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While characters generally gain in power as they gain levels, not all levels are created equal. Sometimes you get a major new ability that makes the game easy. Or you might end up just gaining some small stat increase or a few [[Hit Points]] for that level. But hey, at least it's something, right?
But wait a minute! Those [[Hit Points]] don't even add up to one more hit from my enemies. And my stat increase didn't take my sword out of [[Scratch Damage]] range. And why did the game start throwing all of these [[Goddamned Bats]] at me? I was doing just fine against [[The Goomba
This is the essence of
If you start getting these late into the game, you have a [[Parabolic Power Curve]]. [[Inverted Trope|Inversion]] of [[Unstable Equilibrium]], where doing badly leaves you further behind. That's not to say that this is always a bad trope, especially if one can exploit it by beating the game [[Low Level Advantage|while avoiding level-ups]]. [[Multiple Endings]] provide a way to reward skilled players that can still win with higher-than-normal levels. [[Fake Difficulty]] to the extreme. Big factor in creating the [[Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards]]. In rare instances creates an [[Unwinnable]] situation.
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{{examples}}
== Video game examples ==
=== [[Driving Game]] ===
* Some racing games, eg ''[[Need for Speed]] Underground'', do this, making the opponents faster and cheaper the more your car is upgraded.
=== [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]]s ===
* In ''[[City of Heroes]]'' (And, by extension, ''[[City of Villains]]''), this basically happens every 5 levels. Rather than having actual equipment, you slot your powers with
** A more conventional use of the trope is the way that some levels provide a new power choice, while others only provide you with a few enhancement slots. While enhancements are the key to building a truly powerful character, these levels are rather less interesting - especially at lower levels, when the only available enhancements are rather weak, or higher levels, when all of the most important powers will already be fully slotted.
* ''[[
* Extremely common in Korean-styled [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPGs]], where levelling just gets you a couple stat points and a skill point, making the character only marginally better at most levels. Usually it's every 10 levels or so, when the next equipment set becomes available, that the characters actually make a significant advancement in strength. What this means is, as the enemies you are fighting start giving less experience, and you're forced to move on to stronger enemies, your character isn't meaningfully stronger until those key levels and the fights get harder.
** ''[[Trickster Online]]'', a Korean MMORPG, has "hell levels." For each class they are slightly different. The toughest class to play is the Lion who uses firearms, because his hell levels start at level 1. The lion's gun damage is determined by the accuracy stat, while melee damage is given by the strength stat. Every character starts off weaponless, making the Lion's high accuracy useless and his low strength a huge liability. Until level 20 he is denied quality weapons, cannot use a shield, and cannot move while attacking. You're like a [[Glass Cannon]], except just glass and no cannon.
* In ''[[Nexus War]]'', leveling up means penalties to recovering from death.
* ''[[
* In ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', the effectiveness of stats on gear decreases in proportion to your level, forcing you to upgrade to remain as strong relative to your opponents as you were before. Similarly, the talent trees contain a lot of "filler" between major upgrades (at ten-level increments), and skills are purchased in ranks that skip quite a few levels. The upshot is that you get weaker with each level-up until you hit the next gear/talent/skill threshold, at which point you're suddenly overpowered again. Blizzard, recognizing the issues with this, is launching the largest overhaul of these systems to date in the ''Cataclysm'' [[Expansion Pack]], making skills scale automatically with level and scaling back the talent trees so that each point is significant.
** Under the new Post-''Cataclysm'' system, starting at level 10, nearly every even numbered level grants you a new spell, while every odd numbered level grants you a new talent. Some even levels don't grant abilities, but still unlock new features (such as Dual Talent Specialization at level 30). Though there ''are'' empty levels now and again where nothing but base stats change.
=== [[Platform Game]] ===
* In ''[[
** To cut it short: keep your swim a bit below your other stats (except for fatigue, which really doesn't ever need to go any higher than level 60) and focus on increasing your power and run stats, as these will let you hit harder and more frequently.
=== [[Puzzle Game]] ===
* Due to how the stat system works in ''[[Puzzle Quest]]'', every other level is empty, because you don't have enough points to raise anything important until two levels have passed.
