A lot of litrpgs have systems. I'm actually pretty sure it's a defining factor of a litrpg. Some numerical way to quantify a person's strength and capabilities. Some little probably blue box, for arbitrary reasons, that says this thing you know you can do is now called a skill or ability and you are this good at it.

Well systems come in all kinds of colors of blue and various parameters to say how badass and op your character is. But have they truly aimed to break the system? Nope. Not really. An author strives for balance, and as such their character is the guy who slips through the cracks with unconciously luck to get some broken combination, rather than a minute max stat feed combo build. I would wreck a system world through sheer curiosity and too many times playing DND. Strange since I've only been part of 2 campaigns, there was a third planned, and I got a lot of chance to make a level 10 character with a Homebrew. I would have felt bad for the DM if I hadn't kept an eye towards balance. But then the DM actually helped me and made it MORE broken. Kinda nuts. But yes, a healthy dose of curiosity in a system world can throw several spanners into things.

It's like the system is a bunch of cogs, and every player is their own little stand alone generator. And then I manage to put a trandimensional belt on it and my character is powered by the system, which leaves me more room to undermine every other character. But let's move on to the specifics, how can a person subvert the system?

Let's take a look at the important aspects, we need to know what sort of system we are looking at, how much freedom do we have in this and how does it react to various stimuli?

Taking for example the systems of randidly ghost hound, to be honest I haven't figured out how to properly break the system in terms of trying to get a class that is as op as randidly's, but that leads us to the first part of how to figure that out.

OBSERVATION. A great way to learn to break any system in a litrpg is simply watching and learning, gathering data is important. Going back to randidly ghost hound it's possible to notice several things, outside the standard ominous tethering to a town figure, there is the fact that in the ghosthound system you are given three choices, there is the random choice, the choice based on your history, and the choice of what suits you right now. Given this information it automatically says that people with experience of violence or crafting or various other things will automatically have at least one choice to reflect that. Assumably within the ghosthound world there are sections that held military, I'm sure many of them had the option of either some combat profession like soldier, or maybe a Gunner class. And based on their physical ability maybe a decent "current you" class as well.

But the way I see it, by taking this information in, and then the information of the 6th cohort, it reasons out that the optimal thing to do, is to train yourself and gain skills that lead you on the direction you want, and then give it a specific image and title to go with it. If you want to be a crafter extroardinaire with an ability to layer on all sorts of mojo against the undead, you might learn tailoring and blacksmithing and woodworking and fletching and all the crafting skills you can, and then set your workshop up in a church and remodel it to some crafting god you remember from a fantasy book. You may ask "but why?" The answer is simple.

In theory, if you, in your crafting, become fit, able to fight, but also maintain in your crafting a schedule or superstition where in you pray upon every work, and then you go to a village to get a class, I would bet you're "current self class" would have a dedicated crafter title under the god you worship in your workshop church. But this is only a theory.

Now, we move onwards to a series inspired by randidly ghosthound. With Daniel Radcliff, a.k.a the harbinger of cataclysm. While I currently forget the title of the story, I admit it is good. However this system is both named, and sentient. Schema, however it seems to lack actually giving a class with tangible benefits. Everything there falls under stats and the way you build them. In such a world it's all about perks and skills. And the way to break it is rather simple, do as much as you can as strenuously as you can and gain as many skills as possible and attempt to boil them down to a legendary skill. It's like a connect three game. Every three of this or that tier can combine to a greater tier and you just keep recombining until you have the highest item you can get. It's simple, but it also takes creativity and willpower. Because you have to put forth the effort to perform these actions, but you also need to think about whatever action it is and whether it may have a skill, but more importantly, that if it did have a skill, would you want it?

Moving onwards to such things as the legendary moonlight sculptor it has a very open world skill system, but it's a difficult skill system and the virtual world therein relies upon your external ability to perform these actions. Effort begets reward, but perseverance is required to make sure you put in the necessary amount of effort. Creating skills is a good way to break a system should the system have the ability to allow handmade skills. Now in reality it would take an ai with some serious processing power to be able to make and code the allowance of the new skill, this is likely an unsaid thing within the world, as it requires the 1000 hits in the same way to properly map and code the skill in. On top of that the physics engine and the air controlling that and running the math on the new skill to dictate it's strength, and therefore rarity and damage, would need to be pretty beefy too.

Other systems are simpler or harder based on the many components it's made of. For example within the Homebrew dnd campaign my creature was of a race I called seemed, yes I took it from Skyrim, I made the entire race lean towards being scrawny but intelligent. They were a crafting class.

