Every Role-Playing Game character likes it when their numbers go up, right? More Experience Points, more levels, more Hit Points, that's the way to win.
Except that sometimes, if you really want to be the best there ever was, you need to delay getting those things.
Maybe your level-ups will be more effective if you obtain a particular skill or item first — and it's not retroactive. Maybe if you evolve your mon too early, it will miss out on learning some of its moves. It might even be that if your character gets too strong, the storyline will advance and Permanently Missable Content will be lost. Whatever the cause, a character needs to temporarily hold back from gaining levels and increasing stats, or they'll eventually hit a ceiling on their growth.
Note that this trope doesn't apply if you can come back later and complete all the sidequests with no penalty. It's for when gaining levels and stats too soon is actively harmful in the long run. It can still apply, however, in cases where gaining additional strength later is possible but has become more difficult and expensive than if the character had taken their time in the first place.
A Sub-Trope of Low-Level Advantage, which includes more general cases of wanting to keep levels low (eg to take advantage of Level Scaling or a Level-Up Fill-Up). Sister trope to Magikarp Power, where slow growth for a strong finish is inherent to a character or ability, rather than optional; and Anti-Grinding, where the game takes steps to prevent or discourage you from focusing on raising levels (which may or may not include an actual penalty). Compare Crippling Overspecialization, for other cases where focusing on one type of growth has resulted in other types being limited, and Can't Catch Up, if a character is trying to advance alongside others but falling behind due to a weaker foundation. See also Power-Up Letdown, for general cases of advancement being less awesome than it could be. See also Skipping the Basics, in which someone tries to skip learning simple skills in favor of advanced ones.
Take your time reading through these examples...
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Anime & Manga
- Pokémon: The Original Series: Ash's Pikachu loses at first to Lieutenant Surge's Raichu. But Surge reveals during the fight that his Raichu was the result of evolving a Pikachu as soon as he caught it — which means it never learned speed-based moves like Agility and Quick Attack, giving Pikachu a strategy to win on the rematch.
Ash: Your Raichu's way too slow, Surge! That's its weakness.
Fan Works
- Beware of Cloud
: Jin encounters a group of Shrouded Mountain disciples who have advanced to the Profound Realm, but whose foundations are rushed and haphazard, which horrifies him. When he spars with them, their techniques are inefficient and poorly controlled, their bodies are slow, and he easily beats them all. Ultimately, after he demonstrates the superiority of his own foundation, they agree to have him shatter their cultivation, setting them back years or decades and making them start over, hopefully to get it right this time.
A cultivator whose foundation is flawed will find themselves unable to grow. Their Qi will be weak, their bodies sluggish. Gorging yourself on resources will weaken you.
Literature
- Beware of Chicken: Under Chow Ji's influence, Bi De gains strength rapidly by consuming refined pills, becoming far more powerful than any other spirit beast on the farm in just a matter of days. However, the impurities in the pills result in his strength being flawed and his body becoming vulnerable to Chow Ji's tremor techniques. After Chow Ji's defeat, it takes months of work for Bi De to gradually remove all the impurities and cracks from his Blades of Heavenly Moonlight.
- Bog Standard Isekai: Once a child reaches their "System Day" and gains a class, their growth in levels and stats is very rapid. However, there are specific achievements that can be awarded for performing remarkable feats before System Day, typically resulting in faster stat growth per level once a class is unlocked, and thus giving a permanent increase to one's potential. Brin actually plots with Hogg to move to another town, just so he can delay his System Day for a few weeks (since each town's Prefit sets the day), and have more time to reach achievement thresholds.
- Book of the Dead (2021): Class evolutions are unlocked according to the actions and achievements of the individual, and the exact requirements are not fully understood — especially for rare, illegal classes like Necromancer. Once the status ritual is performed at an evolution threshold, however (level 20, level 40, etc), that's the cutoff; a decision needs to be made immediately, and any further unlocking opportunities are lost.
- As Tyron approaches evolution thresholds, he deliberately holds off on performing a status ritual, because he wants to push his core skills to their caps first in hopes of unlocking better evolutions.
