u/flooshtollen

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I understand patreon, I've tossed a few dollars to authors I like before through that, but are any authors here having any success from PayPal donations?

The other day u/AmalgaMat1on made a post asking for people’s top five series here and I decided to organize it all to see how it shakes out. This was, what’s known in professional circles as, a big fucking mistake. Why did I spend five hours of my life doing this? I’m not getting that time back and we all have such a limited amount to spend on this world before it’s up.

Anyway, at the time of doing this, there were 304 comments total. Using only the top level comments, I excluded anyone who either put more than or less than five answers since that went against the will of the post, and I didn’t include any answers from someone who put the same title more than once in their post. This still left 156 top level comments to use. If any of my exclusions bother you, you can pretty safely just assume you need to add another few more to cradle and dungeon crawler carl.

Potential errors could be some of these being the same books with different names. People were writing both Bastion and Immortal great souls, and stormweaver and iron prince. I wouldn't be surprised if others slipped through the cracks, I don’t know every book on this list.

Finally, since not everyone put things in any specific order, there’s no weights given to where they were placed. All lists were treated as an equally tied five.

If you find anything spelled wrong here, it’s because I was just copying what other people wrote, except for the times its actually my fault.

First place, 61 votes:

Cradle 

Dungeon Crawler Carl

41 votes:

Mother of learning

25 votes:

Beware of chicken

He who fights with monsters

24 votes:

The wandering inn

20 votes:

Primal hunter

18 votes:

Mark of the fool

16 votes:

Super Powereds (and you were all so inconsistent in spelling this one)

15 votes:

Lord of the mysteries

14 votes:

Azarinth healer

Path of ascension

13 votes:

Bog standard isekai

Mage Errant

12 votes:

A practical guide to evil

Shadow slave

Sky pride

worm

11 votes:

Chrysalis

10 votes:

Hell difficulty tutorial

9 votes:

Book of the dead

8 votes:

Game at carousel

The year of apocalypse

7 votes:

Calamatious Bob

Defiance of the fall

the perfect run

6 votes:

A practical guide to sorcery

arcane ascension

stray cat strut

The legend of William Oh

warformed: stormweaver

5 votes:

A journey of black and red

Beneath the dragoneye moons

Bobiverse

Jackal among snakes

Reverend insanity

Weirkey chronicles

4 votes:

1% lifesteal

12 miles below

a soldier’s life

ends of magic

Immortal great souls

industrial strength magic

Quest academy

Return of the runebound professor

Stormlight archives

Super supportive

Worth the candle

3 votes:

Dresden files

elydes, Pale

Path of transcendence

Portal to nova roma

runeblade

system universe

2 votes:

a gamer's guide to beating the tutorial

A thousand li

all I got was this stat menu

all the skills

apocalypse parenting

ar'kendrithyst

Ave xai rem y

cyber dreams

forge of destiny

immortality through array formation

kill the sun

mage tank

melody of mana

millennial mage

path of the berserker

release that witch

rise of the living forge

slumrat rising

soccer supremo

sword god in a magic world

the hundred reigns

the mine lord

the second coming of gluttony

this used to be about dungeons

Unorthodox farming

villain’s code

virtuous sons

1 vote:

absolute regression

ajax ascension

amelia thornheart

an infinite recursion of time

art of the adept

ascendance of a bookworm

axe druid

banished to another world

battle mage farmer

blue core

bookbound bunny

brimstone fantasy

bunny girl evolution

butcher of godobra

buymort

changeling

courting death

cybergenes

death after death

delve

demense

demon card enforcer

demon princess magical chaos

department of otherworldly rescue

depthless hunger

discount dan

divine apostasy

divine dungeon

dungeon born

dungeon core chatroom

dungeon lord

eldritch exorcist

emerilia

eragon

esper labryinth

everybody loves large chests

everyone else is a returnee

father of monstrosity

fff class trashero

fluff

frith chronicles

from the ashes a fire shall be woken

full murder hobo

godclads

greatest legacy of the magus universe

grimgar

hope

immortals ascent

kairos

kingdom's bloodline

land of the undying lord

legendary mechanic

lightbringer

lighting is the only way

lost things (pale lights 1)

