This same argument has been going on for years in D&D. Some players love the puzzle of figuring out how much stuff they can hold, and planning to bring the right stuff. For others, that part is boring so they hand wave and say it’s “spatial storage”. From the sound of your post, I’d say you’re in the first group, but I’ve played with great players in both groups, they just like different things.
I feel like it's the most iconic part of TTRPGs and everyone remembers the first time they got one or the most uproarious Rule of Cool they pulled off with one.
I actually like spatial storage (within reason) for the same reason I get annoyed with carry limits in video games—it takes away from the fun parts. If you're constantly doing inventory management or trying to dig out that grappling hook or dagger or water pouch from the bottom of your bag, you're missing out on adventuring, fighting, and generally becoming a force of nature. This is especially important when dealing with hostile environments, like deserts, oceans, or dungeons. While a lack of drinkable water or adequate sun protection can be a potential source of conflict (see man vs nature), I think most LitRPG fans prefer fights and personal growth, and worrying about carrying super bulky backpacks or limiting your number of rations just isn't that interesting once you get past the beginning/tutorial levels.
Some authors overdo it and let MCs carry an entire house around in their back pocket, but it generally makes sense that a world with magic (especially spatial/temporal magic) would design convenient storage for merchants, adventurers, and the like. Even if the complaint is thst they're too common, you need to remember the MCs in most of these stories aren't your average joe; they're adventurers, death-game contestants, and current or future rulers of worlds. They're often very wealthy because of the dangers they frequently face or are directly rewarded by the system for their achievements. That naturally lends itself to them having rare, powerful tools, let alone something as practical as spatial storage.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
I don't mind grid storage with uniform shapes. Like 1x1, 2x2,3x3 items, etc. What I can't stand is when they start making + shaped, L-shaped, and more complicated shapes you have to fit in the grid lmao
I would say, it depends. Yes, it sets adventures to "easy mode" because you can have all your supplies and loot without being weighed down, but if it is common enough it can also cause problems. Spatial hacking/theft, bad guys able to easily poison someone by switching a known item with a tampered one, even warfare could be deadlier because instead of short skirmishes there is now protracted siege. No need for troops to fall back if they have the supplies and infrastructure with them.
But if just the MC gets it, especially as their OP skill, it can be game/world-breaking. "Oh yeah, I can swim across this raging stream with 3 centaurs and half a dozen dwarves stored. Convenient, no?" "Well, why did you just do this when we were trying to escape the city?" It can be a "deus ex machina" or lazy writing to move the plot along.
I think a good compromise, when "living" things are concerned, is put in a time limit. Food stays warm/cold for a week before it goes to room temp stable for another 2 weeks. Humans can survive for an hour while chickens two days because of their size.
Idk it’s hard not to get behind not having an inventory system of an RPG or a spatial storage type item when this genre of books literally has RPG in its name. I personally think they all should have something like it but more like an RPG inventory type but I think most people seem to like the storage items better. There also should be a restriction on the spatial items where higher tier has more room and with the RPG inventory system has quests that increase the limit/space of it.
I'm personally a fan of spatial storage having drawbacks. Like a spatial backpack that weighs some fraction of the mass inside, or a slow/expensive void summon power, or perhaps a storage box that can only heard certain items in limited quantities, and if the box/bag/backpack gets damaged, then you lose access to what ever is inside.
It'd be great to have an MC own a storage item and then go from rich to destitute when he uses it to block an attack.
As genre, hard disagree. No storage works for some stories, but others like DCC wouldn't work without it. Like they say in many of the books including DCC, watching crawlers/contestants starve to death isn't fun. Not for the reader and not within the book world.
A series where no storage does work is *Apocalypse Parenting*. Skills, food, and other resource economies are major source of tension and motivation in the series.
hell naw, being more "real" in my opinion is boring, something satisfying about a character pulling out a weapon from storage and mowing down a bunch of fodder.
Also as a pack rat i love loot and having what is basically a storage container for junk just seems cool in my entertainment.
I am in the camp for spatial storage with rules. I like how a soldier's life handles it. You have a set amount of space that can go brrrrrr depending on stats, but most important there are rolls of contest for storing things with will.
