I’m not a book snob or anything but Dungeon Crawler Carl seems to be 
’s favorite book. It’s got that redditor stink on it to me. Is it actually any good?
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I tried to read it. I just could not. I thought maybe the writing was just shit so I tried to read the webtoon to take it in a different way. I still could not. The whole “this world has videogame mechanics” thing is so boring to me, and Carl felt really unlikeable from the start so I wasn’t invested enough in his character to care enough to make myself keep reading. I was disappointed because I saw jack’s post monthsafo and it sounded awwesome
It’s very reddit coded but it’s actually good.
I’m telling you and everyone now though, it will end with The Swerve. So don’t expect much out of that. But it’s a fun read and it is left enough that it’s not offensive, even while it is actively being offensive.
But yes it is very reddit coded. I think redditors probably don’t understand they’re being made fun of however
It would be pretty surprising to me if he Swerves given how the recent books have gone. They’re pretty pro-brutally murdering the ruling class.
I’m really afraid it’s going to turn out that Carl is the Bad Guy and it all goes wrong because he Didn’t Do It Right or something. I’ve been burned too many times to trust it
I doubt it. The man has heart.
I’m telling you and everyone now though, it will end with The Swerve.
Maybe, but maybe not. Have you read Operation Bounce House?
I have not, but that was before he got big. He’s got TV deals and shit now. Capitalist pressure gets everyone in the end. We’ll see. I’m happy if I’m wrong but I doubt I will be. I saw seeds of it already in the end of the last book.
Y’all getting mad about a book with a talking cat shooting laser beams out of her eyes. The politics are leftish, carl’s class is uncompensated anarchist, he wants to tear the system down. This slop is fine.
Y’all getting mad
I’m on too much kratom to be mad
Compensated* Anarchist, but still you’re correct
Personally, I like it. And I’m not the only one here who does: https://hexbear.net/post/8317101
PS: it is my opinion that the people shitting on it here in this thread absolutely do not get it at all
Maybe I’ll give it another shot
It’s isekai (system apocalypse, actually, but I’m not gonna split hairs over the hyper-specific genres) litrpg slop. I read a lot of litrpg slop. I bounced off DCC after the first half of the first book, but you’re absolutely right that it is beloved by redditors - much like in the same vein how Brandon Sanderson is. Typical system apocalypse premise, world gets bought out by a galactic corp and like 99% of the population gets eliminated except for Carl who is a Coast Guard vet. Survivors wind up in the galactic corp’s dungeon crawling bs and get classes/skills/etc.
There are better litRPG books/web serials out there in my opinion. DCC is just super accessible to people who don’t really engage with it, if I had to guess, so it’s an easy ‘my first litrpg’ series and as a result people tend to get attached.
I could say the same about like, Worm by Wildbow personally (although Worm is less litrpg and more ‘superhero web serial’) and The Wandering Inn (which is isekai litrpg)I remembered I still have the epub in Calibre, so here’s a sneak peak of like part of chapter 4 of the first book to give you an idea of the world/writing:
Mordecai shook his head. “You don’t even want to know. So anyway, your planet defaulted on claiming Earth as a sovereign entity. You had 50 local years since first contact, and first contact was several thousand years ago. Whenever those pyramid things were built. The Borant Corporation has a huge backlog of worlds to mine, and your time is now.”
My head swam. “So, they’re taking all of our minerals?”
Mordecai nodded. “Sort of. Borant deals in rare elements and the like. What they end up mining will fit on a single transport. I don’t know too much about that part of the process. The elements involved are unimportant. It’s a big universe out there, and there are plenty of places to mine. That’s not why they’re really here. While Borant does make a profit on the mining, the real money is in the game. The dungeon.”
“How?”
“Are you kidding? The Syndicate consists of over three billion independent star systems. Every season, a new Dungeon Crawler World debuts across the net. Quintillions of citizens of the Syndicate become obsessed with the Crawl.”
“Wait, so this is like a TV show? Like Survivor?”
“Oh, I loved that show. And as far as you’re concerned, yes. It’s a show like Survivor. But it’s more a Running Man situation than a Survivor one.”
I leaned back in the chair. I’m on an alien television show. Holy shit.
Bea had always wanted to be on television. She’d tried out for countless reality shows. Me? I’d rather have a hot poker stuck through my eye. I briefly wondered where she was, and if she was alive. Probably not, I decided. It’d been 5 AM in the Bahamas when it had happened, which meant she’d probably been asleep in her hotel. Probably in bed with that asshole. And if by some miracle she had survived, there’s no way she’d have gone into one of those tunnels.
“So are there people watching right now?” I asked, looking around.
