There's basically four flavors of LitRPG. 1. Books where the main character is a person playing a (VR) game. Travis Bagwell's Awaken Online is a good example

There's basically four flavors of LitRPG. 1. Books where the main character is a person playing a (VR) game. Travis Bagwell's Awaken Online is a good example of this. 2. Books where it starts off as a game, but then becomes real. Sometimes it's getting pulled into a game world magically (Rachel Aaron's Forever Fantasy Online, Aleron Kong's The Land). Sometimes it's getting uploaded into a game world (James Hunter's Viridian Gate Online, Dakota Krout's Ritualist). Sometimes it's a game world and a magical world getting cross-linked (James Hunter's Rogue Dungeon, Drew Hayes' NPCs). 3. Books where the world is just the world, but it runs like a RPG (video) game. People have classes and levels. Frequently they have an inventory, go on quests, gain experience. People will even see pop-up notifications and see and navigate menus only they can see related to their classes and abilities. Frequently there are dungeons full of monsters. Anything by Jonathan Brooks usually falls into this category. Full Murderhobo by Dakota Krout. 4. Books where the world is basically a game world, but the rough edges have been sanded off. You basically have classes, levels and experience but the author attempts to justify it with the metaphysics of the world. You don't have explicit quests or popups or anything like that, but you may still have dungeons and adventurers. Dakota Krout's Dungeon Born is a good example of this.