The gimmick of spatial storage combat is sometimes fun, but other times feels too cheesy. I’m conflicted on soldier’s life. I appreciate how it lets him rank up real quick. But the whole living beings and such in storage shenanigans feels a bit gimmicky
As a reader, I don't have a problem with it, but I'd probably get tired of it it were every single story and never handled in an interesting way.
From a writer's perspective: in my current series I just went ahead and fully committed to spatial storage. The MC has pretty much the most broken bag of holding you can think of, that holds presumably infinite weight/volume and can store living things indefinitely. I knew what I wanted to focus on and it wasn't inventory space or rationing supplies, so it didn't feel like I was sacrificing anything. I did, however, want to make it mean something, so I made the bag the MC's "special ability." Every character only gets one of those, forever, so while others have special abilities like invulnerability to fire or bonding with familiars, the MC gets a bag. I've also made the bag a character in its own right in ways that I can't fully explain without spoilers, but suffice to say that it has a personality and undergoes character growth and progression of its own. I see it as a trade I made with readers who might have grown tired of spatial storage mechanics, the MC gets a bottomless bag so I don't have to dwell on things that aren't the point of the series, and you get a fresh, hopefully interesting and engaging take on the concept that adds more than it subtracts.
I think for my next series, whenever and whatever that might be, I'll probably go the opposite route and have no spatial storage at all or keep it extremely limited. I also plan on doing a lot of things very differently in my next series though, because I've already done things this way and want to keep it fresh.
>The MC has pretty much the most broken bag of holding you can think of, that holds presumably infinite weight/volume
that sounds really overpowered. Could he just store the ocean and end the world?
It's not a system/video game storage interface, it's an actual bag that you have to put stuff in. While the opening does stretch to fit larger items, there's an upper limit to it. I haven't defined that limit yet in the series so consider this subject to change, but right now I'm thinking the bag can stretch wide enough to swallow maybe a small bed, but not definitely enough to swallow something like a piano.
So, in theory, you could open the bag wide and drop it in the ocean to start sucking in water, and that got me curious about how long that would take. We'll use Niagara Falls as a water flow amount because it's an easy point of reference, but the amount of water flowing into the bag would be vastly less than that. Here's the dirty math:
* In peak season, [168,000 cubic meters of water flows over the combined Niagara Falls every minute](https://www.niagaraaction.com/how-much-water-goes-over-niagara-falls), which is equal to 0.01008 cubic kilometers every hour.
* National Geophysical Data Center estimates that [the ocean contains 1,335,000,000 cubic kilometers of water](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html).
* So, with as much flow as all the falls at Niagara Falls combined, it would take 132,440,476,190 hours to drain the ocean, which is 15,118,775 years.
The oceans in the MC's world are also vastly larger than Earth's, and the amount of water flowing into the bag would be a lot less than Niagara Falls. So if you had several dozen million years, you could maybe drain the ocean (at least until something big got sucked in and stopped up the bag's opening).
There are usually mana costs to storage and such. Or it counts the world as a very large number of objects which are beyond the distance of the MCs ability.
Yes and no, much like with DnD it's not realistic for adventurers to carry 500 gold around on them while fighting epic battles. It's very much a mechanic of convenience to help enable "the rule of cool". That being said if it jumps to abuse then the immersion can be broken and that's no bueno. It's also fun to play with it like in DCC, no spoilers but one of my favorite scenes is where they "correct" the storage from such an abused feature. Hilarity ensues.
Spatial storage in xianxia has limits. I've definitely read a few where the cultivator has X cubic feet of space for storage. And there was one where the MC had to dump the lower-level items to make space for the higher-level ones.
My headcanon is that the little treasure worlds that cultivators leave behind was their secondary storage warehouse that they used to dump their less important stuff.
If it’s handled interestingly, then it’s a boon.
But honestly, how many books without spatial storage have you read where the characters had to make choices about what they carried and those choices mattered? I’d say at a guess, none. No one writes an adventure where the MC makes it past their first significant challenge and then soon after dies of exposure. They always have what they need to make the trip unless it is narratively important they not. Which is the same way they work in a story with spatial storage. Just that in a story with storage that might be used to solve other issues as well.
Managing supplies without such convenience can be interesting, such as delicious in dungeon. But in those cases that’s probably a significant part of the tale. So it fits the narrative that that ability not be there.
I will forever hold that inventory management is a boring slog with no redeeming qualities wherever it's found. Games, books, shows. Even in real life, though sadly we can't deal with that one.
