Potato is yum

One of the biggest aspects of Lit-RPG is the assignment of numbers or letters to various levels of power. One of the biggest aspects of cultivation stories are the cultivation levels that the characters reach throughout the story. Much of these stories depend on ranks and levels to set clear limits for how power is measured just like how class is measured in real life. In fact, these ranks are often a direct mirror to political and economic power in the world the author tries to paint. This often brings up a very difficult issue that many stories have to solve in some way.

Often, the main character or their party are under leveled and in theory by the world’s logic should not win a certain fight. The main character, expectedly, wins anyway through the help of some BS ability or through some rule that “transcends the barriers of level”. These solutions to power scaling issues honestly feel very disappointing to read. I thought the whole point of these levels were to give a framework for the functions of the world and making a hole for the main character to get past these issues without any reasonable conflict really makes the story feel like the main character obtained an undeserved victory.

I see this pattern a lot with Murim and other cultivation stories where the main character learns some neat technique that supposedly “transcends the barriers of stage” or some BS without really explaining how exactly this power is quantified. In fact, in many of these stories the reader really gets no idea how powerful any of these levels are because in the end the levels don’t actually matter that much only the fact that the main character is supposed to be weaker than the enemies they are going against. However, when the purpose of level is just meant to be a means to say “The main character is weaker trust me” it kind of makes levels lose all meaning. This can clearly be seen in many popular stories such as World After The Fall where the author has basically given up on trying to power scale and just has characters fight to judge the power difference.

Somehow, by not introducing some kind of power scale, the conflicts feel more real as it doesn’t makes sense for someone to be able to precisely judge the difficulty of their opponent without a large amount of prior observation.

In the end, I think many stories fall into this trap of trying to make their main character feel weaker compared to their opponent instead of showing through the actions and reactions of the two characters than the main character is actually weaker until they use their special ability or cool new technique to get them to win. The power scale should not do the heavy lifting of upping the tension.