I've been reading a lot of litrpg lately, off of Amazon and the Royal Road site, and it occurred to me to ask if anyone knew of any such stories here.
Litrpg, for those unfamiliar, is a genre that covers a lot of ground but boils down to settings with a game-like rule system. Some of them have characters who spend time in the real world and in the game world (like Ready Player One), some have characters digitized and trapped in a computer game (somewhat like Tron), some have players transported to a completely different world, and some have no real connection to Earth or a game but take place on a world that runs along video game lines.
The amount of game-stuff varies wildly between stories, but in general characters advance by gaining levels or character points or otherwise progress in power by gaining discrete skills and abilities that they didn't have before, and all of this is explicitly part of the setting. So unlike say Dungeons And Dragons, characters actually know when they gain levels and decide for themselves how to advance as they get more powerful.
I hope that all made at least a bit of sense. Anyway, anyone know of anything like this on SO?