low-fantasy occultist isekai

mimic and me

mistborn

natural law apocalypse

necrotic apocalypse

not (just) a mage lord

oh great, i was reincarnated as a farmer

pact

paragon of destruction

path of the last champion

perimeter defense

player manager

queen of mud

reality benders

reborn apocalypse

record of a mortal's journey into immortality

reincarnated as a farmer

return of the mount hua sect

rose of the lycanthrope

rune seeker

runesmith

salvos

savage awakening

shadeslinger

solo leveling

soulmonger

spellmonger

spire's spite

strategy to capture men

sufficiently advanced magic

sun shadow

super minion

super sell superheros

surprisingly enough (not) common sense is overpowered in a cliche cultivation world

system apocalypse

tales of gods and demons

Tales of herding gods

the 108

the anti mage

the archmage coefficient

the beginning after the end

the black company

the cabin is always hungry

the dungeon slayer

the great immortal souls

the hedge wizard

the immortal great souls

the infinite world

the innkeeper

the land

the last horizon

the legend of randidly ghosthound

the machine god

the night angel

the nightmare of alamir

the outer sphere

the ripple system

the tutorial is too hard

the zombie knight saga

throne hunters

throne of magical arcana

timeless assassin

tower of jack

trinity of magic

unconventional heroes

undying alchemist

unintended cultivator

Vanquer (literally no idea what this could be short for)

victor of tucson

vigor mortis

warhammer 40k

weeaboo's unfortunate isekai: the necromancer's gacha

Sorry but I'm not looking for DMs about this

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Victor Frankenstein refused to put his patron's (Henrich Harlander) brain in his monster because he had syphilis and there was no way to beat that. It would have killed him even with a new body. The monster he made however seemed entirely invincible and unkillable, possessing seemingly unlimited life force. This leads me to believe that either a) Frankenstein was wrong and putting his patron's brain in a new body would have been completely fine, or b) he could have defeated his monster with syphilis, unless there's something else I'm missing.

Keep getting a message popping up on Google docs saying to write with Gemini in the document. Is there any way to make it stop? It's distracting while I'm trying to work

Some people (me) don't want to have to figure out how to deck build when starting a new game. Being able to jump in immediately to see how it plays before deciding whether to get a booster box or something is so much nicer

So, you're thinking of introducing money into the story you're writing and you don't want to be incredibly inconsistent about it? Well, do I have the advice for you!

Don't.

Seriously, don't give hard numbers. How much did the sword cost? A lot. How much was the meal? It was cheap or it was a little overpriced. How much was the house? It's going to take years to pay off. You don't need to use numbers to get the point across, odds are you'll do it wrong and people will notice when you accidentally make a horse and a sandwich the same price.

“But I want to anyway!” I hear you yelling, and wow, you are so incredibly wrong for that, but okay, fine, let's discuss how you could potentially do that.

Let's make a hypothetical fantasy currency. Let's call it rallods for convenience. How do you decide how much anything should cost when someone is paying for anything in rallods in your story? Simple, just look up how much it would cost in your local currency and then use that. A sandwich, side, and drink costs 15-20 rallods, a house might be as low as 200,000 rallods but you know for that price your getting a barely inhabitable dump and you should really be expecting to pay 500,000 rallods for something decent instead. Blacksmith's still exist and still make swords, check their websites. 1000 rallods doesn't seem like a terrible price for a weapon you'll be using for work and keeping you safe, but cheaper and more expensive options are definitely available too depending on who's buying it.

Some of you are probably looking at the values I gave as examples and saying they look too high. Your fantasy kingdom doesn't have numbers reflecting centuries of inflation after all. They should be lower and less off-putting than anything in the real world.

Fine. Literally just shift the decimal place one spot back. A sandwich, side, and drink becomes 1.5-2 rallods, a house becomes 50,000 rallods, a sword becomes 100 rallods.

Now, I know what you're thinking again. Some things in fantasy don't have mundane equivalents. You are wrong, but the fact you think that is all the more reason to go back to the top of this rant and reread the part about avoiding giving set values altogether. Otherwise, you have to kind of use your brain to consider things.

How much does a potion cost? Depends on how common it is. Can anyone get one? Then look around your local pharmacy and see what price in that range feels right. Is it rarer so not just anyone can get it? In that case, since you're using your local currency, start asking yourself how much it would need to be to start pricing out the people who need it in your life. Should it be enough that you're using your paycheck for the month or should it financially ruin you?

