(1) The GR (GoodReads) rating is taken from the first book of the series, readers who are put off by the first book usually do not continue the series, so subsequent books tend to rate higher. Also I don't update the GR ratings very often (~monthly), so the value may be different to what GoodReads shows right now - but should be close. Audible ratings and number of ratings is updated during the same process.
(2) Missing series! I tend to leave out harem / erotica. I might leave other series out because I couldn't find an audiobook version. Mostly: quite a few series are left out because I am unaware, sorry - I update the underlying data reasonably regularly neoporcupine@lo5.me.
(3) Not LitRPG! If you find a series that is not LitRPG (or strongly related) then please let me know. Generally I will receive a list of series and don't always scour the description.
(4) The list is aimed at audiobook users, sadly: no RoyalRoad only, unless it ranks really highly on GoodReads, in which case "When Audiobook?!".
(5) I definitely have NOT personally read everything on this list, only about ~64 series (as of 2024-6).
(6) Synthetic rating: smooths scores with low numbers of ratings, and gives score boost for larger number of ratings and reviews. We start by adding 10 ratings of 4.4 to each GR and AUD rating. The synthetic rating is weighted 7:3 for Google reads to Audible rating. The score is increased by log10(nrGoodReadsRatings)/30 + log10(nrGoodReadsReviews)/25 + log10(nrAudibleRatings)/35 to a max increase of 0.45, and an overall max synth score of 5. (V6)
Back in the day, there weren't that many LitRPG series, and there certainly wasn't an easy way to find them, so I made a spreadsheet to keep track of titles as I found them, providing me with a nice compendium of books "to-be-read". This also helped me remember which ones I had already read, as I kept a brief note on what they were about. I added GoodReads and Audible ratings. Then I just kept building the list out of habit. The task was made so much easier thanks to amazing efforts on the monthly lists by u/VincentArcher, and then the tireless work by Dawn Chapman and her multiple assistants on her google docs spreadsheet. Also, a huge lump of thanks to u/blindsight "complete-series-list guy" for identifying completed series. List building in GoodReads is borderline useless. Audible doesn't let you build lists at all - in fact, they seem to actively prevent you from retrieving your own data.
2014-12-16: Moved book tracking spreadsheet onto Google Docs.
2019-09-08: Split out LitRPG series (N=63) into seperate sheet, read vs want to read, use GoodReads rating and Nr books in series as criteria for next read.
2021-02-18: Created experimental web page LitRPG series (N=85) to display section of LitRPG Google Docs spreadsheet.
2022-02-02: Moved to LitRPG.Lo5.me, available to world (N=391). I have been adding a large number of new series using the work of Vincent Archer's lists on Reddit.
2022-04-09: Added SSL/TLS to the site (https). There is no personal information transferred to this site, but let's keep users happy.
2022-04-09: Added GoodReads Nr Reviews, Nr Ratings, plus a synthetic rating that combines rating and nr ratings and nr reviews.
2023-12-04: Now with super-charged fuel-polarising turbo-boost performance! Thanks to Google providing data even slower for encouraging me to find a solution: the data is now cached, providing up to 135.2 times performance improvement (*just a guess).
2024-06-03: New link to Tier ranking, book images, link to goodreads.
2024-06-04: New link to Sielke inspired tier ranking placing more weight on ratings.
2024-06-27: Tier ranking mouse over contains book title, series name, author.
2024-07-01: Link to Audible should survive even if not logged into Audible, regardless of country.
2024-08-02: We have just gone over 1000 series! To celebrate I updated the graphics at the top of the page. Woot.
2024-08-04: Slight update to notes, update update text with some history.
2025-01-02: Created script to grab direct Audible links, which enabled update of all Audible ratings to latest value, also two decimal places. Side effect - noted a number of audible titles no longer exist.
2025-01-03: Updated Synthetic ranking to increase value of Audible rating : Goodreads rating 1:4, from 1:5. Including in an additional log10 increment for number of Aubible ratings, updated Note (6) above. Added the nAud (Number of Audible Ratings) as a column. Updated Audible icon to show the red X if no longer found on Audible (approx 23 titles no longer available as of 2025-01).
2025-03-02: Removed 12 series that no longer exist on Audible.
2025-08-02: Added a couple pseudo advertising links / banner graphics to books that I'm giveing a boost for one reason or another. I don't get paid for any of this.
2025-10-11: Updated scraping - goodreads pages have completely altered format. Updated logging in the scraping script, consequently found a lot of Audible links have changed - updated them all! (about 20 of N=1231)
2025-10-12: Realised the tier list generator used goodreads to capture the book image, and now the image is lost in the mess that is the goodreads new web page formatting - so a little rewrite to fix that. Complete rewrite of the Synthetic ranking because I found another bug and had been toying with a philosophical shortfall of my statistical thinking, so I rewrote the whole routine to introduce different bugs and feel better about my life choices (v5). Then found one of those new bugs and fixed it (V5a) - lots of versions uploaded tonight.
2026-02-07: Another month another update to 1341 series, along with a fourth book in the advertising doo-dads.
2026-02-19: Rebalanced the tier listing setting to S=2.5% A=7.5% B=20.0% C=20.0% of the current number of series. Noting that C is only the top half of C for the purposes of keeping the page smaller. Previously I had fixed numeric cutoffs: 25, 75, 200, 200 ... which was the same percentages when N=1000. The new dynamic version added 168 new series to the overall displayed for the current series list of N=1341.
2026-04-24: Some speed issues loading, could be some size issues. Change the main page build to HTML instead of PHP, no more PHP required on the server side for viewing the main page.
2026-04-25: Identified that many DNS providers are not properly sourcing the IP address for a number of sites, including the litrpg.lo5.me site. The DNS resolution is slow to failing. I added OpenDNS into my selection of DNS and the problem completely resolved in my case. Noting that all USA tested services did NOT have this problem, just many outside of the USA - something strange is happening with the internet.
2026-05-02: Update script exceptionally slow, change code to use cURL instead of directly accessing the source and everything is fine again.
2026-05-04: I am altering the equation, pray that I do not alter it any further. Yes, yes, I have revised the synthetic rating again. This is not a bug fix but a change in behaviour. I noticed that when there are large numbers of ratings and the proportion of GoodReads:Audible is unusual, then the focus on the higher reviewed rating becomes quite distorted - while this is correct and expected, it removes value from a larger number of ratings. Given we already adjust up using review counts, I removed review counts from ratio weighting and denominator of the synthetic score. Also Audible and GoodReads ratings are now low number adjusted independently, before combining, which smoothes low number variability and better addresses any difference between Aud vs GR scores (IMHO).
2026-05-04.2: Fixed an issue where Audible blocks web scraping.
2026-06-20: Split this "Why you do like this?" section into it's own page. LitRPGCon link enabled (late, sorry!). Credit to Dawn Chapman added (also late!). Some minor edits of this page's text. Added graph of year of publication.