Skills & Demons - Crunchy

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

For months Mark has been bugging his friends to try this gaming system he is enamored with. Skills, Archetypes, and Demons. This system has a skill for everything and even different approaches for some skills. Instead of levels, he tells them, each skill has its own experience and level.

"As true to real life as a gaming system could be." at least it says on the box. When the group finally break down and decide to play it, they head over to Hunter's house to start. Next thing they know... trapped in the game.

Everyone dreams of being trapped inside their favorite game. Abusing the mechanics and becoming OP AF. No one ever dreams of being trapped in a crappy system. One ladened with rules and so much record keeping it almost becomes tedious.

Author Notes:

Note: There is two different versions of this story, one with the game mechanics and dice rolls(this one) and one without. Some people have still said they preferred the lite/noncrunchy version so I'm updating a 2nd story with that version. It will lag behind this one a little but if thats more your cup of tea, check it out...https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/29481/skills-archetypes-and-demons-first-encounters

I truly hope you enjoy.

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2020
Author: UnwrittenDreams

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 3.8/ 5.0
Followers: 213
Views: 40,021

Reviews

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Community Reviews(5)

Cyoa11aaRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
First chapter was great, I can tell that I'm really going to like this book when there's a little bit more.
Warix VivianaRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
A. what beautiful god damn comedy.
B. add more tags.
This book is great. Truly a blessed piece of enjoyment. I laughed, I had questions, I had more questions, they got answered, I laughed again, beautiful.
KoboldPatrolRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
(as of chapter 41)
Five friends wake up in a fantasy world ruled by a tabletop RPG system that they had just started to try out. A system where each and every possible action has its own skill that has to be practiced individually. The characters also quickly find out that when they die they will respawn at the same location without memories and all the earned skills reset to zero; it turns out that they have over time left a large amount of their own corpses scattered throughout the region. Will they ever live long enough to defeat evil and find the way home?
Style: The story is told in third-person limited style following the five main characters, but from the point of view of only two of them. The word choice is mostly good and the descriptions are limited but okay.
The action-specific skill system makes much more sense than what you often see in litRPG stories: when you start using a short sword instead of an axe you have to learn it from zero instead of relying on an illogical global "one-handed weapons" skill.
The litRPG elements themselves are a blessing and a curse. The basic mechanics of the story lead to lots of dice rolls with or without success in the respective action, explaining why the hit landed or the foot slipped. I mostly like that. On the other hand, when the characters are grinding a skill while doing something else (like gathering mana while walking), do we really need to (rolled 9,6,3: success, 6543 more until level up) see each and every (rolled 1,2,3: failure) dice roll that happens (rolled 5,6,7: success, 6542 more until level up), each taking 2-3 lines in (rolled 2,4,6: failure) the text, cluttering the page and (rolled 4,9,9: double success, 6540 more until level up) disrupting the reading flow?
Now, if I don't like it, why don't I read the non-crunchy version that is posted in parallel on RRL, where all mechanics are hidden? Well, I do like to read about dice rolls and leveling up, just not in every second paragraph. E.g., those failed "
Urza IronclawRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
The story is just starting but I am enjoying it. The characters haven't had much time to develop but they seem to be going in a good direction. Also contains some fresh ideas, at least from my point of view.
Good work.
Retrodude653Royal Road
★★★ 3.0
So the story itself is pretty good but a little to dark for me personally if you write something similar but less serious and grim i'll probably enjoy it way more.