What about something magical then? Ask yourself what the magic is doing and then find a roughly real world equivalent. Magicing up a wall? Find the price of having one built. Buying a small scroll of fire to light your campfires while you travel? Unless it's cheap, people are just going to buy a flint and steel, so make it the cost of a good quality lighter. Ask yourself what job the magic you're paying for is doing, and then find something equivalent in a quick Google search.

What about mythril then? It's rarer than gold after all, and all of the best magical stuff is made using it.

Please please please consider the price of gold before you go making a set of armour or a sword out of a metal that's even rarer and more expensive. Please just think about the implication of that for 5 seconds, and then go back and decide that actually, even if it's rare, it's not rarer than gold. Wikipedia has a longsword as being 80-110cm long. Let's say 100 for simplicity's sake. A cubic centimeter of gold weighs 19.3 grams, so we will say a long sword made of gold would be 1930 grams (this is obviously lacking a lot of meaningful details for the comparison, but it will be close enough for our purposes). At the time of writing this, a gram of gold is about 150usd. That means a sword made of it is going to be worth 289,500 dollars, and you're looking at making mythril cost even more than that. If you are going to stick to that sort of price, then at least consider where it would be sold and the fact that, no matter how much spunk you've got, a blacksmith is never cutting you a good deal on it when they need to recoup the material cost, and that even an above average person is not going to have one.

“But I don't want to use rallods! I want to use copper, silver, and gold!”

Listen to me. Read what I'm writing here and take these words to heart. You are wrong, no you fucking don't.

Look up any freaking currency in the world right now and count how many have subunits to their subunits. I'm sure you can find some ridiculous currency structures in the past, but I don't care. All you're doing is overly complicating things and that is going to mess you up in the end. Trying to keep a copper/silver/gold system sensible and consistent is going to make more work for literally no reward. Don't do it.

So, since you're going to do it anyway, here's what you need to consider. First, consider what a terrible choice that is, and then when you ignore that, move on to how these units are going to work.

Assuming you're going with a hundred copper equals a silver and a hundred silver equals a gold (if any of you are somehow making it more complicated than that then I will fight you) then what does a copper equal? Comparing it to the dollar system, is it a single dollar, or a single cent?

If it's a cent, then one hundred copper equals a single silver (or a dollar), and a hundred silver equals a single gold (one hundred dollars). In this system, you're paying for most of your expenses in either silver or gold, in which case you can just cut out the coppers altogether because nobody needs to know how much something is to the penny in your book, that's ridiculous.

If a copper is a dollar, that means that one hundred copper is one silver (one hundred dollars) and one hundred silver is one gold (ten thousand dollars). That means that in day-to-day life, everything you buy is going to be either in copper or silver, and while clearly bigger expenses could use gold, they should be few and far between, to the point that instead, you could just use more silver and cut gold out entirely. Can you imagine wanting to walk around with a coin worth ten thousand dollars casually? That would be insane.

Given both of those points, we're back to not using a currency with more than one subunit, and frankly, any subunits is a waste of your time. That level of detail isn't helping you or your readers, and it isn't even adding more realism. All it's doing is making things more difficult for no reason. Just invent a currency or even use rollads if you really want and save yourself some trouble. Or even better than that, do what I said in the beginning and don't.

So, you're thinking of introducing money into the story you're writing and you don't want to be incredibly inconsistent about it? Well, do I have the advice for you!

Don't.

Seriously, don't give hard numbers. How much did the sword cost? A lot. How much was the meal? It was cheap or it was a little overpriced. How much was the house? It's going to take years to pay off. You don't need to use numbers to get the point across, odds are you'll do it wrong and people will notice when you accidentally make a horse and a sandwich the same price.

“But I want to anyway!” I hear you yelling, and wow, you are so incredibly wrong for that, but okay, fine, let's discuss how you could potentially do that.

Let's make a hypothetical fantasy currency. Let's call it rallods for convenience. How do you decide how much anything should cost when someone is paying for anything in rallods in your story? Simple, just look up how much it would cost in your local currency and then use that. A sandwich, side, and drink costs 15-20 rallods, a house might be as low as 200,000 rallods but you know for that price your getting a barely inhabitable dump and you should really be expecting to pay 500,000 rallods for something decent instead. Blacksmith's still exist and still make swords, check their websites. 1000 rallods doesn't seem like a terrible price for a weapon you'll be using for work and keeping you safe, but cheaper and more expensive options are definitely available too depending on who's buying it.