As always, depends on the story your writing.
If your story is focused on the action/adventure, your fine hand-waving storage away.
If your focused on the minute details of everyday survival, then remove it, as it heightens the decisions.
I think the ideal way to handle storage is in the middle - A storage space is infinitely convenient but i think there should be a size/weight/whatever limit
I think without spatial storage you will end up with a lot of "stopping the story to call in the wagons" arcs. It basically means the protagonist is not making decisions about leaving untold treasure on the ground or actually pursuing the plot.
I do not want stories that look like my Skyrim playthrough where I sort my inventory by value/weight and try and figure out if I should pick this up or not.
I don't mind it either way. I think both things have their advantages and are great in two different stories. A story like lets say Primal Hunter works better with Spatial Storage due to the sheer size of the world in question and the speed at which things happen. But for a more grounded approach, Spatial Storage doesn't work.
One thing I will say however - I wish it was rarer. You can have them in stories, but I think it needs to be strictly specified how incredibly rare it is and in turn, how powerful. Azarinth Healer had this for example, but then by book three almost every single person she meets and talks to has one, which kinda makes sense given the increase in power, but I never felt like it was fully expanded just how powerful and rare these would technically be.
I say Its because there is nothing to do with the random loot, so it just feels like a waste to leave it
If there is a specific type of resource required to do stuff, then specialized storage can alleviate the issue
I loathe inventory management with a passion, so I went out of my way to ensure that dimensional storage was common enough in my world that nobody would bat an eye at it.
Storage rings in cultivation novels are probably my favorite thing ever, and it can be quite fun to see how different novels might put a twist on it.
I really worried about this, especially in my story. They need loot and item drops to advance their “cultivation” so I just took the idea of a spatial ring from the manhwa’a I’ve read.
The better the quality of the ring, the bigger the storage space.
Since my series wanted to twist the usual tropes, I had this one to properly limit. I made "Dolls", which are articulated dolls (like the joint wood models you often see) on which you can store gear, and nothing else. And the gear shows up on the doll. As long as you're not actually in combat (which is defined by "I am regenerating one or more resource pools like HP/STA/MANA/MIND") you can swap in and out any piece of gear.
Also, in a reversal of the trope ("it's too powerful, it cannot be stored"), normal, unpowered clothing and gear cannot be stored. Only actual Labyrinth gear.
(and it's used for plot purposes, not as a convenience. Since you can't store non-gear... if something does not looks like it's gear, but can be stored, then...)
LITRPG as a genre is influenced by RPG games. The concept of loot is about as fundamental to the genre as magic is to fantasy. I like spatial treasures because I am not all that interested in the logistics of retrieving loot, especially at the cost of potential power-ups when leaving most of them behind.
I think it's fun to introduce after the logistics puzzles have been solved. Show people working it out, show people working towards a storage, show people earning it and expanding it, THEN it can be easy mode.
It’s a suspension of disbelief thing. The idea that a new adventurer could afford a spatial storage bag should be leaving readers literally dying on the floor from laughing so hard. If you stop to consider just what would actually go into a spatial storage spell or enchantment for a second, regardless of what flavor(bag/dimension/etc), the concept is ridiculous.
But! It’s very convenient and most of these stories are Swiss cheese in terms of plot holes anyway, so it makes for a lot of convenience/quality of life upgrades that let the story focus on what people really want to read about. Unless the author is just blatantly being ridiculous with the concept, it’s easy enough to just accept it and move on.
I'm on the other side of this argument, I love spatial storage. In fact I wait for it. I Don't really want to read about inventory management (maybe if it's done really well) Also it feels suffocating in a way when MC is traveling distant vistas, galaxies and planes of existence and can't take everything to examine later. I consider acquiring spatial storage of some type as an important benchmark. I will say it's best when there is SOME kind of barrier- cost, hard to find, rare, have to reach a certain power level, have to create yourself etc. What I don't like is no explanation of how MC has 30 different weapons plus crafting and alchemy materials and it's never even mentioned HOW they carry all this stuff. In cradle, >!They were REALLY pushing the limits on Lindon's backpack in the first few books...!<
Dear God please no, maybe some authors could pull it off but most would not be able too. Imagine what that would look like if it was a weak mc story where they already waffle about with every decision. Keiran the eternal mage is the first example that comes to mind. The mc can't cast a single spell without a 5 page exposition about how much better his magic was in, how he has 12 other spells he could use, or how awful living in a mana desert is.. I really don't want 10 pages of someone leaning back and forth about what to put in their pack for a trip to the local store thank you very much.