=== [[Real Time Strategy]] ===
* Early in ''[[Ogre Battle]]'', alignment does this. Later in the game, your lawful characters are ''so'' lawful, their levels are meaningless for alignment. You do need both lawful and chaotic characters to get the best ending, however.
* ''[[Dawn of War|Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2]]'' features squads that level up and can collect ever more powerful gear, but rather than facing more powerful types of enemies, you simply face the same old enemies leveled to match you. You fight level 1 slugga boyz at level 1, then level 15 slugga boyz at level 15. At first glance, there is no apparent point to leveling up, as doing so merely results in smallish stat boosts with every skill point, but every 10 skill points would provide a powerful new ability that could change how each of the squads played. This, combined with new unlockable wargear options that were exponentially more powerful than the initial loadouts(thunderhammers, orbital bombardments, and Terminator armour were the most egregious examples), caused massive spikes in the power of the player's squads every couple missions with little noticable gain in between.
=== [[Roguelike]] ===
* In ''[[Ancient Domains of Mystery]]'', the Small Cave (a common destination for beginning adventurers) is easily one of the most dangerous areas under certain circumstances. Within the Small Cave, enemies scale to your character very, very aggressively. A first-level character will have a fairly easy time fighting the basic monsters that spawn there. A fiftieth-level adventurer will find common rats punching through his dragon plate mail.
** This is because monsters in the SMC spawn at roughly twice the character's level. That 50th level character is fighting 100th level rats.
* ''[[Nethack]]'' monster difficulty is the average of experience level and dungeon level. If you are playing a class that gains little combat ability with experience levels, gaining a level can be a step backwards, especially if the new monster difficulty introduces some particular early-game terror.
=== [[Role
* In ''[[Breath of Fire]]'' (the first one), when you get to about Level 60+, sometimes you will see see "Character reaches level yy!" and... that's it. Not even a single hit point. Not much reward after the ridiculous grind (especially since the game divides XP gained by how many group members total you have, up to 8) to get to those high levels...
* In ''[[
* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]: [[Oblivion]]'' levels are not simply worthless, but actively want you dead. Simply leveling up when you have the option is likely to result in an insignificant bonus to your abilities, but all the enemies still get harder. Everywhere. And your actual strength in combat is linked to abilities that aren't governed by your level. Fortunately you don't have to level up, as it only happens when you go to sleep, and your player has no biological requirement for sleep. Rather than deal with all the annoyance of making sure you get ''stronger'' by increasing level a lot of players simply avoid sleeping. This can all result in the land being saved from a horde of extremely feeble monsters by a strangely competent chronic insomniac.
** It depends on which skills are tied to your level. As long as those major skills are combat related then you'll keep up with the enemies. If they're situational skills, like Acrobatics or Alchemy, leveling purely through those will make you weaker relative to your enemies until your combat related skills catch up.
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*** Of course, the important NPCs are indestructible anyway, so they only get "knocked unconscious" in seconds rather than torn apart. Still annoying when you watch your NPC buddy get knocked down, get up and fight for a second, then knocked down again, etc.
** Even worse, Skill Levels are more important for your character for everything except Raw HP, and you don't need to level up to get higher skill levels. The only real consolation you get for leveling up is that the Infinity Plus One items are only available at higher levels. It is highly likely that you are going to need them.
** Another of Oblivion's main flaws was that the level scaling ability doesn't actually account for gear-dependency. This was remedied in Skyrim, which was going to reuse the ones from Fallout 3, and it works much better.
** In ''[[Morrowind]]'' the leveling system was based on a few of you major skills increasing, but the stat increases were tied to all skills that used that attribute. The result was that if you didn't remember to train your secondary skills inbetween leveling from using major skills, you could end up with a character with a high level and pitiful stats. The most effective builds ended up tagging many of the least used (or at least hardest to level) skills as primary ones, so that you wouldn't "accidentally" level and cheat yourself out of stat bonuses.
** For the most part, this is averted in ''[[Skyrim]]''. You don't exactly have stats other than health, magicka, and stamina. You're guaranteed one at level-up, and you're always given one perk. The perks are basically the replacement for stats. It's possible to, say, grind a skill like smithing or alchemy and get to a fairly high level without upgrading any combat skills, but even then, you would have good enough gear or potions to offset this.