Mordecai put his hands together. “I will get to that in a moment. It doesn’t look like anyone else is going to be joining us any time soon, so let’s get the tutorial started.”
Mordecai’s right hand glowed for a moment, and I felt that haptic buzz in my brain. Across the room, Donut hissed and batted at the air.
You have been granted access to the Crawler Menu.
My world blinked, and several items appeared in my vision. A long green bar—a health bar, I realized—appeared in the top right. It pushed the timer down a notch. That blinking folder remained in my top left. A small minimap appeared in the bottom right.
“You just received a notification,” Mordecai said. “That’s called a crawler notification. There are a few different kinds, but that type will only be seen by you. There are also system messages, which everyone sees no matter what floor they’re on. Those may be in different voices. There are also floor-specific notifications, etcetera.”
“I have a blinking box in my top left,” I said.
“Those are game and status change notifications. Probably from your fight outside a few minutes back,” Mordecai said. “Don’t click it yet. We’ll get there. First, I want you to focus on the map on the bottom right. Look right at it, and make sure you’re thinking about looking at it.”
I did as he asked, and the map got bigger, increasing to fill my entire vision. It was a simple blue and gray map showing the hallways and a few random doorways. Most of the area around us wasn’t filled in. It only showed the area we’d walked, pushing out about twenty meters in every direction. A green dot sat in the middle, right in the guild. Two additional dots appeared, a blue one and a white one. I focused on the blue dot, and a note appeared above it:
Crawler Princess Donut.
The white dot read:
Guildmaster Mordecai.
The whole room glowed yellow, and when I focused on it, it read:
Tutorial Guild.
A trio of X’s appeared outside in the hallway. I mentally clicked on one.
Corpse – Level 2 Goblin.
I mentally clicked away, and the whole map shrank back to normal.
“Good, good,” Mordecai said. “So, you’re the green dot, the blue dots will be other crawlers, white dots will be NPCs such as myself, and mobs will be red. There are a few other kinds, but you’ll figure those out along the way. By the way, no other crawlers or mobs can see your menus, but while you’re inside this guild, I can see what’s on your screen. You are already adept at opening and closing, which is good. Now try focusing on the map again. With your mind, pinch it smaller. And then move it across the screen. That way you can customize your HUD.”
It went on like this for a while, him explaining how to open and close menus within my display. I could just think about it, and a whole menu system would pop up, giving me access to several folders. Once I got used to the weirdness of it being in my head, the system was quite intuitive.
The first menu was player stats. Like I mentioned earlier, I’d played a handful of computer and tabletop RPGs over the years, so this section wasn’t too surprising. My stats were:
Strength: 6
Intelligence: 3
Constitution: 5
Dexterity: 5
Charisma: 4
According to Mordecai, I couldn’t directly adjust these stats. Not yet. I received three stat points every time I leveled up, but I couldn’t distribute them until I picked a race and class. And I couldn’t do that until I reached the third floor down. For now, these numbers went up and down on their own based on my inherent, real-life physical and mental attributes. He also added the typical adult human averaged between three and five for each of these first five stats, so my six in strength was good.
I could find items and potions that would either temporarily or permanently adjust these numbers, but for now, there wasn’t much I could do about them.
And here’s like a bit further on - like Chapter 16 - when he’s building with goblins (and about where I stopped):
“It’s not going to blow up on me, is it? That dozer thing exploded after it hit the wall.”
“That dozer wouldn’t have blown up if you had twisted the relief valve,” the engineer said. He pointed to a pair of identical spigots on the side of the bike. “If it gets too hot, twist that one right there, and it won’t blow. If the pressure is too high, twist the other one. Don’t mix it up, or you make it worse.”
“How will I know if it’s too hot? Or if the pressure is too high? There are no gauges!”
He smiled, revealing a row of sharp teeth.
“Don’t you worry about that, human. You will know. Just listen to the chopper. It will tell you.”
The engineer had pointed at that stack of coal that reached the ceiling, telling me to grab all I could carry. I sneaked around the back of the heap and took a metric fuck-ton of the stuff. I had three piles of 999 coal lumps before the heap started to look noticeably lower.
It was time to jet. Both Rory and Lorelai had disappeared while the goblin engineers worked. They reappeared now. Both of them were blitzed. Rory’s eyes were noticeably slitted, and Lorelai danced seductively toward me as we prepared to leave.
“Wanna have some fun before you go?” Lorelai asked, grasping the front of my tattered jacket. Her breath smelled of rotten fish. She’d removed her bone necklace.
“Uh,” I said.