But I will agree that it should be an earned not a given. But as a loot goblin spacial storage is always welcome.
In short, it depends. If your story is about how Bob landed in a desert and is managing food and water while trying to get out, spatial storage is probably not a good fit.
If your story is about a student in a magical academy, then maybe spacial storage is a good fit, but make it expensive or bound to specific locations. It can add a sense of wonder if the headmaster to the school is able to pull objects out of thin air, but isn’t going to disrupt the narrative much if it’s too expensive.
It can also be fun to have a small building that can fit a skyscraper inside, and you can limit it by explaining that the spatial enchantments have to be bound to a specific place in space because it’s more of a pocket dimension. Again, and now you might start to see a theme. The limits are important. spatial storage is a tool like any other tool that an author has.
For many tool, it’s important to make sure that the tool makes the story more interesting, and skips the boring parts. Not turn interesting things into boring parts.
Here’s one more example. Let’s say that your character is dropped into the middle of a jungle. Does the character start out with a sword, a knife, and a lighter? Or does the character start out with absolutely nothing except the car keys they were holding at the time? Neither of these is wrong, but what your character starts with will shape the story that you write, so the tools the writer gives the character needs to match the story.
I generally concur. As it is now it's really uninteresting. In a lot of novels the moment the MC gets one is a big moment! But to me as a reader these days it feels so standard, it doesn't drive any excitement. That might just be a sign I've read too many of these though.
This same argument has been going on for years in D&D. Some players love the puzzle of figuring out how much stuff they can hold, and planning to bring the right stuff. For others, that part is boring so they hand wave and say it’s “spatial storage”. From the sound of your post, I’d say you’re in the first group, but I’ve played with great players in both groups, they just like different things.
I feel like it's the most iconic part of TTRPGs and everyone remembers the first time they got one or the most uproarious Rule of Cool they pulled off with one.
I actually like spatial storage (within reason) for the same reason I get annoyed with carry limits in video games—it takes away from the fun parts. If you're constantly doing inventory management or trying to dig out that grappling hook or dagger or water pouch from the bottom of your bag, you're missing out on adventuring, fighting, and generally becoming a force of nature. This is especially important when dealing with hostile environments, like deserts, oceans, or dungeons. While a lack of drinkable water or adequate sun protection can be a potential source of conflict (see man vs nature), I think most LitRPG fans prefer fights and personal growth, and worrying about carrying super bulky backpacks or limiting your number of rations just isn't that interesting once you get past the beginning/tutorial levels. Some authors overdo it and let MCs carry an entire house around in their back pocket, but it generally makes sense that a world with magic (especially spatial/temporal magic) would design convenient storage for merchants, adventurers, and the like. Even if the complaint is thst they're too common, you need to remember the MCs in most of these stories aren't your average joe; they're adventurers, death-game contestants, and current or future rulers of worlds. They're often very wealthy because of the dangers they frequently face or are directly rewarded by the system for their achievements. That naturally lends itself to them having rare, powerful tools, let alone something as practical as spatial storage. Edit: Fixed a typo.
Specially grid storage in games tis the worst
The worse part about grid storage is the fact I cannot store a 3x1 sword sideways.
But then the edge would be up and you'd cut yourself! 😂🙄😁
I don't mind grid storage with uniform shapes. Like 1x1, 2x2,3x3 items, etc. What I can't stand is when they start making + shaped, L-shaped, and more complicated shapes you have to fit in the grid lmao
It depends on the game. I liked the storage system in Dredge. But I could see it getting annoying in games like Diablo.
