I'm a little curious about what is apparently called the litrpg subgenre... because like it's pretty much a web native subgenre, it seems to have become wildly popular in terms of like sales and so on, but basically nobody i know really reads/watches it outside of maybe dungeon meshi?
I have an itch to maybe do something with the concept of a world that runs on game rules and have for a while, but I really struggle to figure out what the actual story would be. I have no interest in retreading 'self-insert hero starts at the bottom and works their way up to be the strongest' which seems to be the standard narrative for these things.
it's notable to me that the litrpg stories I've encountered don't often work like a real multiplayer rpg. the protagonist can hardly be the best if everyone is limited to the current patch's item level, competing to squeeze out a fraction of a percent higher dps. instead a common conceit seems to be that the ecosystem fully runs on rpg rules with an equivalent representation for players and enemies. a powerful enemy is not one that's spawned in a high level area or raid instance, but the survivor of a series of battles comparable to the protagonist. kill strong things, get xp, become strong thing yourself. in this regard it seems to more closely resemble very early, simulation-oriented experiments in what would become the mmo form, such as ultima online, rather than a post-WoW mmo.
anyway, rather than the isekai super-protagonist, I want to imagine something like what you actually get with players of an mmo, where reaching the top is a relatively banal achievement. the idea of an economy actually structured around loot drops is one thought (inspired by certain of charity's short stories), along with taking 'extra-diagetic' gameplay notions like a meta strat, weekly lockout, rotation, 'best in slot' etc. and imagining they're diegetically how people encounter the world they live in. but beyond cheap jokes like, "oh, I'm going to work to kill the god of dragons 20 times, see you this afternoon" I'm not sure what to do with this.
the other thought is to take a functioning game rules world and imagine people find a way to mess with the game's underlying code. we can draw on all the speedrunning and hacking repertoire: clipping through walls, duplicating objects, exploiting AI, wrong warps, overflowing buffers, all the way up to arbitrary code execution. there is potential for a story there: the status quo of the rpg world is disrupted when word spreads of an exploit, what happens next?
the problem is that such tricks are interesting insofar as they're engineering puzzles: you have limited tools and you have to combine them in an unexpected way to achieve some (often fairly arbitrary) goal. it becomes really sublime when it reaches the level of pannenkoek2012's videos, pulling out really complex chains of integer overflow tricks requiring hours of precise computer controlled inputs, just to avoid pressing the A button. but as the author creating an imaginary game system for the story, I'd have to devise a system rich enough that the unexpected trick feels like a plausible follow through and not just an authorial fiat.
it almost feels like this idea would be better as a kind of very self aware game with a deliberate 'glitch' which the characters react to. but such fake glitches are rarely as interesting as real ones... a game is supposed to guide its players towards the solution.
(this is why 'hacking' games such as hacknet fall a bit short... there was a conceptually neat bit in hacknet where the 'virtual machine' (the game) is compromised by a rival hacker and you have to edit the game files using the OS to continue. in practice the game pretty much spoonfed the relevant console commands to you. zachtronics programming games at least actually realise that feeling...)
in this regard, perhaps I'm looking for something a bit like CrossCode, which is a zelda-like game set in a kind of sci fi mmo using players in vr controlling programmable matter avatars. there are some good sequences in that game where competing hackers adjust the rules of the game to make a fight unwinnable and then the opposing hacker finds a loophole... but it's limited to a few sequences and the satisfaction is mostly that of seeing a number get very big.
a lot of potential for satisfying feelings of having broken a system wide open comes from systems with modular components and interfaces which can combine in unpredictable ways. the most extreme example of this in games that i know of is magic the gathering, which is a kind of linguistic program whose cards interact by means of keywords. magic is fascinating in one way because although combinations for e.g. infinite damage certainly exist, they don't destroy the game, and may even be inferior to decks which move faster. but it is immensely satisfying in magic to set a combo deck in motion.
I'm still kind of stuck for what story I'd want to tell with these elements, though. the glitch would presumably set off some sort of scientific revolution type scenario, as people race to take advantage of the new discovery and new social configurations grow to match? but how does this relate to characters and themes and so on? this is where i always get stuck.
it does seem funny to think of the history of science this way though - electricity as a glitch allowing access to the underlying system, computers as an ACE exploit. go too far down that road and you end up sounding like a lesswronger though...
