It’s The Experience, Stupid: What LitRPGs Get Wrong About Immersion

The past year hasn’t left much room for doing.

My wife’s been in and out of the hospital for long stretches, and I’ve been with her every day of it. Between bad Wi-Fi, spotty cell service, and the endless hum and ping of hospital machines, my brain needed something, anything, to keep from turning into a stagnant pool of jelly.

Enter Audible.

Not wanting to risk buying audiobooks I might hate, I started with the free ones included with our Amazon Prime subscription. That’s how I fell head-first (or is it ear-first) into the sprawling, stat-obsessed world of LitRPGs stories.

I’ve listened to a dozen or so series now. That’s not a flex, just a testament to the amount of time I had to burn. These LitRPG books are a mixed bag of old Halloween candy. You might get lucky to get something that’s okay, but it can get kinda dicey at times. But every time I cue one up, I’m reminded of my own gateway into fantasy worlds, way way back in 1983, when I used one entire month’s allowances to buy this weird new thing sitting in the board-game aisle at Sears.

Enter Dungeons & Dragons.

I still remember opening that red box with the dragon on the cover, finding odd-shaped polyhedron dice so strange they came with a crayon to fill in the numbers. Two paperback books inside promised something wild: not a game about winning, but about imagining.

Most games at the time were straightforward, like Monopoly, Scrabble, Sorry. You rolled dice, moved pieces, and tried to win. 

D&D wasn’t that. It gave you rules, sure, but handed you the rest, the story, the stakes, the world, to invent yourself. I was hooked from the first illustration of Morgan Le Fey. 

Yea, you know what I mean, nerd.

For years I played alone, making bad dungeons and worse characters. When I finally met a group in high school, my world cracked open.

Fiction You Wrote Yourself

At fourteen I was devouring Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Burroughs, Moorcock, Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels, so my early attempts at world-building were, predictably, terrible.

My dungeons overflowed with half-naked princesses who all looked suspiciously like Elvira and villains straight off Skeletor’s payroll. But Holy Bejezzus, it was fun.

We were those kids, the ones hunched in the cafeteria corner, shouting “Scored a hit!” and getting shushed by confused teachers. Girls roilled their eyes at us. Guys snickered at us. We rolled dice, argued, cheered, and created entire story worlds hidden in our Trapper Keepers.

Yes, I also played video games, collected comics, watched anime, and quoted Temple of Doom and Holy Grail.

All together now: Geeeeeeeeek!

But here’s the thing: over time, our characters became more than evolving stat sheets. They became us, an imaginary reflection of our group. We weren’t just killing monsters; we were building stories we still talk about decades later.

That’s Where LitRPGs Lose It

That camaraderie, that sense of shared authorship, is what most LitRPGs miss.

They obsess over the grind: killing higher-level monsters, collecting loot, stacking stats. They confuse mechanics with meaning.

In D&D, the Dungeon Master creates a world for the players to live in. You inhabit your character, think like them, act like them. The fun comes from pretending you’re someone who believes their world is real.

LitRPGs flip that. The protagonist usually dies or gets uploaded into some AI-controlled world and has to “learn the rules” as they go. Entire chapters are devoted to system tutorials disguised as plot.

And what’s missing?

The Human Reaction.

Imagine waking up to find your body gone, your world erased, your reality rewritten by code. Most of these characters shrug it off by chapter three. It’s trauma without consequence, a skipped cutscene so the “plot” can start.

Only one series I’ve found actually gets it right: Dungeon Crawler Carl.

It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it’s also brilliant. Carl watches his entire world be destroyed, and that loss drives him. His rage, grief, and absurd resilience make the story real. It’s not about power; it’s about purpose.

The Real Experience

Most LitRPGs mistake points for progress.

They think the reader wants endless leveling, but what we crave is experience, the kind you remember, not the kind you tabulate.

Experience is surviving a moment together, even if it’s imaginary. It’s the memory of a shared story, the laughter, the moral dilemmas, the way your group still quotes that one campaign like it really happened.

We cared about why we fought, not what we fought.

That’s the difference between immersion and simulation.

Why I Make the Games I Do

So there I was, sitting in hospital rooms, listening to one more overpowered hero crush one more dungeon, wondering why it all felt hollow.

And I realized: these stories never let me in. They had worlds, but no welcome.

That’s why I design the way I do now.

I believe players want more than dice rolls and stat boosts, they want connection. They want to be part of something that exists because they touched it.

When I build a game world, I’m chasing that eleven-year-old feeling: the wonder of creation, the shared heartbeat of imagination. I want players not just to play in my worlds, but to live in them a little, to leave fingerprints on the walls.

Because immersion isn’t about escape.

It’s about belonging.

These are my original D&D rulebooks, a little worn around the holes where they were kept in my Trapper Keeper for decades. And, I still have the original dice that came with them.