- When studying the underlying death magick that animates his minions, and how it interacts with bones, he is careful to avoid actually raising any minions, because that would give him experience and risk raising his level to the threshold before his studies are complete.
- Chrysalis (RinoZ): Evolving to the next tier makes a monster much larger and stronger. However, Anthony finds that there are several factors needed to maximise a monster's potential before it evolves, like forming a core (which sets you back to level 1 and makes you start the levelling process again), absorbing other monster cores — ideally including a special core to overclock one's own core — and fully mutating all organs. If any of those is not completed, the evolution will have less energy available, and the core's growth will be less, which in turn limits the potential advancement in the next evolution. James the worm evolved before forming a core, not knowing how the system worked, and has ended up as a decent digger but unable to really fight.
- Cradle Series:
- If you try to advance to the next stage of the sacred arts before your soul has properly stabilized at the current stage, then you risk damaging your soul. At best, such damage can make further advancement impossible, and if truly bad it can literally kill you.
- Each of the three Lord-tier advancements (Underlord, Overlord, and Archlord), involves reforging your body and soul in soulfire. This process cannot be halted once it starts, takes more or less time depending on the available aura density, and causes your sacred arts to go haywire while it is happening. As such, multiple characters deliberately choose not to advance in low-aura regions because the situation is tense and they cannot afford to be incapacitated for the hours or days it would take to advance under such conditions.
- No More Levels: Craven is The Trickster god, who likes making items that are situationally very useful, but with major drawbacks. Rin gets hold of a Craven-made ring that gradually poisons the wearer to build up resistance, which is very valuable in dungeons — but the ring rapidly scales up the amount of poison based on the wearer's level, to the point where it is soon fatal instead of useful. Rin, without any levels yet, just gets some loose bowels and can start training poison resistance, but his honorary uncle, at level 17, would die within minutes.
Percy: For anyone above level 10, it's a death sentence. Even if you have a grade A poison resistance ability, this is one of the few artifacts that bypasses it entirely. It's treacherous. But here's the thing. You don't have any experience to lose. You don't even have a level yet. For someone like you, it's perfect.
- Null And The Void: Chapter 4 mentions that "Intellect determines how many Perks you can unlock per Level up", so taking the time to get more Intellect before levelling up by hunting monsters will mean more perks down the line.
- Return of the Runebound Professor: It's possible to quickly and easily advance your Rune tier by simply taking a tier 1 Rune and copying it until you have seven, fusing them together into a tier 2, copying that, etc. However, that will produce poor quality Runes with less potent effects, and using a single element will leave your soul so unbalanced that you'll soon reach a bottleneck where you can't successfully fuse the next tier. Making truly strong Runes requires a clear and specific intent, with the right balance of variety and specialisation, adjusted to the tier (lower-tier Runes need to be relatively narrow in scope to work well, while higher-tier Runes can handle broader concepts). It's possible to remove bad Runes and start over, but it involves essentially tearing them out of your soul, which causes serious damage that can take months or years to heal — and removing the "lynchpin" Rune that you used to advance to your current tier is even worse. It's generally accepted that you need to take your time and get it right (or at least do your best) on the first try.
- Rise of the Living Forge: Arwin was trained as the Hero by raising his tier and upgrading his class as quickly as possible, making him faster and tougher and stronger and granting him powerful skills. However, with more life experience, he's recognised that a more effective approach in the long run is to focus on gaining achievements and titles, which can upgrade skills or provide other temporary and permanent benefits, then level up. In theory, it's still possible to gain achievements afterward, but since many achievements are awarded for doing difficult things like defeating a monster at a much higher tier than yourself, it's easier to get them early than late. Furthermore, achievements will sometimes have the effect of upgrading one of your skill selections next time you level up; if you've already gone through your skill selections, it's too late.
- Runeblade:
- There are only ten slots for general skills, and skills can never be deleted, but certain sets of skills can be merged into one after all the skills hit their level cap. As a result, to obtain an optimal set of skills,note it's necessary to painstakingly train until the right ones have been obtained and levelled up, refusing any other skills that the System offers along the way. Accept a single skill that doesn't fit, and you'll never have a perfect set.