* ''[[Fallout 3]]'', if you have Broken Steel. It's particularly egregious because the new monsters it introduces would be [[Demonic Spiders]] to even a character who reached level 50, and the cap is 30.
** It's even possible for a character to gain no stats at all from a level up.
** ''[[Fallout 3]]'''s system was actually implemented as a direct response to ''Oblivion.'' ''Oblivion'' started with a basic NPC and added levels and improved gear as the player leveled. By level 20 or so, this created a bizarre world where every random bandit wears a suit of top-shelf armor and has an artifact-level enchanted weapon. ''Fallout'' instead uses a list of pre-built enemies with a short list of random equipment. These enemies rotate in and then out as the player levels. For example, a level 8 character will start encountering Super Mutant Brutes in addition the garden variety Super Mutants. By level 15, there will be almost no regular Super Mutants to be found, having given over almost entirely to Brutes and tougher-still Masters. (This was later used in Skyrim)
** On the other hand, Broken Steel also subverts it by leveling up your nonhuman party members ''as if they were monsters'' (and monsters get stronger far faster than humans). This results in the nonhuman companions being horribly, hideously broken, and while {{spoiler|Fawkes}} was already broken to begin with, {{spoiler|Sergeant RL-3 and Dogmeat}} become veritable death machines.
** It was arguably the point, as the endgame didn't provide a decent batch of new enemies to constitute a real challenge without them.
** It is one of the most literal examples of the tropes because your attributes and skills only provide a minimal boost to effectiveness in combat outside the combat skill you are using (which you can max out at the very beginning of the game). Gaining levels causes enemy variant with higher health and generally better weapons to appear. Your actual combat effectiveness is based on what weapons and armor you have. So the level scaling is not actually related to the aspect of the game that defines how good you perform in combat.
*** This is somewhat of a moot point in any case. The effectiveness of late game weapons is so ridiculous that even mid-tier pistols would liquefy Behemoths, Overlords, and Hellfire Troopers with ease.
* [[Fallout: New Vegas]] makes things both better and worse. The list is less obvious, with Fiends using low-mid level equipment the whole game and ubiquitous NCR and Legion troopers peaking around level 8. On the flip side, Deathclaws are terrifying murder machines at every level. While this reduces instances of "These guys are nearly killing me, I must have leveled up!" the decision to only award a Perk every even level instead of every level makes all those odd levels ''feel'' emptier.
* [[Cool Old Guy|Tellah]] of ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' actually has his physical stats ''decrease'' as he gains levels to simulate the effects of old age. Fusoya is a more straight example, since his stats don't change after a level up.
** Most characters have a chance of not increasing any stats, or even ''decreasing'' them, when they level up after they reach level 70. Oddly, the one with the best post-70 level-ups is [[Spoony Bard|Edward]].
** If you want real ultimate power in ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'', put off gaining levels until you start getting a selection of Espers. The only thing you get for gaining levels before this is a pile of hit points and a tiny bit of [[Mana]]. (Well, the damage algorithm ''does'' take levels into account, but you're still not increasing your base stats without Espers.)
*** This also means equipment selections are more important than usual.
** ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'' is undoubtedly the king of this trope; the game becomes much easier once you disable random encounters and just abuse the crap out of GF-junctioning by playing the card game for items to transmute into spells.
** ''[[Final Fantasy IX]]'' is similar, although not quite as bad because your characters' base stats do increase somewhat when they level. However, their base stats increase more when wearing gear that increases that base stat. Therefore, to get the highest stats possible, you need to keep your characters at level one until you get gear with high stat bonuses.
** ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'' zig-zags this one. The game had several empty spots on its "spheregrid" leveling system, and several abilities required you to follow a sidepath and then waste time moving back to where you left off. Fortunately, you could retrace several previously crossed spaces for the cost of moving to one new one, and later in the game, you got both the ability to teleport around the spheregrid and the ability to fill in the empty spaces with new bonuses. (Heck in the "post-game," you could rip out weaker stat bonuses and replace them with stronger ones!)