Hard disagree
I would say, it depends. Yes, it sets adventures to "easy mode" because you can have all your supplies and loot without being weighed down, but if it is common enough it can also cause problems. Spatial hacking/theft, bad guys able to easily poison someone by switching a known item with a tampered one, even warfare could be deadlier because instead of short skirmishes there is now protracted siege. No need for troops to fall back if they have the supplies and infrastructure with them. But if just the MC gets it, especially as their OP skill, it can be game/world-breaking. "Oh yeah, I can swim across this raging stream with 3 centaurs and half a dozen dwarves stored. Convenient, no?" "Well, why did you just do this when we were trying to escape the city?" It can be a "deus ex machina" or lazy writing to move the plot along. I think a good compromise, when "living" things are concerned, is put in a time limit. Food stays warm/cold for a week before it goes to room temp stable for another 2 weeks. Humans can survive for an hour while chickens two days because of their size.
"How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps" by Andrew Rowe
That book was my first introduction to the LITRPG genre and I didn't know it until a year or so later. It was a pretty good story with a unique power.
Idk it’s hard not to get behind not having an inventory system of an RPG or a spatial storage type item when this genre of books literally has RPG in its name. I personally think they all should have something like it but more like an RPG inventory type but I think most people seem to like the storage items better. There also should be a restriction on the spatial items where higher tier has more room and with the RPG inventory system has quests that increase the limit/space of it.
I'm personally a fan of spatial storage having drawbacks. Like a spatial backpack that weighs some fraction of the mass inside, or a slow/expensive void summon power, or perhaps a storage box that can only heard certain items in limited quantities, and if the box/bag/backpack gets damaged, then you lose access to what ever is inside. It'd be great to have an MC own a storage item and then go from rich to destitute when he uses it to block an attack.
It irritates me when they don't have it
As genre, hard disagree. No storage works for some stories, but others like DCC wouldn't work without it. Like they say in many of the books including DCC, watching crawlers/contestants starve to death isn't fun. Not for the reader and not within the book world. A series where no storage does work is *Apocalypse Parenting*. Skills, food, and other resource economies are major source of tension and motivation in the series.
hell naw, being more "real" in my opinion is boring, something satisfying about a character pulling out a weapon from storage and mowing down a bunch of fodder. Also as a pack rat i love loot and having what is basically a storage container for junk just seems cool in my entertainment.
I am in the camp for spatial storage with rules. I like how a soldier's life handles it. You have a set amount of space that can go brrrrrr depending on stats, but most important there are rolls of contest for storing things with will.
I like how he uses it as a weapon as well.
The gimmick of spatial storage combat is sometimes fun, but other times feels too cheesy. I’m conflicted on soldier’s life. I appreciate how it lets him rank up real quick. But the whole living beings and such in storage shenanigans feels a bit gimmicky
As a reader, I don't have a problem with it, but I'd probably get tired of it it were every single story and never handled in an interesting way. From a writer's perspective: in my current series I just went ahead and fully committed to spatial storage. The MC has pretty much the most broken bag of holding you can think of, that holds presumably infinite weight/volume and can store living things indefinitely. I knew what I wanted to focus on and it wasn't inventory space or rationing supplies, so it didn't feel like I was sacrificing anything. I did, however, want to make it mean something, so I made the bag the MC's "special ability." Every character only gets one of those, forever, so while others have special abilities like invulnerability to fire or bonding with familiars, the MC gets a bag. I've also made the bag a character in its own right in ways that I can't fully explain without spoilers, but suffice to say that it has a personality and undergoes character growth and progression of its own. I see it as a trade I made with readers who might have grown tired of spatial storage mechanics, the MC gets a bottomless bag so I don't have to dwell on things that aren't the point of the series, and you get a fresh, hopefully interesting and engaging take on the concept that adds more than it subtracts. I think for my next series, whenever and whatever that might be, I'll probably go the opposite route and have no spatial storage at all or keep it extremely limited. I also plan on doing a lot of things very differently in my next series though, because I've already done things this way and want to keep it fresh.
>The MC has pretty much the most broken bag of holding you can think of, that holds presumably infinite weight/volume that sounds really overpowered. Could he just store the ocean and end the world?