Sounds simple, but it's deceptive, the entire race was a half fry celestial (because the DM actually decided, trust me I wanted it to be part dwarf) and it had bat wings, a prehensile tail, and four arms. This all sounds like it's a grotesque creature with very little useability. But they were Crafters, as a blacksmith you automatically know how to weild the weapon you made with proficiency.

Automatically that means you can forge four daggers and be a flying razorwind. Not bad. But let's continue to where i really broke it. As it was level ten you can choose perks and skills and things. I chose many crafting abilities. Including enchanting. Many may be aware of the Skyrim exploit of using potions to buff enchanting, to make better enchanting gear or potion making gear, and then it cycles around into a broken loop of insanity. Using this sort of thing to my advantage, as a four armed creature I could easily enchant rings out the wazzoo, and be decked out with anywhere from 16-20 rings, 4 bracelets, an amulet, and maybe even a tail ring. And all of these could be enchanted to make my racially intelligence based creature become a tank never before seen.

At level ten and 9 levels in alchemist and 1 in gunslinger this creature named master draz had 40 intelligence. He had a straight up +10 on int rolls. He didn't fail to make a +5 ring of strength, he simply did it. And if you think about it, that means crazy shit for a hotswap build. Granted he didn't have the classes for it, but it did mean my scrawny little guy could easily hold back an ogre, and probably win against a giant in an arm wrestling match.

What this all boils down to is testing the limits of the various inner mechanisms of a system. If your system has potion making, or enchanting, or stat building, you can use it to your advantage. In some litrpgs like emerilia you can train stats. It's not easy, and usually endurance is a painful one, but in theory, that means if you put forth the effort in the early game you can get massive dividends later on when you start to level up. Other options might include using crafting as a training excercise. In theory you might be able to use tailoring to up things like dexterity, perception, and maybe endurance if you screw up and see yourself to the material enough times. Others can be attempts at getting skills that might just seem insane. Like say you get juggling as a skill, intentionally, and then you start to juggle slowly heavier items, it trains the skill, it trains dexterity, it trains strength, and at the end of it, maybe you can even use it offensively by chucking knives in the middle of battle that you were juggling.

In real videogames there are no oversights, there is a lack of ability towards player creativity, it will have some feedback loops to exploit every now and then, but in a litrpg you have this capability to screw with the system just by the fact that you can do zany shit with things that most people wouldn't consider. Perhaps taking strolls through monster infested woods and chatting with the wildlife without any battles going on could give a strange and unprecedented skill or perk. It's hard to say, but I will admit to having broken one authors system by merely asking about the possibilities. I wouldn't say there was any discrepancies with their system, but there was never stated that this thing had had tried, there was a mechanism, there was option A, and there was option B, the two were seperate by only one component, and when I set a on b, it apparently created an unthought of feedback loop that the author outright stated had broken the world by the mere concept. It then had to be given some thought so as to prevent it from being an inconsistency, and now has the potential in a limited and more abalnced version to be a part of the story. Had it actually be a litrpg world in which I was in, I would have damned the consequences as it was a very world and I could respawn, and I would have shattered some conceptions, and likely been nerfed or hired by a company. Lol

Sometimes the best way to break a system is to simply ask questions. Be aware of what limitations are stated, but note what isn't stated as well. If the game says you can't get more than five ounces of water from a bucket, ask how much water you can get from a larger container. Thinking outside the box has its rewards and dangers, and in a litrpg that can mean a broken op character simply because they don't let defined walls set the route for them, they look at the place where they haven't found a wall and they start trailblazing.

If you are an author and you make a system, you need to consider the questions that might be ridiculous. Like what if I made my vegetable soup in Mana potion? Would anyone ever do it? No, a Mana potion is to be drank! Is what they would say, but then you have the experimental chef and he suddenly has vegetable soup that refills your Mana with the slurp of a spoon. Ridiculous questions beget ridiculous outcomes. In one manga a renowned blacksmith has retired and is no longer famous, he is picked on by street thugs and they get chased away by a Japanese "Yankee" when the blacksmith asks him what he wants as a weapon he says an iron pipe. So what happens? The blacksmith makes him a mithril iron pipe with a straight leading into an elbow joint.

You might be surprised by what concepts can be birthed by a mind that is said to only ask "stupid questions", going against "common sense" does not necessitate stupidity, and can cause a whole knew standard to come about and better your world and enrich its history and capabilities.

So if you have a path to power in your story... Try tossing in a few oddball ideas and see if you can't break it. Maybe you'll find that it works even better now than before, and it's something new to write about.