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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7458096" data-attributes="member: 7006">Leveling is purely a game mechanic meant to keep the default player interested in their character over the long term.  The feeling of course being that unless you were one of the "actor" type of players who could remain invested in their PC and advance and evolve him or her over the years through the simple act of just playing them through the story even if the character never "got" anything... the other 95% of the player populace wanted and needed new things to "play" with every couple of sessions.  New abilities, new spells, higher numbers, this and that.  If the character sheet didn't seem to change more frequently, they'd be less invested in keeping the character going.But as a result, the game mechanics begin to rub up against the internal "reality" of the campaign setting itself, and you have to gently massage or completely handwave away all the descrepencies between the two.  Why are PCs gaining all this power while the NPCs are not?  The Watch Captain who has been on the job for 20 years defending a city still only has enough HP to maybe survive a single Burning Hands spell, but this rando kid who's gone out into the wilderness for the last three weekends to "adventure" now can take a Hill Giant's maul to the face and then brush himself off and ask for more.Yes, it's narratively dumb, and it makes no sense.  But that's why D&D is a game and not a novel.  And oftentimes the game part of D&D takes precedence.  And thus the best you can do is just... ignore it... when the game and the story are at odds.  Accept the game requires mechanics that run counter to the story, let those mechanics play out, and not think too hard about trying to explain the issues away.The other option of course being you play the illustrious E6 style game and have just 6 levels worth of abilities that character can acquire over the out-of-game years you run the campaign.  So the PCs probably won't level up until like 6 months of real-world play.  You do that... and really emphasize the fact that PCs DON'T change much at all over months and years in-world... and you get to keep HP low so that they can still get one-shotted by an Adult dragon even after 2 years of adventuring, and it makes the really old NPCs that have spent the last 50 years of their lives defending the world actually something of an anomoly when they are Level 18-- a level that not a single of one your players is ever going to sniff because the game will end before that character ever came close to it.The question though remains whether your players could remain invested in a game like that?  When they didn't "get" anything over the months of play other than just the experiences in the story.  Is that enough for them?  If so, great!  But I tend to doubt most tables will have that luxury.</blockquote>

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