- Many of the Honours that give permanent stat boosts and unlock rarer class evolutions are dependent on great achievements at low levels, or even before first reaching class selection. Rushing to gain levels will mean completely missing out on many of them (such as killing high-level enemies before reaching level 100) and making others much harder to obtain (eg killing enemies 100 levels higher than oneself).
- This turns out to be a recurring theme along the path to ascension, such as the need to ignite one's Aspects before reaching the second tier, or else miss out on them entirely due to one's soul "crystallizing" and thus have one's growth permanently limited.
- Saintess Summons Skeletons:
- It's normal to delay taking the filter trials, and first train up skills, because there are substantial and essentially irreplaceable bonus rewards for exceptional performance in the trials. Each trial can only be taken once, so if you go before you're fully ready, and get mediocre results, you're stuck. And that's before considering the possibility of failing a trial and never again being able to level up. Gaining levels between trials is the easiest but also least important part of becoming strong.
- The third filter trial involves collecting monster imprints to fill up a "mana heart". But the type of bonus you get from the completed heart depends on the type of imprints that went into it, and it has a limited capacity, so if you just add every monster you find, then it might not match your build very well (eg a spellcaster having bonuses to physical strength instead of mana). Building an ideal heart takes patience to hunt down the most appropriate monsters, discarding any that don't match your goals.
- So I'm a Spider, So What?: As Kumoko improvises her way through levelling up and gaining skills, she discovers that there are skills that increase the stats gained by levelling up — and they don't apply retroactively, meaning that every level gained before purchasing those skills was a lost opportunity. She applies that lesson when training Sophia, ensuring that Sophia will gain all sorts of powerful skills before ever seeing combat and gaining any levels — which eventually results in Sophia becoming monstrously overpowered compared to everything else in the System, capable of killing S-ranked monsters in a single hit.
- Syl A Slime Monster Evolution Lit RPG: Getting a new class level can reveal a new skill based on what has occurred between levels. But as Syl learns in chapter 6, skills don't need combat to reveal themselves from their "???" name state. So if someone is close to unlocking some new skill due to their own work, they might want to refrain from combat so they don't level their class and get something they were going to get anyway.
- The Traveler Initiative: The level cap for a tier 0 monster is 10, at which point they can evolve to tier 1. However, gaining large amounts of XP beyond the cap before evolution will unlock a hidden quest to first reach level 20, for extra rewards such as increasing the effect of all future evolutions.
- Too Stubborn to Die:
- All kills give experience and help you level up, gaining more stats. However, the skills you will be offered at certain level thresholds are influenced by your actions beforehand, with the System keeping track of abstract "effort". Killing every trash-tier monster you come across will quickly rack up the XP and result in fast levels, but the skill selections will be mediocre. Waiting to fight only really worthy opponents will mean only occasional levels, but Rare-tier and Epic-tier skills. Thus, Aaron is happy to leave it to his weaker companions to take out low-level encounters, only getting involved himself when something big threatens the party.
- It's possible to go a step further and turn down a skill selection, with the System keeping a portion of the recorded "effort" to upgrade the next skill selection. Not all of the effort value is preserved, but in some cases it's better to take nothing at first in hopes of something good at the next threshold.
- Zenith Of Sorcery: The transition from a rank three "logos" mage to rank four involves the mage fusing all of their acquired logos fragments into a core, which then makes assimilating further logos fragments much easier — but only so long as those fragments are related to the ones used in the core. Delaying the creation of a core until more fragments can be included means more potential in the long run, but that process of gaining and reconciling many fragments can be very difficult and time-consuming to do.
Marcus: If the foundation was made by fusing a small number of logos fragments, it will be difficult to build upon it after its creation, and it will be very difficult to incorporate weakly-related logos into it. On the other hand, a comprehensive foundation made by fusing hundreds of logos fragments into it will be easy to expand upon and might even accommodate completely unrelated logos into its structure... There is a big difference between a fire elementalist who has a really comprehensive foundation and can freely incorporate related elements like smoke and lava, perhaps even adding trace elements of something unusual like swords and flowers… and a fire elementalist that can only handle pure fire logos and nothing else.
