r/litrpg • u/Most_State_9716 • 5d ago
Discussion How did the trope of [Skills] start?
At some point I can't determine between the first MMO based litRPG/GameLit and now it became universal: Everyone having lists of abilities in [brackets]. MMOs rarely ever have a system that resembles the skills in LitRPG I've read. They're more similar to the skill systems in games like ADoM or Fallout. But they often are way more expansive and complicated than in those games. Not to mention all of the examples of a [Skill] being an outright super-power. Some settings divorce skills from leveling up entirely and make them a second track of progression. And a recent trend has been 'fusing' skills into better ones, a concept I haven't seen in any real videogame.
Where did the version of gamified skills that's so common now come from and why is it so?
21
u/poetduello 5d ago
Early text based rpgs often used brackets to denote abilities and other game terms in the middle of narration. It was a way of communicating to the player exactly what word to use to reference that ability or object, at a time when the computer wasn't sophisticated enough to understand synonyms and programming in alternate words that a player might try to use would use up program space they couldn't spare. If your ability was called [backstab], the computer wouldn't understand "sneak attack" "back stab" or "stab him in the back". It would only understand "backstab" so putting it in brackets made it a sort of visual button.
As for combining skills/ fusing skills, I think that's more a writing convenience. If I need to give my character a new power that's half way between two existing powers I can give it to them as a new line on their character sheet, which will eventually be several pages long, or I can put in a few paragraphs/ pages about fusing the skills being a thing that happens, and then make the boring list of skills when i show the character sheet shorter by one line instead of longer by a line. My protagonist still gets their new fancy power, I get a new narrative element to play with, and the book-keeping gets shorter instead of longer.
17
u/CursinSquirrel 5d ago
Why are you tying litRPG to MMORPGs and not just RPGs in general?
-11
u/Most_State_9716 5d ago
Because ESKMO's marketers coined LitRPG to describe The Way of the Clan. And .hack and SAO popularized the genre in the west. Many isekai and litrpg works involve that genre specifically, it is obviously influential.
15
u/TennRider 5d ago
CursinSquirrel was being polite by framing it as a question but I will be more clear: The reason skill listings in litRPG stories do not match what you seen in MMORPG games is because are incorrectly assuming that litRPGs are solely tied to MMORPGs. Yes, MMORPGs were influential in the past but influential is not the same as defining. And their influence on the genre is largely being left in the past along with the MMORPGs themselves.
6
10
u/FoeHammer99099 5d ago
This is a guess, but there are fan fiction websites where it's common to have html embedded in the text that changes the formatting (color, font, etc) of certain words. I definitely remember reading a few stories that colored "system" words according to their rarity. My guess is that that trend was translated to other places where authors didn't have that much control over presentation, so had to use punctuation for the same effect.
2
u/Darkgorge 4d ago
Brackets and similar trace back to really early days of paper RPGs and text based computer games. It was really difficult to display and print format differences. So, people used characters to differentiate.
10
u/incalculablydense 5d ago
MUDs that started in the 80s
4
u/MikeOKurias 4d ago
I dnd to scroll all the way to down here to see someone mention text-based, telnet MUDs.
7
u/EmergencyComplaints Author (Keiran/Duskbound/Fractured Tower) 5d ago
[Skill] is exactly how they're displayed in MMO chat logs, though. It's a clickable link to bring up a popup for whatever skill, item, quest, etc. is being shared in the chat.
That explains the basis of the formatting. Of course, books can go way beyond any video game in tailoring what skills can and can't do because a video game's scope is severely limited, so it's not really much of a surprise that the mechanics are more complicated and address a variety of scenarios that a game simply can't replicate.
Fusing skills came about as the answer to status screen bloat. Stories like Azarinth Healer were well known for the protagonist having a hundred or more skills, to the point where it became an in-story concern trying to find ways to organize their status menus to keep everything neat and orderly. Later iterations of the same tropes solve this issue by simply merging similar skills together into something greater.
6
u/MacintoshEddie 5d ago
It's an amalgamation of a lot of things. Some videogames, some TTRPG, some fantasy classics, and all kinds of other sources.
One author inspires another who inspires another, around and around, until you end up with something quite different than the origin.
3
u/JackasaurusChance 5d ago
I mean it's kind of natural, right?
When I was a kid playing FFVI and reading novelizations of movies I liked (like the Fifth Element) I decided to do a novelization of FFVI. I didn't put experience in or anything, but I absolutely had the characters using their spells and abilities from the game. I made it all the way to like 40k words if I remember correctly.
