Hello everyone, Usber here!
Did you guys know that most novels set in a video game, or a world derived from a video game, must grapple with one specific trope that’s basically become the original sin of the genre? Well, I guess I’m exaggerating a bit here, but I am of course talking about stat sheets. Almost all novels that have video-game-related settings are stuck using them. A lot of readers aren’t fans of them, and I often see comments like “Not stat dumps again!” or “Why does a fantasy world need stats at all?” or even “Stop trying to pad your character count with stat pages!” and so on.
If you were to ask me though, there’s a more fundamental problem with including stats in your work. Namely that throwing them in half-assed without thinking about the implications of those numbers just causes issues! In one of my previous works (Only I Know We’re Living in a Game World), the video game superimposed itself on real life, so a lot of standard menu options stopped working, and you stopped being able to see people’s stats as numbers. I did that mostly to avoid having to show people’s attributes in concrete numbers, but this story has a much more involved relationship with stat numbers, so I couldn’t afford to obfuscate them here.
But, as I was writing this story, I had an epiphany! If I made strict rules for how leveling and stats worked in the game and then made the fantasy world work under the game’s rules, then I’d be able to avoid a lot of the common pitfalls! I also came up with the genius idea of using spreadsheet software to keep track of everyone’s stats and growth rates and levels. That would make it really easy to copy and paste them into stat tables whenever I needed to throw them into the series properly. I thought I’d come up with the perfect plan, but very soon, I realized I’d started walking down the stairway to hell.
For starters, it took forever just to come up with all of the classes that would be featured in the story. All told, I ended up having to come up with 30 different classes, and then I had to come up with their growth rates and class change conditions and all that. It was a real pain. I was keeping track of every character’s growth in Excel, but then I realized I could make a lot of functions to help streamline things.
At first, I just thought, It’d be nice to have a function that calculates someone’s stats after a level up if you plug in a character’s growths and current level. But then I found myself thinking, Since I’m recording all this info anyway, I may as well write a function that tracks everyone’s stat totals and averages, and While I’m at it, I should make a function that color codes a person’s highest and lowest stats. Once that was done, my thoughts shifted to, Porting over numbers every time I set a new character’s stats is such a pain; I should just make a function that automatically copies and pastes them over into a stat table that I can immediately slot into the novel, and then Manually calculating someone’s total rank is getting annoying; I might as well make a macro to do it automatically and then Copying over some of this other data is kind of annoying too; I should just make a pull-down menu that lets me pick a character and their class which automatically calculates their stats at any given level for me. That last one I made a note to myself: This one’s important.
As you can see, I kept on coming up with more and more things I could do to streamline the process. Unfortunately, I wasn’t particularly proficient with Excel. In fact, the only function I was familiar with before starting this journey was the SUM one.
A more experienced person could have probably whipped all of these functions up in five minutes, but I was stuck googling everything and grumbling about how I had no clue what VBA was, or how the hell I was meant to use VLOOKUP. Any time I wanted to add a feature to my spreadsheet, it took five hours instead of five minutes. Some things took even longer than that. I’d fallen into a quagmire of Excel functions!
If any one of you out there is interested in writing a novel with a video game setting, I have one piece of advice for you—just half-ass all the stats! You’ll make your life so much easier. Also, if any of you guys are programmers, please make a program that lets you do efficient stat tracking for Naro novels! I promise you people will pay for this!
Anyway, as you can see, this novel took a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and VLOOKUP to make, but it took a lot more than just that, so let’s move on to the acknowledgments.
First off, I’d like to thank my editors Fda-san and Ykuchi-san. The manga adaptation is starting from this volume on, so there was a lot more work that needed to be done, and I’m thankful for all of your guys’ help. I hope you’ll keep looking out for me in the volumes to come! I’d also like to thank my illustrator, Amano-san. I know I made a lot of annoying demands when it came to Nirva’s design, so thank you so much for your patience and godlike art! You made him look every bit as badass as I was hoping! A big thank you as well to my designer, Kiba-san, who made the great designs for volume 1 and volume 2’s obi. And also thank you to my proofreader, who pointed out all the contradictions I didn’t notice when writing the web novel version of I’m Not the Hero.
Last but not least, a big thank you to all of my readers out there! May we meet again in the next volume!