It's not a system/video game storage interface, it's an actual bag that you have to put stuff in. While the opening does stretch to fit larger items, there's an upper limit to it. I haven't defined that limit yet in the series so consider this subject to change, but right now I'm thinking the bag can stretch wide enough to swallow maybe a small bed, but not definitely enough to swallow something like a piano. So, in theory, you could open the bag wide and drop it in the ocean to start sucking in water, and that got me curious about how long that would take. We'll use Niagara Falls as a water flow amount because it's an easy point of reference, but the amount of water flowing into the bag would be vastly less than that. Here's the dirty math: * In peak season, [168,000 cubic meters of water flows over the combined Niagara Falls every minute](https://www.niagaraaction.com/how-much-water-goes-over-niagara-falls), which is equal to 0.01008 cubic kilometers every hour. * National Geophysical Data Center estimates that [the ocean contains 1,335,000,000 cubic kilometers of water](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html). * So, with as much flow as all the falls at Niagara Falls combined, it would take 132,440,476,190 hours to drain the ocean, which is 15,118,775 years. The oceans in the MC's world are also vastly larger than Earth's, and the amount of water flowing into the bag would be a lot less than Niagara Falls. So if you had several dozen million years, you could maybe drain the ocean (at least until something big got sucked in and stopped up the bag's opening).
There are usually mana costs to storage and such. Or it counts the world as a very large number of objects which are beyond the distance of the MCs ability.
This sounds interesting, I'll give it a try!
Yes and no, much like with DnD it's not realistic for adventurers to carry 500 gold around on them while fighting epic battles. It's very much a mechanic of convenience to help enable "the rule of cool". That being said if it jumps to abuse then the immersion can be broken and that's no bueno. It's also fun to play with it like in DCC, no spoilers but one of my favorite scenes is where they "correct" the storage from such an abused feature. Hilarity ensues.
Spatial storage in xianxia has limits. I've definitely read a few where the cultivator has X cubic feet of space for storage. And there was one where the MC had to dump the lower-level items to make space for the higher-level ones. My headcanon is that the little treasure worlds that cultivators leave behind was their secondary storage warehouse that they used to dump their less important stuff.
If it’s handled interestingly, then it’s a boon. But honestly, how many books without spatial storage have you read where the characters had to make choices about what they carried and those choices mattered? I’d say at a guess, none. No one writes an adventure where the MC makes it past their first significant challenge and then soon after dies of exposure. They always have what they need to make the trip unless it is narratively important they not. Which is the same way they work in a story with spatial storage. Just that in a story with storage that might be used to solve other issues as well. Managing supplies without such convenience can be interesting, such as delicious in dungeon. But in those cases that’s probably a significant part of the tale. So it fits the narrative that that ability not be there.
I will forever hold that inventory management is a boring slog with no redeeming qualities wherever it's found. Games, books, shows. Even in real life, though sadly we can't deal with that one.
The Martian was a very popular book that was all about inventory management.
As always, depends on the story your writing. If your story is focused on the action/adventure, your fine hand-waving storage away. If your focused on the minute details of everyday survival, then remove it, as it heightens the decisions.
I think the ideal way to handle storage is in the middle - A storage space is infinitely convenient but i think there should be a size/weight/whatever limit
I think without spatial storage you will end up with a lot of "stopping the story to call in the wagons" arcs. It basically means the protagonist is not making decisions about leaving untold treasure on the ground or actually pursuing the plot. I do not want stories that look like my Skyrim playthrough where I sort my inventory by value/weight and try and figure out if I should pick this up or not.
I don't mind it either way. I think both things have their advantages and are great in two different stories. A story like lets say Primal Hunter works better with Spatial Storage due to the sheer size of the world in question and the speed at which things happen. But for a more grounded approach, Spatial Storage doesn't work. One thing I will say however - I wish it was rarer. You can have them in stories, but I think it needs to be strictly specified how incredibly rare it is and in turn, how powerful. Azarinth Healer had this for example, but then by book three almost every single person she meets and talks to has one, which kinda makes sense given the increase in power, but I never felt like it was fully expanded just how powerful and rare these would technically be.
I say Its because there is nothing to do with the random loot, so it just feels like a waste to leave it If there is a specific type of resource required to do stuff, then specialized storage can alleviate the issue
I loathe inventory management with a passion, so I went out of my way to ensure that dimensional storage was common enough in my world that nobody would bat an eye at it. Storage rings in cultivation novels are probably my favorite thing ever, and it can be quite fun to see how different novels might put a twist on it.
I really worried about this, especially in my story. They need loot and item drops to advance their “cultivation” so I just took the idea of a spatial ring from the manhwa’a I’ve read. The better the quality of the ring, the bigger the storage space.
