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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 6136557" data-attributes="member: 7006">For all kinds of situations like this... I always default to a particular way of thinking--D&amp;D is a story.&nbsp; D&amp;D is a game.&nbsp; And more often than not, one is going to run counter to the other in order to make both sides work.&nbsp; So just accept it and handwave it away.So in the this case... &quot;leveling up&quot; is distinctly a game concept.&nbsp; It has nothing to do with story.&nbsp; The fact that a person remains flatline in power and ability for however many days/weeks/months but then suddenly increases in health / abilities / skills at a completely arbitrary point is purely to make the game work.&nbsp; The game says your PC &quot;gets better&quot; over time... but there is no cause and effect inside the fiction why this switch suddenly turns on and you get all this stuff at a single point in time once you've reached a certain game milestone of &quot;XP&quot;.Yes... we all try and justify this switch by saying to ourselves that the characters have been slowly &quot;gaining power&quot; in the background of the story this entire time... but that doesn't play out in the game.&nbsp; Our numbers don't slowly increase over time.&nbsp; The game doesn't have us go from a 15 STR to a 15.1 STR to a 15.2 STR to a 15.3 STR and so on until we magically reach a 16 STR just as our character coincidentally dings 4th level (if you're playing 4E).So to go through all the mental effort of trying to align every single game point to some sort of &quot;reality&quot; within the story to me is a waste of energy, because it's never going to work 100%.&nbsp; There will always been issues and loopholes where game and story just can't align.&nbsp; So I just choose to whitewash the &quot;game parts&quot; as a necessary evil to the story we're creating, because you need the game parts to actually have a game to play.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 6136557, member: 7006"] For all kinds of situations like this... I always default to a particular way of thinking-- D&D is a story. D&D is a game. And more often than not, one is going to run counter to the other in order to make both sides work. So just accept it and handwave it away. So in the this case... "leveling up" is distinctly a game concept. It has nothing to do with story. The fact that a person remains flatline in power and ability for however many days/weeks/months but then suddenly increases in health / abilities / skills at a completely arbitrary point is purely to make the game work. The game says your PC "gets better" over time... but there is no cause and effect inside the fiction why this switch suddenly turns on and you get all this stuff at a single point in time once you've reached a certain game milestone of "XP". Yes... we all try and justify this switch by saying to ourselves that the characters have been slowly "gaining power" in the background of the story this entire time... but that doesn't play out in the game. Our numbers don't slowly increase over time. The game doesn't have us go from a 15 STR to a 15.1 STR to a 15.2 STR to a 15.3 STR and so on until we magically reach a 16 STR just as our character coincidentally dings 4th level (if you're playing 4E). So to go through all the mental effort of trying to align every single game point to some sort of "reality" within the story to me is a waste of energy, because it's never going to work 100%. There will always been issues and loopholes where game and story just can't align. So I just choose to whitewash the "game parts" as a necessary evil to the story we're creating, because you need the game parts to actually have a game to play. [/QUOTE]

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