“Oh, sweetie,” said Donut, “as amusing as I would find it to watch Carl here disappoint yet another woman, we’re on a schedule. Banging monster girls is not the narrative we’re going for with this story. Maybe next time.”
“Sure, but you look me up later, okay?” the goblin said. She reached up and booped me on the nose. “It’d be nice to fuck someone and not have to eat them afterward.” She sighed and turned toward one of the Bomb Bards.
“You,” she said. “Meet me in my chambers after lights out. And take a bath first.”
Rory handed me a bag. I examined it, and it was filled to the brim with dynamite and several types of small bombs and grenades. Remembering how dangerous this stuff was, I quickly added it to my inventory. I’d examine the items from there.
Rory turned to Donut. “Okay, we had a deal. Where’d you find the stuff?”
“The drugs?” Donut asked. “It’s just one neighborhood over, on the other side of the road. We got it from one of those llamas.”
“I knew it!” she said. She turned toward another Bomb Bard. “Gear up. They’ve been holding out on us. We’re rolling on them in five.”
I stood, bewildered as all around me, the goblins—from the level two standard goblins to the engineers to the bomb bards—burst into a screeching frenzy of activity. The murder dozers growled like dinosaurs as goblins piled on. Four copper choppers similar to my own roared to life. The bomb bards all donned metal helmets with a German-style spike at the tip. The tips glistened, shooting sparks. The goblins could light their dynamite sticks and bombs just by raising them over their own heads.
One by one, the choppers and dozer transports rumbled away, filled with screaming goblins. A minute later, and we were alone in the room.
“Did that just happen?” I asked, spinning to see if we truly were alone. We were. “Did we really just start a meth war between the goblins and the llamas?”
Yes, that’s basically the quality of writing the entire book. Maybe it gets better later on, a lot of RoyalRoad litrpg stuff that runs long enough either does invariably get better in terms of writing or it just spins out in the mud. Real toss-up on this one given it’s sold like millions of books at this point and is only 6 years old but
this sucks so much
This reads like fanfic LLM slop you’d find posted in a sub with 20 million users repeating the same Office jokes over and over.
Yeah that’s the bar for quality for a lot of litrpg/isekai/etc. If you go to RoyalRoad.com right now and scroll the Best Rated you’ll come across so many that have like hundreds of thousands of views & are written at a high school level at best. RoyalRoad’s where DCC got its start & probably a large chunk of its audience. The /r/litrpg, /r/progressionfantasy, and similar subreddits all basically look for their slop on RoyalRoad.
Not to say that there aren’t genuinely good pieces of work on RoyalRoad. I’m currently reading at least 4-5 that I think are worth keeping open in a Safari ‘Web Serials’ tab group on my phone and pulling up to read whenever I’m like, grabbing something to eat in public by myself without a book or whatnot. Mother of Learning, the top-rated fiction on RoyalRoad for example, is arguably better written than DCC but it is a time-loop progression fantasy sort of story and was written with a clear end in mind. DCC on the other hand, is one of those series that is gonna be drawn out for ages because the author can get away with it and people genuinely do like it & are willing to purchase the epubs/audio books on Amazon and whatnot.
My biggest gripe with the whole medium tbh, there’s a clear drive for authors to just write some slop with AI and get it on Amazon after they amass a few hundred followers by doing absurd release schedules, like a chapter a day for 6 months. You can always tell by like Chapter 30 if that’s the case because invariably the plot will start to just grind to a ‘oh…i’m just gonna fill this chapter with a bunch of stat menus and meaningless numbers’ sort of halt.
Also lol, I think it’s worth pointing out (because it’s so sadly funny to me) that this kind of slop is probably the ONLY sort of fiction a sizable portion of the American male populous is reading if they are. Redditors who might’ve read/watched GoT, have read Brandon Sanderson? They are the exact market for DCC and adjacent litrpg slop. The ‘army vet’/‘recently divorced dad’/‘fuckup neet’ who survives the system apocalypse is something that appeals to a number of people. Me personally? I like the actual fantasy serials because I’ve already read Xanth/Discworld/etc and it scratches an itch.
TL;DR, Like an onion, RoyalRoad slop has layers. The Elf Who Would Become A Dragon is not like Dungeon Crawler Carl in any regard, except for the fact that both are published on RoyalRoad as web serials and are based in fantasy. The Legend of William Oh takes place in a dungeon (tower actually) and is in the same vein as Dungeon Crawler Carl, but where Dungeon Crawler Carl tries to make you care about Carl being a vet with his ex’s cat and feel like he is awesome because he presumably becomes able to smite goblins with a snap of his fingers in 2-3 books, William Oh is written as almost a mockery of the genre in a way.