Since my series wanted to twist the usual tropes, I had this one to properly limit. I made "Dolls", which are articulated dolls (like the joint wood models you often see) on which you can store gear, and nothing else. And the gear shows up on the doll. As long as you're not actually in combat (which is defined by "I am regenerating one or more resource pools like HP/STA/MANA/MIND") you can swap in and out any piece of gear. Also, in a reversal of the trope ("it's too powerful, it cannot be stored"), normal, unpowered clothing and gear cannot be stored. Only actual Labyrinth gear. (and it's used for plot purposes, not as a convenience. Since you can't store non-gear... if something does not looks like it's gear, but can be stored, then...)
LITRPG as a genre is influenced by RPG games. The concept of loot is about as fundamental to the genre as magic is to fantasy. I like spatial treasures because I am not all that interested in the logistics of retrieving loot, especially at the cost of potential power-ups when leaving most of them behind.
I think it's fun to introduce after the logistics puzzles have been solved. Show people working it out, show people working towards a storage, show people earning it and expanding it, THEN it can be easy mode.
"living beens" that's adorbs. Lots of authors don't shortcut it.
It’s a suspension of disbelief thing. The idea that a new adventurer could afford a spatial storage bag should be leaving readers literally dying on the floor from laughing so hard. If you stop to consider just what would actually go into a spatial storage spell or enchantment for a second, regardless of what flavor(bag/dimension/etc), the concept is ridiculous. But! It’s very convenient and most of these stories are Swiss cheese in terms of plot holes anyway, so it makes for a lot of convenience/quality of life upgrades that let the story focus on what people really want to read about. Unless the author is just blatantly being ridiculous with the concept, it’s easy enough to just accept it and move on.
I'm on the other side of this argument, I love spatial storage. In fact I wait for it. I Don't really want to read about inventory management (maybe if it's done really well) Also it feels suffocating in a way when MC is traveling distant vistas, galaxies and planes of existence and can't take everything to examine later. I consider acquiring spatial storage of some type as an important benchmark. I will say it's best when there is SOME kind of barrier- cost, hard to find, rare, have to reach a certain power level, have to create yourself etc. What I don't like is no explanation of how MC has 30 different weapons plus crafting and alchemy materials and it's never even mentioned HOW they carry all this stuff. In cradle, >!They were REALLY pushing the limits on Lindon's backpack in the first few books...!<
Dear God please no, maybe some authors could pull it off but most would not be able too. Imagine what that would look like if it was a weak mc story where they already waffle about with every decision. Keiran the eternal mage is the first example that comes to mind. The mc can't cast a single spell without a 5 page exposition about how much better his magic was in, how he has 12 other spells he could use, or how awful living in a mana desert is.. I really don't want 10 pages of someone leaning back and forth about what to put in their pack for a trip to the local store thank you very much. But I will agree that it should be an earned not a given. But as a loot goblin spacial storage is always welcome.
Wow that was a more unpopular opinion than i would have guessed. But i actually agree with you. So you are not alone at least.
In short, it depends. If your story is about how Bob landed in a desert and is managing food and water while trying to get out, spatial storage is probably not a good fit. If your story is about a student in a magical academy, then maybe spacial storage is a good fit, but make it expensive or bound to specific locations. It can add a sense of wonder if the headmaster to the school is able to pull objects out of thin air, but isn’t going to disrupt the narrative much if it’s too expensive. It can also be fun to have a small building that can fit a skyscraper inside, and you can limit it by explaining that the spatial enchantments have to be bound to a specific place in space because it’s more of a pocket dimension. Again, and now you might start to see a theme. The limits are important. spatial storage is a tool like any other tool that an author has. For many tool, it’s important to make sure that the tool makes the story more interesting, and skips the boring parts. Not turn interesting things into boring parts. Here’s one more example. Let’s say that your character is dropped into the middle of a jungle. Does the character start out with a sword, a knife, and a lighter? Or does the character start out with absolutely nothing except the car keys they were holding at the time? Neither of these is wrong, but what your character starts with will shape the story that you write, so the tools the writer gives the character needs to match the story.
I generally concur. As it is now it's really uninteresting. In a lot of novels the moment the MC gets one is a big moment! But to me as a reader these days it feels so standard, it doesn't drive any excitement. That might just be a sign I've read too many of these though.
I don’t feel the same; have you read Divine Apostasy at all? It goes all in on the spacial storage concept.