the genre, it is a fantasy move in an already fantasy setting. What does rustle my jimmies is when the women who waltz into the story have no agency, no interesting aspect, and while they might be powerful warriors, magic users, or whatever, they immediately get heart eyes, roll over, and throw themselves at the boring ass main character.