Tabletop Games
- Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition: Overlaps with Evil Is Easy in Dragonlance's Orders of High Sorcery. The Evil-aligned Black Robes are those who chase power, and they gain levels fastest, but they also have the lowest level Cap. Conversely, the Good-aligned White Robes who choose to use magic to serve others need to gain substantially more Experience Points per level but can advance much further.
- Nightbane: World Book 3: Through the Glass Darkly: The spell creation rules prevented you from trying to modify a spell until you had gained an experience level. Palladium experience charts require much more XP as levels rise, making it harder for higher level characters to get a subsequent chance, and fewer total since most charts cap at 15/16. The ideal would be to learn all spells while level 1 and try to modify each spell until failure before gaining a level.
Video Games
- Baldur's Gate:
- The NPCs who can join your party will automatically have levels matching your own. This is convenient for making them immediately combat ready, but if you reach a high level before meeting them, you'll miss out on the chance to steer their growth, such as allocating weapon proficiencies. To maximise their potential, you need to make your way to them while still at level 1.
- If you go for a dual-class character, when you activate the new class you might put a proficiency point or more into a weapon that you already knew before dual-classing. Except that the point won't sum up to those you already invested, which are temporarily removed until you reactivate your original class. Only the points beyond those you already gave to your character are effectively added - the rest are lost. So for example, if you invested two proficiency points into short swords and then dual class, those two points will be missing as if your character never learnt how to wield a short sword, until you reactivate your starting class; when it happens, if you meanwhile added one or two points to short swords, they will be ignored, only the third point will be summed. This however can be prevented if you don't level up at all until you have enough xp to go straight to the reactivation of your former class, that is, your class level + 1. By doing so, all of your previously invested points will show up, and anything you add now is effectively summed. This is the only legal way to get 5 proficiency points in a weapon and achieve grandmastery (as a fighter/thief or fighter/druid), by the way.
- Breath of Fire III has the Master system, where your playable characters apprentice under certain special NPCs. It's best to keep your party's level-ups to a minimum until you find your first Master because they give stat bonuses and penalties whenever one of your characters level up and to get them to teach you their skills, you need to gain a set number of levelups while studying under them, which is naturally easier to do when your level is lower.
- Dragon Quest VI and Dragon Quest VII rely on the player winning battles against decently challenging enemies to gain job levels and consequently skills from advancing. Each area has a maximum level at which job points are awarded; if a character exceeds this maximum level, they will not be awarded job points and not advance. Therefore, grinding early on can lead to some big trouble in class developing. In VII, right before you can even take jobs, you're forced into a long, difficult dungeon with multiple That One Boss candidates — and your characters are stripped of their natural skills in the process. If you know it's coming, you'll want to level grind, but as noted, that might be a bad idea. This dungeon, understandably, is where many players abandon the game.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind contains an Imperial Cult quest that gives a much more powerful reward (a +20 Blunt Weapons ring, instead of +5) if your Blunt Weapons skill is under 40 when you complete it.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: The stat boosts you get from levelling up range from +1 to +5 depending on which skills you improved since your last level up, so in order to get the most out of your level ups, you have to have first taken the time to train some of your minor skills connected to the stat you intend to boost. This is particularly important for the Endurance stat, which governs how many Hit Points you gain on level up, and isn't retroactive, so you really need to train related skills in between your level ups.
- Empire Earth II: Advancing to a new epoch as soon as possible means the player no longer has access to techs that remained unresearched, which could still provide bonuses later on in the game.
- Fallout 3: The Broken Steel add-on has a variant, where you need to level, but avoid picking up any of the stat-boosting bobbleheads, until you have reached level 30 and chosen the "Almost Perfect" perk. Almost Perfect boosts all your stats to 9, and then the bobbleheads can increment them all to 10, the maximum — but the perk will ignore already-collected bobbleheads, so it doesn't work in the opposite order.