Yeah that’s the bar for quality for a lot of litrpg/isekai/etc.
Everytime I think my writing isn’t good enough, I just need to remember to read stuff that is very popular in the genre.
Having a similar experience at reading this, then going, ‘oh it’s about knowing how to market it online’ and knowing I don’t have those skills instead
I am a royalroad webfiction slop enjoyer. I have read worm, mother of learning, the wandering inn, practical guide to evil, pale, etc and I have read 7/8 DCC books. DCC is the worst of its peers and it’s not close. The story is one long millennial humor video game action scene, the emotional beats read as flat and unrealistic, the characters’ motivations are noticeably inconsistent, and the plot often feels ass-pulled to reach a particular conclusion.
DCC haters online tend to focus on the bad prose but I didn’t find it distracting unless I was looking for it, the other things I mentioned bothered me more.
The “critique of capitalism” is read into too much by people starving for leftist themes in popular media. To me it comes off as more of a critique of the current moment in American society (which is capitalist). There is discussion of evil stuff the US does like blatant imperialist plunder, corporate control of media, dehumanization of people in the periphery, but it’s not really a “left critique” as much as pointing out things that are obviously bad. Also the main character is described as an anarchist because he is against the system and likes blowing stuff up. I would be very surprised if Matt Dinneman knows what capitalism is, imo the book has the ideology of socdem reddit memes
It’s still entertaining like a marvel movie can be, as long as you go in with your expectations in the right place
My wife is obsessed with the litRPG genre as a whole. She’s pretty deep into it and has been reading these books for years. Every once in a while, I’ll read a page or two “over her shoulder” (she projects to the TV to read) and just…by the gods is the writing bad. Grammar and spelling errors are rampant, and it’s clear that they didn’t use an editor or had a friend skim through the book for them. The dialogue more oft than not resembles what one would expect from a high school classroom rather than whatever the setting is in the book. The books in this genre just seem extremely poorly written as a whole. Some can look past it, and that’s perfectly fine, but it’s not something that I can look past as a reader.
Yep. The easiest way I can describe the average litrpg is like “imagine something off fanfiction.net but maybe a little more engaging and not obviously based on pre-existing work”, which is fine imo as long as it isn’t the ONLY stuff you’re reading. I’m pretty picky about grammar/dialogue too but at the end of the day as long as the litrpg I’m reading scratches the ‘i wanna read about a magical world’ itch I get here to there, I’ll forgive a lot of just really clunky writing as long as it is very clearly not AI.
The average piece of fiction on RoyalRoad is Grade S slop though and that’s why you’ll never catch me reading anything off it - even the stuff I do think genuinely should be published and I’d be fine with displaying on my bookshelf to people - where others can see me. God forbid I have to explain to some guy sitting next to me on the bus wtf litrpg is, I think I’d immediately be like “i’ve read actual books recently too you know…d-do you want to talk about those instead??”
My number 1 guilty pleasure I’ve said it before in other threads! I yearn to be like your wife, I can’t imagine casting ANYTHING I’m reading onto a TV for even my partner to see lol. I was reading If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub for the first time a few weeks ago on the bus sitting next to someone after I’d grabbed it out of a Little Library otw to the stop and they were very clearly reading it over my shoulder with me & the book basically opens with the main character skinny dipping with his cousin and I was just sitting there reading & thinking to myself “this dude probably thinks I’m a FREAK” lol
that this kind of slop is probably the ONLY sort of fiction a sizable portion of the American male populous is reading if they are.
Horus Heresy. It has infected a sizable portion of people I know, being into tabletop games myself. Like I’ll feel guilty about not having got around to any Moorcock because I’m still reading Heart of Darkness, which should have only taken me like a week but I’ve been doing other shit, and then someone will mention they’re on book 25 of 60 or some shit. I’m just like “How? How are you able to tolerate those long enough when there’s so much sci-fi Warhammer borrows from?” This doesn’t get into my commie reading backlog.
Starship Troopers is the Great American Novel to these guys.
Holy shit thanks for saving me. I almost bought into the hype and went in blind, but something deep inside me raged in resistance. Reading those excerpts was like my worst nightmare.
no thanks
My partner said i would like this because of all the isekai slop i watch but i’m sorry, i have standards
Needs more talk about stacks of items and the exact numerical amounts of them.
I got bored about halfway through that passage. Can’t imagine reading a whole book like that.
If people enjoy it fair play
Borant
Whoaaaa they got the “My wife” guy? Cha ching
What would you recommend for someone who enjoyed Worm?
