The closest things to this that I can think of off the top of my head are The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross and the Secret History series by Simon R Green, neither of which is exactly a short story 😅

Summary: Robots are better at boxing than human experts!

Methods: We paid an amateur boxer $75 to cosplay as Mike Tyson and fight Punchbot 5000. Punchbot 5000 is a pneumatic piston bolted to a fencepost, so we tied the boxer to a fencepost too and aimed it at their chin. The bot won 2 of 3 rounds.

Depressing yeah, but also this methodology is weird to me? It says the plagiarism machine is better at plagiarism (or, generously, at ghostwriting) than MFA students are, when limited to the optimal length of output and amount of context for the machine. The MFA students actually got less context?

Good point, I know I've played with people who struggled with reconciling game mechanics vs in-world stuff for DND...

I'm curious about how common this is, I thought "RPG set in litRPG world" becoming common might be the next wave of this story->game->story cycle but apparently it's already here!

TTRPGs started as simulations of settings that didn't have those mechanics, right? And early tie-in fiction like Dragonlance doesn't have characters who know and understand the mechanics... When did this start? I don't think DnD was designed this way, even in recent editions, but I could be wrong!

I grew up reading Brin off my dad's bookshelves; my paperbacks of The Uplift War, Glory Season, Earth, and The Practice Effect are falling apart from rereads and I have an ARC copy of Practice Effect from the 2021 SFWA/Worldbuilders auction.

So I freaked out when I saw the confirmation email 😅.

Broadly. The prototype was 22 blank cards that I scribbled on with sharpie pen. Print production needs high-res image files (scanned or native digital) with consistent quality and style, but not necessarily 1:1 w/prototype images. There is also a non-art side to each card but I can handle that part.

I want to be very excited but I'm also just so overwhelmed at this point by the whole year to date + ahead - I just bought a new roof, I'm struggling through treatment for sleep apnea, my first Worldcon is coming up, the government is attacking my friends, I'm crashing out editing a novella...

My idea of "little-known" is probably SUPER wrong, as I was born in 91 and read these in the 00s, but I rarely meet people who've read:

Jack the Bodiless, May, 91

Psychoshop, Zelazny & Bester, 98

Phule's Company, Asprin, 90

No YA, but Phule's is a comedy if you want something lighter.

One notable implication of this, for all #litRPG stories, is that characters have access to meta information about the narrative: Stat blocks and system screens can carry information across the fourth wall without breaking it.

That's a powerful storytelling tool!

Game abstractions reflect game focus. D&D is focused on fantasy combat and exploration; socialization is largely lumped into one stat (CHA).

Making the abstraction diegetic has implications for the setting and themes of a litRPG.

I'll be thinking about how to use that better in my next draft.