He Who Fights with Monsters 3

I think some of the economics stuff has improved. Still enjoying many of the characters.

Some complaints are probably a result of listening to this as an audiobook. I like Heath Miller's narration. The voices are differentiated but not over the top, and it's generally very easy to listen to. I also appreciate that full character-sheet level stat readouts are very uncommon.

Unfortunately, every time anyone uses any ability, the entire description of the ability gets read out. This gets a little painful, as the clearly tabular style doesn't read very well while being pretty repetitive, especially where there are like 4 levels of nested effects being defined. Of course, the fact that abilities (especially Jason's) have pretty vague names means that I frequently DO end up needing to listen to the description.

That said, I don't think all the blame lies with the format. Jason's ability set causes to his fights to be super predictable so far. 1) Give afflictions (yes, even a scratch is enough), 2) do damage scaling with afflictions, 3) absorb the afflictions to deal more damage and set up 4) execute. Like, I get and that's fine, but you don't need to explain it to me every time.

The fight predictability gets a little better near the end, and thankfully they start to be described in a little less detail. We'll see if it continues to improve in book 4 (which I guess I'll be reading next)