** Common with most classes in ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]''. Even worse considering you have to reach at least level 15 for some classes to even start being useful, and levels take a long time. Red Mage is probably the closest thing to aversion to this, since they get a ridiculous quantity of spells, with surprisingly few of them not being useful in one situation or another.
** ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' can also fall into this trope if you [[Level Grind]] excessively without advancing the plot. Monsters get a lot of power just from leveling up, while human characters (especially physical-based classes) only get some power from leveling up and get more power from improving their gear. Since the enemies in random battles are tied to the average level of your party (while story battles have pre-set levels for the enemies), and many random battles contain monsters. Unless you go through the pains of nicking off gears off the humans from random encounters (their equipments are appropriately upgraded for their levels), those monsters can become a real pain very quickly.
** Easily averted by simply not using Ramza in random battles. He's the only character the developers could rely on being used frequently, so his level is the only consideration the scaling system has. If you sideline him in random battles, the game scales very slowly. When you gut [[Game Breaker|Thunder God Cid]] half way through, only the bonus dungeon or serious blunder could ever pose a threat to you again.
* In the browser RPG ''Heroes Of Ardania'', levels mean almost nothing to most classes except HP. If a player "plays as they should", their rise in levels and their rise in power should mostly be around the same.(Power will go faster for a player that really knows what they're doing.) But if a player just gains empty xp without doing quests or getting good items, in certain areas the number of monsters will rise depending on level and the player won't be strong enough. Of course, that is the player's own damn fault, and level only matters in a few instances anyway.
* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' suffered from this to an extent. The max. level one could get was 20. However, the protagonist would not become a Jedi until a few missions in to the game; party members also joined at whatever level the protagonist currently was. Thus it was of more benefit to not level the protagonist until they had become a Jedi so that the more useful abilities (i.e. Jedi) could be levelled up more.
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* Happens in ''[[The Last Remnant]]''. Your battle rank goes up according to how many fights you have fought. The more battles you fight, the harder the encounters become. And the more upgrades a character gets, the longer it takes them to level up that stat again. So if you thought you could ignore recruitment and just turn Rush into a [[One-Man Army]] through fighting monster after monster in the Ruins of Robelia Castle, you're in for a nasty shock.
** Balanced in the [[Updated Rerelease|PC version]]. While BR still scales HP/stats/art levels, it's not as detrimental to the player anymore, allowing stat gains later on for newer recruits. Additionally, characters all have their own individual (albeit invisible) battle rank in addition to the party's, allowing them to gain stats at their own pace to a certain extent.
* ''[[Muramasa:
* Due to a bug, ''[[Phantasy Star IV]]'' characters would actually lose stats and abilities when they hit level 99.
* Utilized in ''[[Risen]]''; levelling requires a [[Double Unlock]] where you have to expend "level points" to increase your strength, speed, special skills, etc. Otherwise, all you get is a HP increase and the ability to use leveled loot.
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* While the levels in [[Dead Island]] do increase your total health and give you points to spend customizing your abilities, zombies level with you. Your damage is mostly dependent on your weapons, meaning your expensively upgraded weapons fall a little more behind the zombies each time you level up and you need to find, upgrade, and modify new weapons.
=== [[Shoot'Em Up]] ===
* In ''[[Battle Garegga]]'', the [[Dynamic Difficulty]] increases the further you go without dying, the more you shoot, and the more you power up, etc. If your rank is too high, the later levels may become [[Unwinnable]].
* The arcade shooter ''Twin Eagle'' can suffer from this, due to its piss-cheap and unbalanced [[Dynamic Difficulty]] system. For example, if you make it to the high-speed sequence fully powered up, there's a great chance you will encounter the [[Demonic Spider]] red jets, which will often deliver unavoidable death with their missiles and rapid-fire bullets, making these sequences a [[Luck-Based Mission]]. And the game has [[Unstable Equilibrium]] too, which means you lose all your powerups if you die, meaning you are fucked in the later levels. And those [[Goddamned Bats|goddamned mini-choppers]] appear a lot more often and shoot more rapidly on the higher dynamic difficulties, also often causing unavoidable deaths.
