Tom Larcombe

Larcombe, Tom. Enter System. Natural Laws Apocalypse No. 1. Kindle, 2021.
I downloaded Tom Larcombe’s Enter System because the title and premise intrigued me. The world gets a message from a mysterious “System” that the natural laws we are used to have been part of a beta test and will now not apply in all cases. College kid Marc and his buddies soon find that the world now works like an online role-playing game. So far, so good. Unfortunately, there is not much story arc beyond that. show more Instead, there follows much pointless game action with details that read like a transcript of RPG character sheets. Here is a sample:
“Are any of your stats lower than the rest,” Jeff asked. “Ones you wouldn’t want to use as a dump stat?”
“Um, I don’t know. My physical are all pretty good, especially now after leveling some. My mental stats are kinda low though, four intelligence, four aptitude, six in willpower though.”
There may be gamers who find all this fascinating. I am not among them. 2 stars. show less

Overall an average book as my score reflects. There are strong stretches with interesting ideas and some decent character interactions.

Then you get the mage that can identify, create new spells and knows people sell scrolls for teaching spells or for single use on the market make a job choice. He is even currently selling researched documents. So does he pick researcher, spell teacher, appraiser or author that he has the skills for and needs to do more of to evolve his class skills? Of show more course not, I wouldn't be on a rant if he did, the person with issues due to too many skills picks up a new skill for leather working and works on that.

He could just sell 2 spells and buy the armor to resell locally if their local lack is such a major hindrance. Now he slows somebody else's progression in the profession while nobody is doing what he is good at. So he makes money slower, provides no unique benefit and slows down his class progression. show less

From a technical view the writing is fairly solid. The main problem is that the dialogue is unlike anything human, and it's clearly being used to try to feed me exposition.

great series

I am really enjoying this series even though the character Jeff can be frustrating at times. I look forward to more in the future.