I’ve gotten so behind in tracking what I’ve read in my reading journal, I’m not sure where to begin.

The problem? LitRPG books.

No wait, the problem is that I don’t have the focus to keep up with my usual book logging commitment. I don’t have that focus because baby. And I don’t make time for logging the books I’ve read because… baby. Baby, and everything else that needs to be done.

Another part of the problem is that I can read ebooks on my phone while I’m doing other things, including while I hum and rock my baby to sleep. That works just fine. It works far better, far more easily, than…

…making time to gather my thoughts and observations, to track a book’s publishing data, and to write all that down in my reading journal. Thus I’ve been building up my reading journal deficit, and I am continuing to make it worse.

I’m doing genre research. I had already heard about Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC), but I wanted to know what other books I should look for in the LitRPG genre. A quick search surfaced DCC, of course, but also He Who Fights with Monsters (HWFwM)—a very Australian web serial-turned-ebook series that fits neatly into both the LitRPG genre and portal fiction.

I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read from both series. I’m caught, however, on the different ways that they model powers and abilities, and on the implications that those models create.

Side note: I’m sticking to my guns, the more I read of LitRPG the more my previous observations feel correct. LitRPG is just another derivation from the line of classic quest literature, adventure fiction, and portal fiction.

Anyway. Back to the implications of powers and skills and abilities in these LitRPG stories.

DCC conceives of every action people take as being tied to skills. We’re treated to a bottomless skill list early in the first book that includes things like Breathing and Watching TV. In that way, this model feels like GURPS. With this model, there are mechanical ramifications to being really good at just about anything—and there’s a benefit (stated or implied) to specializing in relatively banal and practical skills that have no overtly magical powers.

For all that the book references Dungeons and Dragons, the characters in the story are creating their own collection of highly trained special abilities (both within their character class and outside it) with a flexibility that no D&D class offers. Their character classes may offer them specific advantages (and limitations), but they aren’t leveling up their class. Instead, they’re leveling up whichever skills they use (and even choosing which ones they focus on training). As I said, it feels more GURPS than D&D.

Furthermore, everyone inside DCC’s gameshow “dungeon“ (even random monsters, not just our protagonists or all dungeon crawlers) uses the same skill system. Everybody has character attributes, everybody has skills, everybody can (with a few limitations) gain access to any of those capabilities. This means that our protagonists (and the other dungeon crawlers) don’t feel totally unique or distinct from non-dungeon crawlers. This underlying similarity between those we are told are special or different (the dungeon crawlers) and those we are told are unimportant background characters without “real” lives (the monsters, the non-player characters) is key to the story’s deeper message and our main characters’ emotional, ethical, and narrative arcs. Heck, the narrative goes out of its way to humanize (awkward word here but whatever) many of the monsters and foes that the protagonist Carl faces. 

By making a setting in which everybody is working within the confines of the same system, DCC lays a foundation that argues for a more egalitarian world. Or at least a world in which people aren’t immediately dismissed as unimportant or non-people due to some arbitrary distinction (like “dungeon crawler” vs NPC). Yes, there are power differences between people—some folks have higher skills or levels or attributes—but everyone is in the same system, and they are all still people. Most of them deserve our empathy.

HWFwM on the other hand feels like a system devoted to Supers and fighting the monstrous Other. There are no skills offered for everyday (or even rare) activities. You don’t level up in Cooking, for example, and gain additional benefits to your food preparation. Instead one must absorb Essences and then use Awakening Stones to gain special abilities.

Essences and Awakening Stones are both rare and expensive in HWFwM, leaving most people without any access to magical powers. This creates obvious socioeconomic class distinctions, and even as our protagonist Jason fumbles his way into gaining these powers (because of course he does) he questions his new world’s assumptions about what a just society looks like and how access to this power warps the world. HWFwM’s story makes both implicit and explicit arguments that many societies are unjust, mistreat people, and reward entrenched power structures.

This is very comparable to some of the undertones (and later, overtones) of DCC.

HWFwM’s setting also dodges a conflict that DCC has to go out of its way to answer. HWFwM’s initial setting doesn’t suggest that there might be intelligent human-like life that “doesn’t count”—there aren’t NPCs in HWFwM, and our protagonist Jason isn’t encouraged to do violence to people-shaped things to entertain a bloodthirsty audience. But HWFwM dodges the issue by making nearly all the monsters Jason faces explicitly incapable of being reasoned with—they are best handled with violence, and there’s no call for empathizing with them. That tone carries over to many of Jason’s humanlike foes. DCC instead confronts this head on, though it perhaps tries to have its cake and eat it too. Carl’s very clear inner monologue tells us how much he dislikes this horrifying gameshow’s requirement for violence and murder, even as Carl and Donut continue to do violence in an effort to survive the bloodsport.

