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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7724806" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>In the case of something like World of Warcraft, what you have is false leveling. After about level 20, your character never actually gains another level. The numbers go up, but your characters place in the world is unchanged. You'll be grinding your way through level 70 bears with basically the same techniques and difficulty you encountered when you grinded your way through level 20 bears. The obvious conclusion is that the numbers have no existence, even in the abstract, in the in game world. Your character has not really increased in power and prestige from the early days of your time as a character. Rather, the only purpose of the numbers is external to the game reality - for example, ensuring that you approach the story presented by the game in a linear manner, reliably going through the content in a predictable order. Or else, to ensure that going through the content requires a certain amount of in game time, so that you remain a customer for a longer period. But it's reasonable from most everything you observe (if you follow the game's expectations) that your character has been a mighty hero from pretty much the time you left your factions starter area and has not 'leveled up' meaningfully any time since that time.</p><p></p><p>The same is fundamentally true of a game like Skyrim or any of the other elder scroll games. Since the content levels up around you, the numbers exist only for the out of game experience. You aren't meaningfully getting more powerful. Rather the numbers are going up simply for the pleasure the player takes in getting bigger numbers. The only real meaningful increase in power is your power relative to your expected power for your level. In some versions of the Elder Scrolls, a true power gamer then would endeavor (if they could) not to level up at all, as the most powerful possible character would be a 1st level character (or similarly low level character) with massive advantages compared to the games expectations. This character's narrative would be the one of being the most powerful, experienced, and capable character despite in fact never leveling up at all.</p><p></p><p>D&D originally had the idea that levels were meaningful, and that reality didn't level up with you. Mighty heroes would eventually overcome all but the most mundane challenges and move on to new roles in the game universe - lords and perhaps even gods. But as the original article points out, older versions of D&D often had a hard time delivering the same level of interest in high level game play because offensive powers generally vastly outstripped defensive capabilities. Eventually, the initiative roll was the 'midpoint' of the combat, and most combats were meaningfully over by the end of the first round. Later editions have tried to balance the desire to have gameplay be interesting and yet still capture the 'zero to hero' and beyond gameplay that appeared to be D&D's intention and which has become its core 'story'. The result though is sometimes the experience that fighting Orcus is functionally identical to fighting a Bugbear chieftain, just with bigger numbers, making leveling less meaningful.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7724806, member: 4937"] In the case of something like World of Warcraft, what you have is false leveling. After about level 20, your character never actually gains another level. The numbers go up, but your characters place in the world is unchanged. You'll be grinding your way through level 70 bears with basically the same techniques and difficulty you encountered when you grinded your way through level 20 bears. The obvious conclusion is that the numbers have no existence, even in the abstract, in the in game world. Your character has not really increased in power and prestige from the early days of your time as a character. Rather, the only purpose of the numbers is external to the game reality - for example, ensuring that you approach the story presented by the game in a linear manner, reliably going through the content in a predictable order. Or else, to ensure that going through the content requires a certain amount of in game time, so that you remain a customer for a longer period. But it's reasonable from most everything you observe (if you follow the game's expectations) that your character has been a mighty hero from pretty much the time you left your factions starter area and has not 'leveled up' meaningfully any time since that time. The same is fundamentally true of a game like Skyrim or any of the other elder scroll games. Since the content levels up around you, the numbers exist only for the out of game experience. You aren't meaningfully getting more powerful. Rather the numbers are going up simply for the pleasure the player takes in getting bigger numbers. The only real meaningful increase in power is your power relative to your expected power for your level. In some versions of the Elder Scrolls, a true power gamer then would endeavor (if they could) not to level up at all, as the most powerful possible character would be a 1st level character (or similarly low level character) with massive advantages compared to the games expectations. This character's narrative would be the one of being the most powerful, experienced, and capable character despite in fact never leveling up at all. D&D originally had the idea that levels were meaningful, and that reality didn't level up with you. Mighty heroes would eventually overcome all but the most mundane challenges and move on to new roles in the game universe - lords and perhaps even gods. But as the original article points out, older versions of D&D often had a hard time delivering the same level of interest in high level game play because offensive powers generally vastly outstripped defensive capabilities. Eventually, the initiative roll was the 'midpoint' of the combat, and most combats were meaningfully over by the end of the first round. Later editions have tried to balance the desire to have gameplay be interesting and yet still capture the 'zero to hero' and beyond gameplay that appeared to be D&D's intention and which has become its core 'story'. The result though is sometimes the experience that fighting Orcus is functionally identical to fighting a Bugbear chieftain, just with bigger numbers, making leveling less meaningful. [/QUOTE]
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