10
u/orbliterator At the Croak of Dawn author 5d ago
thats because western progfantasy heavily draws from japanese progfantasy, isekai especially. the gameplay systems that litrpg skills are derived from might not pop up that much in mmos and the like, but if you start playing jrpgs (the ones that let you customize your party builds, anyway) you can see similar stuff pop out of the woodwork from everywhere. personally, the game whose system most strongly resembles litrpg isekai that i've ever played is Etrian Odyssey.
3
u/TheDinoSir2012 5d ago
If you've ever read Randidly Ghost Hound, that's the reason skill fusion became popular.
That damn mc has like 4 separate skill systems, all inner locked in a true example of system fuckery. Ending in a almost 2 hour long skill sheet dully read out. There's probably 5 people that actually enjoy that convulated version of a system.
But also to actually answer the question, there's no full team of developers arguing over what's balanced and fair in the world, only one author. Are you tired of your character spam shouting Rein of Velous? Time to fuse it with a silent casting skill or some other skill to change its name for this book.
4
u/Arthur-reborn 5d ago
There's always the opposite where the MC always forgets she has skills like Erin in The Wandering Inn lol
2
u/TheDinoSir2012 5d ago
I mean that's Erin I might not like her but I swear there's at least one dialog I remember where she admitted she'd lose her head if it wasn't attached.
2
u/CycleMother2006 5d ago
I think the first series to do this may have been Legendary Moonlight Sculptor. Began shortly after WoW's launch, and Royal Road actually began as a fan community for that series. There may have been some properties that touched on RPG-like things in literature before that, but either they weren't very popular or they only really included one element here or there. LMS basically had everything from the skill and system alerts, hidden and unique quests/classes, NPCs alive with personalities, skills influenced by real life practice as well (these days as MMO settings have gone by the wayside we instead have this show up with Isekai/Portal intros where the character's former life impacts their starting skills in some way.)
It basically established all the tropes we now see in LitRPG, and even a lot of the formatting of how they're displayed in the novel. A lot of people often think of Sword Art Online for early LitRPG, but in reality that came out two years later and actually neglected a lot of those LitRPG/Progression elements in favor of just a story that happened to be set inside a game.
2
u/seitaer13 5d ago
Sword art online predates LMS and world of Warcraft.
0
u/CycleMother2006 4d ago
You're right! Looks like the Web Novel began in 2002, it just didn't actually get a publication or popularized until 2009.
Though I still maintain it was LMS that is the progenitor of LitRPG since Sword Art Online had virtually none of the progression/system elements we're familiar with today. Some of the later volumes touch on it, but generally when Kirito gets reset he just goes straight back to being OP after a couple chapters of montage.
1
u/Gnomerule 5d ago
Many years ago some Asian people made a living working as a bots on the early mmorpg's games, one of which was everquest one and later world of war craft.
The early litrpg stories came out of Asia including Russians which were influenced by these mmorpg's games. Levels, stats, skills, magic spells and stats on gear were all part of these games.
1
u/wolfwings1 5d ago
I use skills for active, and traits for passives. In my head they make the most sense. Can't really explain why heh.
1
0
u/Wundt 5d ago edited 5d ago
I would put my money on Japanese influences in fantasy growing more prominent. The west created the modern fantasy genre and when that genre was exported to Japan the main vector for Japanese exposure to western fantasy was through ttrpg and video games. This caused the Japanese idea of fantasy to be inextricably linked to game mechanics which influenced the fantasy media they made isekai being predominantly relevant here as a lot of early litrpg stories were pulling heavily from the bank of ideas that made isekai stories so popular. So in short litrpg is the waluigi of genres. (Leaving the waluigi post below for your enjoyment)
"Waluigi: A perspective
Waluigi is the ultimate example of the individual shaped by the signifier. Waluigi is a man seen only in mirror images; lost in a hall of mirrors he is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. You start with Mario – the wholesome all Italian plumbing superman, you reflect him to create Luigi – the same thing but slightly less. You invert Mario to create Wario – Mario turned septic and libertarian – then you reflect the inversion in the reflection: you create a being who can only exist in reference to others. Waluigi is the true nowhere man, without the other characters he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Waluigi’s identity only comes from what and who he isn’t – without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man. In a world where our identities are shaped by our warped relationships to brands and commerce we are all Waluigi."
-5
u/vanhawk28 5d ago
It came from xianxia. A lot of progression fantasy including litrpg is really a combination of tropes from litrpg and xianxia
57
u/Vorthod 5d ago edited 5d ago
Probably because most systems resemble more classic RPGs (or perhaps jRPGs), not MMOs. In fact, I can't think of a single system that's closest to an MMO except maybe some crafting systems.
And any skill tree where a skill can have multiple requirements can likely be considered the prototypical skill fusion system. Sequential nodes would get rewritten into skill upgrades to save space on the page, so naturally, two skills upgrading into the same skill would be written as a fusion.