- Fallout Shelter: The Endurance stat governs how many Hit Points a dweller will gain on level-up, but those points are not retroactive. If you want to maximise a dweller's HP, you need to keep them away from any activities that would give experience, until they have maxed out their Endurance in the Fitness Center, plus you need to obtain the best possible Endurance-boosting outfit. For the same reason, although legendary dwellers gained from lunchboxes can be useful Crutch Characters in the early game, their high starting levels mean that they've missed out on extra HP and your home-grown dwellers can become stronger in the long run.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy I: In remakes from Dawn of Souls and up, your stats growth was affected by your current class, so you got the best stats by leveling up as little as possible before the class upgrades.
- Final Fantasy III: All of your stats except max HP change upon changing classes. You gain HP based on your Vitality stat when you level up, so it's best to wait until you open the Karateka or Ninja classes which have the highest Vitality to do a lot of your Level Grinding if you want to have more HP at the end. Similarly, you might want to unlock and change to the initial job classes as soon as possible to avoid weak HP gains from being Onion Knights.
- Final Fantasy VI: Most Espers give a special level up stat bonus. Therefore, it's best to save all your level ups for when you have some Espers with stat bonuses.
- Final Fantasy VIII can actually be easier to beat at low levels due to its Level Scaling. If you do level up, it's best to wait until you have Guardian Forces with Stat Bonus abilities, which award an extra point (in the case of HP, an extra 10) to that respective stat upon leveling; Brothers has HP, Ifrit has Strength, Carbuncle has Vitality, Siren has Magic, Leviathan has Spirit, Cactaur has all of them. This means levelling up in earnest is best left till after you get the Ragnarok, as the aforementioned Cactaur plus Bahamut (with Ability X 4, so you can equip more Bonuses at once) become available at that point.
- Final Fantasy IX: Stat growths depend on the gear your characters have equipped. On this logic, it's best to keep levels low until you get equipment that yield better bonuses. Also, Magic Stones (used to equip a character's passive abilities) increase with a character's level, with a fixed starting number for each character. The levels of the later four characters (two of which only join near the end of Disc 2) depend on the current average of the entire party, and are penalized with their Magic Stones in the process. If you want a balanced party, the level average must stay at 1 until the last party member finally joins.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Having a character "master" a particular class grants a bonus ability/combat art they get to keep even when changing/promoting classes. If you rush through and promote your units to stronger classes as soon as you're able without mastering their previous classes, they won't have these abilities and won't be quite as good as another character who did.
- Knights of the Old Republic: After Taris, the player character's original class progression is replaced with a Jedi class of your choice. The less levels you gain before that point, the more you can develop the Jedi class afterward.
- In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, most of your party consists of untrained Force-sensitives who can be trained and re-class as a Jedi if you build enough influence with them, similar to the player character of the first game (the second game's PC is already a Jedi and can get a Prestige Class, instead.) However, this can be inverted with some characters like Atton and Mira, who gain unique feats from leveling up in their original classes that they stop getting once they become Jedi (Sneak Attack for Atton and Targeting for Mira), so depending on how you want them to play, it may be worth it to let them level up normally or even put off re-classing them until the bonus feats aren't worth it anymore.
- Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: The stats that the Bros gain upon level-up are in direct relation to Bowser's level. Keep their levels sufficiently low until Bowser hits level 37, and then you're pretty much free to grind away.
- NetHack: Donating a certain number of gold pieces to a priest will permanently improve the character's protection against physical attacks, with the amount of gold required increasing with every Character Level. Gathering lots of gold while maintaining a low level and then donating all the gold to a priest is known as the Protection Racket.
- Pokémon:
- Pokémon who are levelled up with Rare Candy will miss out on the extra stats that come from Effort Values, only obtainable through combat. This can be fixed by battling after levelling up — but in generation 1 and generation 2, the stats from Effort Values are only applied on level-up, so once you reach the level cap, the opportunity for those extra stats is lost.