Some of you are probably looking at the values I gave as examples and saying they look too high. Your fantasy kingdom doesn't have numbers reflecting centuries of inflation after all. They should be lower and less off-putting than anything in the real world.

Fine. Literally just shift the decimal place one spot back. A sandwich, side, and drink becomes 1.5-2 rallods, a house becomes 50,000 rallods, a sword becomes 100 rallods.

Now, I know what you're thinking again. Some things in fantasy don't have mundane equivalents. You are wrong, but the fact you think that is all the more reason to go back to the top of this rant and reread the part about avoiding giving set values altogether. Otherwise, you have to kind of use your brain to consider things.

How much does a potion cost? Depends on how common it is. Can anyone get one? Then look around your local pharmacy and see what price in that range feels right. Is it rarer so not just anyone can get it? In that case, since you're using your local currency, start asking yourself how much it would need to be to start pricing out the people who need it in your life. Should it be enough that you're using your paycheck for the month or should it financially ruin you?

What about something magical then? Ask yourself what the magic is doing and then find a roughly real world equivalent. Magicing up a wall? Find the price of having one built. Buying a small scroll of fire to light your campfires while you travel? Unless it's cheap, people are just going to buy a flint and steel, so make it the cost of a good quality lighter. Ask yourself what job the magic you're paying for is doing, and then find something equivalent in a quick Google search.

What about mythril then? It's rarer than gold after all, and all of the best magical stuff is made using it.

Please please please consider the price of gold before you go making a set of armour or a sword out of a metal that's even rarer and more expensive. Please just think about the implication of that for 5 seconds, and then go back and decide that actually, even if it's rare, it's not rarer than gold. Wikipedia has a longsword as being 80-110cm long. Let's say 100 for simplicity's sake. A cubic centimeter of gold weighs 19.3 grams, so we will say a long sword made of gold would be 1930 grams (this is obviously lacking a lot of meaningful details for the comparison, but it will be close enough for our purposes). At the time of writing this, a gram of gold is about 150usd. That means a sword made of it is going to be worth 289,500 dollars, and you're looking at making mythril cost even more than that. If you are going to stick to that sort of price, then at least consider where it would be sold and the fact that, no matter how much spunk you've got, a blacksmith is never cutting you a good deal on it when they need to recoup the material cost, and that even an above average person is not going to have one.

“But I don't want to use rallods! I want to use copper, silver, and gold!”

Listen to me. Read what I'm writing here and take these words to heart. You are wrong, no you fucking don't.

Look up any freaking currency in the world right now and count how many have subunits to their subunits. I'm sure you can find some ridiculous currency structures in the past, but I don't care. All you're doing is overly complicating things and that is going to mess you up in the end. Trying to keep a copper/silver/gold system sensible and consistent is going to make more work for literally no reward. Don't do it.

So, since you're going to do it anyway, here's what you need to consider. First, consider what a terrible choice that is, and then when you ignore that, move on to how these units are going to work.

Assuming you're going with a hundred copper equals a silver and a hundred silver equals a gold (if any of you are somehow making it more complicated than that then I will fight you) then what does a copper equal? Comparing it to the dollar system, is it a single dollar, or a single cent?

If it's a cent, then one hundred copper equals a single silver (or a dollar), and a hundred silver equals a single gold (one hundred dollars). In this system, you're paying for most of your expenses in either silver or gold, in which case you can just cut out the coppers altogether because nobody needs to know how much something is to the penny in your book, that's ridiculous.

If a copper is a dollar, that means that one hundred copper is one silver (one hundred dollars) and one hundred silver is one gold (ten thousand dollars). That means that in day-to-day life, everything you buy is going to be either in copper or silver, and while clearly bigger expenses could use gold, they should be few and far between, to the point that instead, you could just use more silver and cut gold out entirely. Can you imagine wanting to walk around with a coin worth ten thousand dollars casually? That would be insane.

Given both of those points, we're back to not using a currency with more than one subunit, and frankly, any subunits is a waste of your time. That level of detail isn't helping you or your readers, and it isn't even adding more realism. All it's doing is making things more difficult for no reason. Just invent a currency or even use rollads if you really want and save yourself some trouble. Or even better than that, do what I said in the beginning and don't.