: Re: Why do most authors shed their LitRPG elements as the stories go? Is it a genre convention? In almost all the LitRPG stories I read, the start of the stories is full of system messages, +1

@Kristi637

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Current practice for attention-calling literary elements --I'm thinking primarily here of things like accents and dialects --is to start out with enough to give the flavor, and then to assume that the reader can extrapolate that those same things are continuing in the background, even if they are no longer being called-out or fully rendered. It's an anti-realist convention intended to make things less tedious and annoying for both the reader and the writer.

A story filled from beginning to end with stats adjustments would be practically unreadable. That doesn't entail that the the gamelike aspects might not still be an important part of the background setting and atmosphere. It may be true in some instances that those conventions could be entirely removed without any loss --and perhaps to the story's overall benefit! --but it sounds like that would migrate the story to a different subgenre.

From the little I know of LitRPG, it's already an anti-realist subgenre --it's founded on artifice and the deliberate suspension of disbelief --so it doesn't surprise me that it has ritual conventions of form.

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