Handle with Care: a Treatise on Character Progression

"One player character is much more powerful than the others, and it's making it hard to balance fights."

"My players have bought everything they need and now money is worthless."

Have you caught yourself saying anything like this? Your problem might be to do with character progression, the leading cause of death among games in the 18-34 age bracket.  Here, I'm going to discuss why it exists, what problems it causes, and why you don't actually need it. 

Why it exists

Narratively speaking, character progression is satisfying. We like to see characters grow and change to meet their challenges. Players enjoy the feeling of character advancement, watching enemies that were previously a challenge become non-issues, and this can help build a sense of scale, particularly in video games that have a fixed beginning, middle and end. By starting the game fighting goblins, and ending it fighting gods, it's easier to appreciate the stakes of the story. From a power-gamer perspective, the enjoyment of the role-playing game is gaining strength to take on new opponents. 

What's the problem?

First, the mechanical issues. To avoid trivialising combat (a large part of most RPGs), when the players grow, the enemies must grow with them. This is an inversion of the narrative about character growth, above; instead of finding a new challenge, the players get arbitrarily stronger from punching goblins and now a new threat must find them. There's two schools of thought on how to deal with this. 

Different enemies

Most JRPGs and TTRPGs have enemies at fixed levels, or enemies in a small range of levels depending on location. In D&D 5e (2024), an ettin has a challenge rating of 4, suggesting it would be a reasonable challenge for a party of 4 adventurers at level 4. (The uselessness of challenge rating is beyond the scope of this essay.) In Final Fantasy (1987), there are goblins right outside Cornelia that are supposed to challenge a level 1 party; their strength and rewards remain the same regardless of the player's level, so it's not rewarding to just sit in the starting area and step on goblins. The player must search for new locations to progress, and if they advance too quickly, they'll be squished themselves. This can feel punishing in an open world, especially to casual players, leading to:

Level scaling

Made infamous by games like Oblivion (2006) and Fallout 3 (2008), this involves making a set pool of enemies tougher to match the players. This lets players explore an open world in any direction, but can feel disconnected from the logic of the game world as penniless bandits appear in armour that would, if sold, set them up for life. 

An Oblivion bandit in advanced armour.

Level scaling can feel punishing in its own way, as players are forced to optimise their character to match where the developers felt they should be at a given point in the game. It's not uncommon for Oblivion playthroughs to avoid levelling up at all to side-step the issue of enemies becoming more combat effective than the player without in-depth planning. 

This gets even worse in multiplayer games like tabletop RPGs, where the GM must aim his foes at the whole party. Differences in player skill, character direction and class can all result in wildly divergent results when the dice hit the table, leading to poorly optimised characters being one-shot while the veteran player's fighter simply can't be hurt at all. Beyond problems with scaling enemies, player growth can unbalance the game world in other ways. Characters that get stronger than the guards can handle can theoretically break the law with impunity, if they're willing to do so (although the super-ultra guards might be on their way). 

On a narrative level, this kind of advancement is empty without a goal to work towards. Your character got stronger? Great - why? How? When will they stop? Why hasn't everyone kept growing like you have? This can be even worse when they do have a goal! You want money and fame? You have that now. You killed the six-fingered man and avenged your father, so why are you still adventuring? One way to deal with this is enforcing player retirement, or at least patron play. Your 10th level fighter is busy managing a demesne now, he doesn't have time to go cave-diving for pennies. 

But what if you could deal with player advancement on your own terms?

The Circular Narrative

Don't progress if you're not going anywhere.

If you are the kind of GM who only runs published adventures, you can stop reading. Not because the following won't be helpful, but because you're insane and I want nothing to do with you. Equally, if every one of your games is masterfully orchestrated down to the session to ensure that every player character wraps up their own story arc and reaches level 20 by the time they fight the final boss, probably in a battle where no-one can hear the GM over the epic battle music, or see their character sheet or their custom 3D-printed miniature for the dramatic lighting and the dry ice, you can stop reading as well, because you don't have players, you have actors. 

But for the GM whose last game ended with player characters growing out of control, or a half-assed final boss fight because the players were already out of control, I have good news - your game doesn't have to go anywhere. You don't have to have a final boss. You can, if you want - but if you want a dungeon- or monster-of-the-week experience, you don't have to give your characters levels, or experience, or character points, or even a significant equipment boost that won't be taken away. 

As an analogy, consider TV shows. There's a spectrum of plot advancement: some shows have something important happen every episode, or near to it; some have precisely nothing important happen over their whole run. Most are somewhere in-between, where you get plateaus of character and plot development until an episode where something changes significantly for one or all of the characters. The rate of power level growth in most tabletop RPGs would be called insane by any traditional writer, so of course it causes problems!

For your next game, strongly consider - with player discussion - finding the power level you want to be at, and staying there. Perhaps not permanently, but long enough that you get to enjoy it. You could even try it in your current game: "I like the place we are now as a party and in the world, so we're going to pause levelling for a while." In a game like GURPS you can even tweak individual characters to match the power level you want, irrespective of point level. Maybe the monk can have a couple of abilities to pull him up to the fighter's level, and the wizard can have a slightly nerfed power item. If you like low-powered fantasy, why age out of it for no reason other than the book says 1-5 character points per session? 

The Moderate Position

"My players won't agree to that!" 

Very possible. There's a weaker form of this principle: only advance if you're going somewhere, and only in a way it makes sense. Say that you know the plot will end with the characters fighting that ettin from before, or some other powerful creature or villain. If and only if the players are making strides towards the main plot, they get more powerful so that they match the villain by the time they reach it. While they're mucking about fighting goblins and doing side-quests, any rewards will be ephemeral, or social; favours they can call in, or consumables, or armour that will inevitably be eaten by a rust monster, not permanent character bonuses. 

A similar concept can apply to characters' individual aims. Sam the Swashbuckler wants to be the greatest swordsman in the world. So, he advances significantly only when he does things in furtherance of that aim - fighting other sword masters, for example - and when he achieves it, he retires. Frank Fighter progresses towards his dream of owning a castle by hiring mercenaries and impressing local lords; going dungeoneering is a side hustle for him, so he gets nothing from it. Their players can still have fun going on adventures with their friends, without the GM worrying if their numbers will grow out of control and let them walk over the 2N goblins he's prepared.