Learn to write, launch, and earn from your outline → Elite LitRPG Bestseller Blueprint
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This video covers two categories of ingredients: magic and class tropes, and identity and reputation tropes. But the reason I'm combining them is that the most important ingredient in this video is one that almost no one talks about — and new authors are actively warned away from it.
I'm going to tell you why that warning is wrong. And I'm going to back it up with data.
But first — the magic ingredients.
The most popular LitRPG novels lean heavily toward nontraditional magic systems. Void magic, lightning magic, spatial magic, darkness, blood, time, chaos — anything that sets the MC apart from the conventional mages and warriors that populate their world.
Standard magic is fine. Fire, water, earth, wind — these work. But if you look at the top fifty, the ones that break out almost always give their MC something unusual. Something the world hasn't fully seen before. Something that makes readers feel like they're discovering something alongside the protagonist.
This is one of the most satisfying arcs in the genre, and it follows a reliable progression. The MC starts with magic that appears weak — maybe the lowest class, the most dismissed attunement, the ability that makes NPCs laugh. They're looked down on. Condescended to. Written off.
Then the truth is revealed: their magic isn't weak. It's taboo. It's feared. It operates on principles that make it fundamentally threatening to the existing power structure.
What makes this delicious is what happens after the reveal. The same people who mocked the MC for being weak immediately turn around and say their power must be destroyed because it's too dangerous — without any acknowledgment of their own hypocrisy. And readers love that. They love watching the people who underestimated your MC scramble to contain what they dismissed.
The mask. The false name. The rusty sword that conceals a legendary weapon. The shabby clothes that hide an immense power. This trope is incredibly popular because it creates sustained dramatic irony — the reader knows what the MC is capable of, and watching other characters underestimate them is endlessly satisfying.
Bonus version of this trope: when antagonists or side characters mistake the MC for an ordinary person even when the MC isn't actively hiding. The condescension is real, the mistake is genuine, and the eventual reveal hits even harder.
Here it is. The trope that vocal readers on forums, in reviews, and in writing groups will tell you ruins books. The trope that new authors specifically avoid because they've been warned it makes their MC look like a Mary Sue, or breaks immersion, or frustrates readers.
The MC is extraordinarily knowledgeable about specific things despite being new to the world.