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I really enjoyed the first 4 books, but have timed out pretty hard on 5. Giving it a break and seeing if I want to go back to it.

I am not a gamer, the only video games I have ever played are Tetris and Mario Kart with my kid when he was younger. I don't think that's the problem for me? It just felt like starting with book 4, everything felt too bloated. I made it through that book bc I was listening...

but I really lost track of a lot of it. And the 5th book just feels way too overweighted, too long, too flabby. I mean, I guess that can be about the gaming stuff? But it doesn't feel that way to me. It just feels like it could be half the length.

It's the sort of book that I definitely think could be fun to discuss if social media wasn't currently a shitshow of media illiteracy and defensive fandom and I don't feel like wrestling with either side right now. But I really am interested in the wide range of non-gamers I see reading these!

They feel so aggressively niche gamer to me, if you are a non-gamer reading them I would love to hear if you find any of that tedious or overwhelming. I'm having a hard time imagining what the experience would be if you're not a big gamer, but they have CLEARLY broken containment in a huge way.

(I also wonder if the audiobooks are part of that magic. A lot of people I see talking about them who aren't gamers are listening to them, and I gotta hand it to the narrator: it's impressive that I am not sick & fucking tired of hearing "New Achievement" already??? lol)

Hello! I am so thoroughly not a gamer I think the last non-puzzle game I played regularly was like Kirby's Dreamland on Gameboy, and I tore through those books! At first the videogame world-building stuff was really distracting, but eventually the characters and truly BONKERS plot won me over.

I am a non-gamer who is reading through them! (slowly, as my library holds come in) I find the game achievement stuff very clunky but at the same time find the books themselves compulsively readable. After I finished the first I wasn't sure if I liked it or not…but kept on reading.

I have very mixed feelings overall as I sort of hate the reading experience but am deeply invested in the story.

this is FASCINATING. Are you reading them in ebook/print or listening to them?

This was very much my experience! It took until like halfway through book 3 to go from "not sure if I like this" to "I don't understand WHY this is working but it clearly is." I devoured the (extremely long) faction wars book in like 4 days!

Honestly game lit/LitRPG sometimes drags more in audiobook format because you can get excessive stat blocks going and they're harder to skim/skip. I think part of it is the rage and scheming to do something that will make it matter.

I also feel like DCC is one of the few game lit books that are extremely well written to the point that they do well with non-gamers.

I mean I know really talented writers who write in the genre! I don't think it's necessarily just writing. I think that part of it is probably it's extremely accessible and also had the very good luck of breaking out now because our whole reality feels like an absurd video game run by a fucked up AI