I started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl recently. I made it through about a chapter and a half before I had to give up. I think what turned me off was the giant amount of boldfaced text that indicated the aliens who were in charge, like a giant infodump. And the loot boxes and achievements just got sillier and sillier, and not in a good way.

I know DCC is an extremely popular series, but I just don’t think it works for me. I’ve read a couple of LitRPG-lite books that were okay at best; I didn’t love them, but I made it through them. By “LitRPG-lite”, I mean the ones where you have a character who consistently levels up in power. I read one about a space-bound civilization that I can’t remember the name of, and it was acceptable. However, as someone who rarely plays RPGs of any type, I might just be the wrong audience.

Theoretically DCC should have things that I like in it: silliness, cat humor, action, peril. But I don’t like infodumps. I’m thinking the author wanted to get people to read all the boldfaced text and he did so by giving us a pretty silly (but still somewhat compelling) introduction and first chapter (prior to the aliens’ arrival). However, the kick wasn’t enough to get me to want to chew through all the infodumping and ridiculousness.

Generally in the past when I’ve seen LitRPG on a book’s blurb, I’ve skipped right over it. It looks like that was the right thing to do — at least for me. If I want to do something RPG-related in a book, I’ll read (or write) an interactive novel instead.