The rest of Wildbow’s writing (I think Pact and Pale might be my favorite non-Worm related works of his, read Pact first); Worm has a sequel too - Ward, which was pretty good. He’s currently writing Seek but it hasn’t been updated since January
I’ve yet to find a really good superhero web-serial/fiction like Worm and Ward that has a decent sized cast & isn’t just “my Justice League/Avengers OC”. Super Supportive is the only thing I’m reading right now that is even somewhat similar and I do recommend it but if you’re expecting a Taylor Herbert MC you’re not gonna get it.
Wandering Inn maybe if you really like long-running web-serials and are fine with fantasy litrpg instead of superhero fiction; but again, completely different tone of writing & plot than Worm.
It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s fun as hell. And the story just goes more and more mask off leftism as Dinniman puts out more books.
I’ve read the first three (out of I assume approximately thirty) books, each of them is among the worst books I’ve ever read. It’s absolute bottom of the barrel redditor slop. It’s worse than Sanderson. It’s worse than Cline. I honestly recommend it because it’s so bad it’s good.
the first three (out of I assume approximately thirty) books
how does someone have time to write all these and how do people have time to read them?
tbf they’re easy reads, not particularly long, and written very simply. it’s the mcdonald’s of books, it’s not difficult to just pump em out
Define good. If you mean like top quality literature, no. If you mean fun and engaging, sure, depending on the audience. There are dozens of series like it getting published, but most of them are Japanese (and are called “light novels” which is like young adult fiction in the west. DCC is like that, but it’s not for kids. I haven’t come across any sex (or SA) but there’s a lot of violence and profanity, and it can be a bit over the top.
It’s kind of like Ready Player One but with less emphasis on pop culture references, but not by much.
I see a lot of people shitting on the books in the comments. I guess if your life is so good that you don’t need a fun little distraction from time to time, it’s different, but with all the bad shit going on, it’s nice to have something fun.
Best way to experience it is the audiobook, and you can find those online fairly easily. Give it a shot. My wife doesn’t even do audiobooks and used to read real (dead tree) books, but stopped reading a while ago. I played her a sample of the first book, and now she’s almost done with it. She doesn’t listen as frequently as I do, but she is enjoying it. It’s one guy doing all the voices.
As I’ve previously posted elsewhere, it’s actually pretty damn good
had this recommended to me by some folks irl and got the same impression. but their enthusiasm for it has me kind of curious and the premise sounds interesting enough.
chuds love it. the critical drinker apparently voices a character in the audiobook
Dinniman’s comments on that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DungeonCrawlerCarl/comments/1e00uff/comment/lckgdw8/
I regret that my books have any association whatsoever with him. I hope one day to have his part in book three removed all together. It’s a distraction, and the only edgelord douchebag I want people to think of when they read my books is the AI itself.
To expand slightly:
Sometime in early 2020 while we were prepping book three for audio, Jeff asked me if I’d like to get a guest voice for the drunk dwarf guy. He knew a popular youtube reviewer that was a Scottish guy whose persona was a drunk Scottish guy, and I said sure. I had no idea who he was, but I figured, some guy with (at the time) 500K subscribers or so could only help the series along. Back then, he was mostly known for his funny but sarcastic reviews of movies. He wasn’t known as the person he is today. Clearly if this was asked of me today, I would decline.
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IDK, but the most reddit people I know IRL are into that series along with Sanderson novels.
I’m having a fun enough time reading it, though I have my criticisms (Book 3 is confusing for the sake of being confusing imo). It’s not high art but who cares.
Unlike almost any webnovel or manga / manhwa like stories, DCC has a rare anarchist and revolutionary and anti-capitalist slant.
I read quite a bit of webnovel slop for a while. It’s fun, brainless entertainment and escapism. But it’s also interesting because we are seeing a culture change, since forever the publishing business has gatekeept books for better or worse. Now anyone can post fanfiction as a weekly serial on the internet. Most is power fantasy with little care for literary integrity.
Afaik it really became popular in Japan and Korea, and the stories are very distinctly different to what you’d expect from western literature. DCC follows the same format of “slop” but the protagonist gains a hidden class called “compensated anarchist” to destroy the system from within. Afaik something “subversive” or socialist like this is unheard of asian webnovels. It’s weird how webnovel authors seek to create unique stories and commercial interest is pushing the creation of more and more slop, but there is a distinct uniformity in avoiding anything critical of capitalism or the system.
Also, there are definitely some popular webnovels that I see as rather problematic, like stories with “anti-heros” or downright villains that push ideation of sociopathy and self-serving power seeking. Things like Reverend Insanity, that China actually banned.
But Dungeon Crawler Carl is quite explicitly an anarchist fantasy.
They’re small pre-packaged meals you eat on an airplane
but that’s not important right now