=== [[Turn
* The ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' games have this happen sometimes, due to the random level-up system. One playthrough may invoke this trope by having every one of your party members with level five stats at equivalent level 40; the next may see you with an entire party of [[Game Breaker
** [[Averted Trope|Averting]] this is the biggest change ''Radiant Dawn'' made to the series level-up system. The game will always force a character to gain at least one stat-up during each level up, so it's mostly getting more then one increase per level. But
** On the other side of the coin though, you may well have a character cap all of his stats midway through his last tier (Nolan says hi), and the final levels cannot yield any further stat gain.
* As with many games, ''[[Shining Force]]'' increased statistics randomly when players leveled up. However, some can stand a chance of getting disproportionately low stats, such as gaining ''1 hit point'', and nothing else.
=== [[Tabletop Games]] ===▼
* ''[[Dungeons
▲== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
▲* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' is the [[Trope Maker]]. While early-edition clerics and magic users could gain new spells with every few levels, fighters and thieves were mainly stuck with the standard increase in attack bonus, saving throws and hit points that everyone got upon leveling up, in addition to increase in skill percentages if you were playing a thief. Combine this with increasingly-horrifying supernatural enemies against whom sharp-sword-swinging was a decreasingly recommendable tactic ([[Demonic Spiders|powerful undead in particular]], whose [[Level Drain]] attacks didn't care a whit about your armor and [[The Virus|turned anyone they killed into more of them]]), and it wasn't too long before the [[Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards]] thing took hold (course, there were some enemies that were very resistant if not immune to magic, so the casters weren't immune either). Each edition has attempted to fix this, but ultimately only succeeded in making the problem worse. It is such that in 3rd/3.5 if you are not a caster you are required to take short dips in many different classes - something that only works because the martial classes are front loaded in addition to being loaded with empty levels. In 4th you might get features, but rarely are these features actually meaningful in any way. So not only are you required to heavily optimize your character just to keep your attack up at the same rate that enemy defenses scale, but you are most likely still using low level abilities to do this as the higher level abilities are not even necessarily better!
** Also literally an empty level is Rogue 20 (the Level Cap) in edition 3.5- unlike almost every other level or ''class'' in the game, you get actually nothing for it. The standard bonuses to health, accuracy, and defenses are given to all classes, so Rogue 19/Anything 1 is better than Rogue 20
*** Even worse was Fighter 5, the absolute most pointless level in the game, which only increases attack bonus, hit points, and the minimum possible number of skill points, with no class features an no increase in saving throws. The only reason to take it is to get to Fighter level 6, and a serious optimizer only has about three reasons to do that (two specific 20-level builds or a particular alternative class feature at level 6). On the other hand, serious optimizers seldom recommend taking Fighter past level 2...
*** The "Truenamer" class from the ''Tome of Magic'' splatbook was perhaps the most sorely afflicted with dead leveling. It's core ability was based around using a skill check to invoke its powers. The problem is that skills have a maximum rank of 4+level, and the difficulty of said check increases by 2 each level, meaning that the Truenamer winds up getting further and further behind each level. This could be ameliorated by buying skill boosting items or taking levels in a few Prestige Classes that would make the checks
** [[Pathfinder]] took a look at 3rd Edition and carefully designed the revised base classes so that all of them get something new (either a class feature or a new range of spells) at each level. The aforementioned fighter is the best example. It used to be that every odd level (except for first) was a dead level but the added armor training and weapon training abilities gave fighters a huge bump taking them from the what was regarded as the most boring class in the game to a class that truly stood out in its category. It's made even less boring by various archetypes (specialized sub-classes) that give it more flavor, such as gladiator, crossbowman, roughrider, corsair, etc.
*** Sadly, being a d20 based system based on D&D 3/3.5, the game still suffers from [[Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards]], so they're still bad. Just not -as- bad.
** 4th Edition went to great lengths to avert this, with a standard level progression for all classes, PC and monster attacks and defenses scaling pretty evenly (although characters generally need to spend a few feat slots to keep up with the 'expected' progression, leading to the much maligned 'feat tax' abilities), and the paragon paths and (especially) epic destinies adding new and (usually) awesome powers for all high level characters. As a result the game is pretty balanced for most classes across most levels.
* With the introduction of Levelers in [[Magic:
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[[Category:Power At a Price]]
[[Category:Fake Difficulty]]
[[Category:Tabletop
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