LitRPG Forum discussion

First post here. I'm an author, and I'm planning a LitRPG novel. Regarding the charts, do they have to be displayed as images? or could characters be used to show the stats? such as the following...

---------
Stamina: 89
---------
Strength: 56
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And so on?

Also does anyone know of any successful LitRPG novels that are using characters instead of images for the charts?

And lastly do you like more elaborately designed charts? or basic is fine?

Off the top of my head I can think only one that is stat heavy, the mirror world series.

There are a few others but not as heavy handed, at least I can't think them at the moment. Most of the ones I've read recently incorporate the stats into the the narrative rather then listing them all flat out.

Which is better depends on the style you are going for but personally I tend to skip those tables if they appear too often, once every few chapters when a big change happens is ok but I don't need to know what the MC's entire Battle log looks like.

I tend to read most of my books on my phone these days, but will still use my K2 and even the Kindle desktop app on my tablet on occasion. It has been my experience that the actual charts don't resize very well between the different screen sizes. Thankfully, there aren't many books that use that format.
I usually prefer the simple end of chapter character synopsis. I can skip it if I want without missing anything, but can also refer back to it quickly if needs be.
The Alpha World series by Daniel Schinhofen uses a simple synopsis style layout at the end of some chapters. It does get a little long as the spells get listed.
Good luck with your book.

I read from various devices.
Stuart Grosse's books have a lot of in-chapter tables about quest advancement, skills,etc. They appear to use simple tables, they look good on KPW3 and Android Kindle app and K4Mac in single-page column mode but multi-column mode (which I use a lot) breaks badly.
If same data was present with character formatting like
+----
| Hero gets....
+----
it would be much worse.
It it would be just colored text log, it would be much better.

I agree that the text charts are not good on small devices, even the smaller Kindles, unless you use tiny fonts, lose information or don't resize. I'm sure there are ways to deal with it, but so far I haven't seen anything that worked.

I prefer them in text format. Why? I read mostly in the evenings and in bed, on my phone in night mode, so light text on a dark background, with the backlight dimmed. Im happily reading along till i get a bright white stat image blinding me. It hurts! There is no need for fancy imagery, i read a book, it's all in my head anyway. And while im on the subject, if i get endless pages of stats i skip them quite often (looking at you, Weirdest Noob).

Less is more in my opinion when it comes to charts. I feel it’s a huge waste to post the full 3 pages of stats each chapter.