- Later generations redesigned the way that Effort Values work, with the result that you're no longer stuck. However, if you want a Pokémon to have Effort Values that match its build, you need to either be very picky about the opponents it fights, which makes Level Grinding even more tedious, or else purchase berries to remove Effort Values before seeking out additional fights that will give you the values you want.
- Evolving a Pokémon with a stone will make it stronger, but will typically prevent it from learning any more moves. If you want a Starmie that knows Hydro Pump, or an Arcanine that knows Flamethrower, you'll need to do a lot of Level Grinding of their earlier evolutions first. (On the other hand, sometimes the stone-based evolutions gain their own moves, particularly the forms of Eevee, so you need to know in advance whether to evolve early or late.) Games since Pokémon Sword and Shield downplay this trope, as the Move Reminder allows a Pokémon to gain all the moves it would normally learn — although moves exclusive to an earlier form can still be lost if it evolved too early.
- Some Pokémon learn moves in their first forms which they can't learn once they evolve, encouraging you to delay their evolution for a while. For example, Shroomish is a weak Grass-type which evolves into the powerful Breloom at the relatively low level of 23... but if you want it to learn Spore, a 100% accurate Forced Sleep move, you'll have to keep it as a Shroomish until (depending on the game) anywhere from level 40 to level 54, past the point where Shroomish starts leveling up much more slowly due to its EXP curve.
- In a Downplayed example, Pokémon typically learn moves quicker in their unevolved forms than in later forms, meaning that they can get more powerful moves sooner if they hold off evolving for a while. For instance, while Bulbasaur, Ivysaur, and Venusaur all learn exactly the same moves by level-up, Bulbasaur gets new moves every 3 levels, Ivysaur every 5, and Venusaur every 7. This effect compounds the gap for individual moves, meaning that Bulbasaur gets its final level-up move, Solar Beam, at level 36, but Venusaur has to wait until level 58 to get it.
- In Gens I-IV, before TMs (which teach new moves to Pokémon) became reusable, holding onto certain powerful ones available early to teach to stronger Pokémon that can only be acquired later is more beneficial. In Gen. I, for example, the TMs for Bubblebeam, Dig, and Thunderbolt are all available by the third gym but are better off held onto for later. It may be tempting to teach Thunderbolt to the Pikachu you can catch very early on in Viridian Forest to give you a decent Electric-type attacker in the mid-game. However, even after evolving into Raichu, it will fall behind the power curve by the late game. If you instead hold onto Thunderbolt to teach to the much-better Jolteon or even the legendary Zapdos (both of which only learn the weak Thundershock and Powerful, but Inaccurate Thunder naturally), it will serve them as a hard-hitting but still-accurate primary Electric-type attack up through the end of the game.
- In Pokémon Red and Blue, holding off on using any unique item until you can reach Cinnabar Island and access the Missingno "item duplication" glitch is highly beneficial in the long-run. TMs, Rare Candy, the stat-boosting Vitamin items, Nuggets, etc. can all be duplicated there and used/sold indefinitely to power up your entire party and more easily complete the Pokédex. Cinnabar Island is the second-to-last new area accessed (besides Indigo Plateau), meaning you need to delay the potential benefits for quite a while, but they are very powerful if you wait.
- In Valkyrie Profile, to get the maximum possible benefit out of accessories that grant a bonus to your DME and CP on level up, you naturally want to level up characters who're currently wearing them, which is thankfully pretty easy to do thanks to storeable Non-Combat EXP that you can distribute to your characters as you wish.
- Xenogears has the character Emeralda, who has a certain side-quest in Disc 2 that turns her into an adult form. After that quest, she has insane stat growth with every level up. If you keep her level low at the beginning and do some grinding after the quest, then she can be even more powerful than her own Humongous Mecha.
Webcomics
- Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: People in the RPG Mechanics 'Verse can absorb a limited, level-dependent number of Essences: Rare Random Drops that permanently increase their stats and grant some of the monster's abilities. Given the Early Game Hell, many explorers take what they can get. Those with the means and knowledge to wait for essences that best complement their own abilities tend to be either privileged enough to buy equipment to compensate — or transmigrators like the protagonist.