However, Carl in DCC appears to be immediately trying to lay the groundwork for larger change using whatever tools are available to hand. Jason in HWFwM appears to be deferring acting to change society, instead climbing the ladder of power in the hopes of maybe someday being able to influence things. Yes Jason acts to help other less-powerful people, but his actions aren’t outside the model of a beneficent tyrant. It doesn’t seem like he’s trying to undermine the existing system, or replace it with something better.

Carl on the other hand is clearly “planting seeds” (his words) of future cooperation, contrary to the game’s expectation of violent competition. Simultaneously, he’s working to destabilize the system that has trapped him and so many others in hellish bloodsport. Regardless of the outcomes, Carl feels revolutionary in a way that Jason does not.

Part of that, I think, is tied to the systems these two stories use for their “RPG” elements. Carl’s actions are important; he’s questioning the assumptions of the world he’s been trapped in, and is actively working to weaken toxic power structures and collaborate with other people when he can. But because of how skills and powers work in his setting, he doesn’t need to oppose BOTH his setting’s powers-that-be AND the world building itself. Jason feels like he’s doing less to change the world: yes, he’s acting more like how we might want a superhuman or a noble to act, but he’s not trying to change society in the same way that Carl is. However, to accomplish what Carl is attempting, Jason would likely need to find some larger way to change how access to his setting’s magical powers works (via the world building of Essences and Awakening Stones) in addition to facing off against / feuding with his setting’s extant power structures. 

There are other issues at work here.

Carl feels like he’s struggling to keep his head above water. He is gaining power, but the power he gains feels barely commensurate to the challenges he faces. Moreover, he doesn’t have a way to opt out at any point. While he might be more powerful than some of the other dungeon crawlers around him, none of the dungeon crawlers are in their current struggle because of an informed choice. They (and even the NPCs) all feel trapped in the same shitty situation, facing ever-mounting challenges just to reach the promise of a marginally less-shit tomorrow.

Jason continually faces bad situations, but in many cases he faces them because he opts in. He chooses to risk himself even when he has the option of not playing the hero. He chooses to face danger when he could theoretically leave the adventuring life and live in comfort. Perhaps this is more heroic (he chooses to lay his life on the line), but it does not feel as transformative.

Jason’s position in his new world’s society is one of power and wealth and privilege. Between the Haves and the Have-Nots, Jason is one of his new world’s Haves. This is inherent to the game system of HWFwM’s setting: only some people get Essences and powers, those people are special, and they’re largely comparable to some form of aristocracy. Carl, meanwhile, is a Have-Not (or maybe a Have-One-Bit). Carl starts from roughly the same place as all the other Dungeon Crawlers, and theoretically has access to all the same opportunities as anyone else. He is the Proletariat, trapped inside a Capitalist gameshow that is literally designed to kill him (and everyone else) as dramatically as possible for the Capitalists’ amusement. Thus even when HWFwM conspires to pit the noble Jason against ever more hideously daunting foes, and Jason feels as though there’s no way he could back out, he still feels less under-the-gun, less disempowered, and less threatened than proletariat Carl does.

That’s an absurd statement given the stakes HWFwM establishes, but I stand by it.

This comparative dynamic also plays into Jason and Carl’s different approaches to facing larger threats. Jason embraces the role of the Lone Savior. He will work with allies, and he quickly makes friends and joins their team, but he’s got a big ol’ heroic-self-sacrifice complex. If he can do something on his own, he will. He is the incarnation of noblesse oblige.

Carl, meanwhile, is part of a team from the get-go. He works to build coalitions where he can. He takes a far more communitarian and cooperative approach. There are overtones of heroic self sacrifice for him too—he’s a sympathetic hero in a subgenre of adventure fiction. But that self sacrifice is rooted not in feeling that he has more power than others and must therefore use it responsibly, but in feeling that he and everyone else stuck in the gameshow are all in the shit together and must thus work together to oppose the powers that be.

Again, Carl feels revolutionary in a way that Jason does not… and a lot of that difference comes down to the respective writers’ world building choices. Not all, but plenty. Thus, even as HWFwM makes many very pointed critiques of inheritable power and wealth inequality and entrenched power structures, Jason’s actions feel like they fall a bit flat by comparison with Carl’s.

I can’t help but think that HWFwM’s critiques would feel better and land harder if the setting didn’t create such a concrete class distinction and then place our hero on the top. At least DCC’s messages feel like they’re all pulling in the same direction.