Level up "experience" problems // Xianxia "Devour" mechanics

[Basiun]

A funny thing. Inconsistencies or outright ridiculous requirements to level up in RPG novels ("Devouring" or "refining" in xianxia).

Let's say that an MC kills "5242" mobs around his/her level to go from level 325 to 326 - Doesn't that mean that for a thousand people to do the same, 5 million monsters/people have to be killed? Shouldn't that pretty much mean that most monsters/people should go extinct quite fast?

Obviously this can't be applied to "game" style genres, dungeon genres nor FULLY applied to stories where things are naturally born at a ridiclous level due to respawn reasons etc.

There's clear reasons as to why it takes so many mobs to level up, since if you only needed to kill a few, the story would either be over in 100 chapters or become a super-high level grind where the MC rarely even farms, or simply have a ton of repetitive "level restrictions" that stump the story for 30 chapters, but since I started noticing the massive plothole that these "experience/devour" mechanics have I always bug myself about how idiotic the design is.

I think the main problem stems from the fact that authors tend to overplay numbers far too much. Xianxia usually uses the word "billion" or "trillion" when just 10 thousand would do fine and be more descriptive.
If monsters are truly dangerous, the main character could only fight a few at a time, struggle and get realistic rewards for succeeding. Normally in power-grind novels it's quite the opposite where the first encounter is super hard and levels them up twice whereas the next paragraph goes like "And then they killed 421 monsters and earned 1 more level" or "Over the past next few months they kept farming relatively easily and earned another level"
That kind of writing makes no sense. Why would a single fight level/almost level you up, take an hour but the next few months of constant fighting barely have the same effect?

The worst offender in this type of problem is Xianxia novels, as they usually describe for example "spirit beasts" as ancient 10000 years old rare creatures, while their cores are being sold in the thousands at every street corner and the MC always ends up pretty much pushing them to extinction.
The close runner-up would be power-fantasy RPG stories, but they at least sometimes have some kind of redeeming factor such as dungeons to respawn monsters.

Well, this was a pointless post but I just wanted to hear your opinions, what do you guys think about the level up design of most novels?

 

[Nahrenne]

A funny thing. Inconsistencies or outright ridiculous requirements to level up in RPG novels ("Devouring" or "refining" in xianxia).

Let's say that an MC kills "5242" mobs around his/her level to go from level 325 to 326 - Doesn't that mean that for a thousand people to do the same, 5 million monsters/people have to be killed? Shouldn't that pretty much mean that most monsters/people should go extinct quite fast?

Obviously this can't be applied to "game" style genres, dungeon genres nor FULLY applied to stories where things are naturally born at a ridiclous level due to respawn reasons etc.

There's clear reasons as to why it takes so many mobs to level up, since if you only needed to kill a few, the story would either be over in 100 chapters or become a super-high level grind where the MC rarely even farms, or simply have a ton of repetitive "level restrictions" that stump the story for 30 chapters, but since I started noticing the massive plothole that these "experience/devour" mechanics have I always bug myself about how idiotic the design is.

I think the main problem stems from the fact that authors tend to overplay numbers far too much. Xianxia usually uses the word "billion" or "trillion" when just 10 thousand would do fine and be more descriptive.
If monsters are truly dangerous, the main character could only fight a few at a time, struggle and get realistic rewards for succeeding. Normally in power-grind novels it's quite the opposite where the first encounter is super hard and levels them up twice whereas the next paragraph goes like "And then they killed 421 monsters and earned 1 more level" or "Over the past next few months they kept farming relatively easily and earned another level"
That kind of writing makes no sense. Why would a single fight level/almost level you up, take an hour but the next few months of constant fighting barely have the same effect?

The worst offender in this type of problem is Xianxia novels, as they usually describe for example "spirit beasts" as ancient 10000 years old rare creatures, while their cores are being sold in the thousands at every street corner and the MC always ends up pretty much pushing them to extinction.
The close runner-up would be power-fantasy RPG stories, but they at least sometimes have some kind of redeeming factor such as dungeons to respawn monsters.

Well, this was a pointless post but I just wanted to hear your opinions, what do you guys think about the level up design of most novels?

I think for a lot it's not well thought out in regards to how realistic such acts would have on the world of the story, however there are some that do touch upon that kind of thing.
I don't know if it would be classed as being a dungeon but in the JN, Kumo Desu Ga Nani Ka?, the MC comments on how the enemies start to dwindle due to them over-killing in order to level up fast. At least, I think they do...
It's been a while since I read it...
orz
However, the premise of things dying out and going extinct are touched upon, I believe.

As for the xianxia novels...well I think cos the authors mention how much bigger the world is compared to ours, and how there are different realms/planes of existence, that they tend to gloss over the blatant over-hunting and killing. They also tend to gloss over how many people live in the world and how many of them become cultivators.
@w@

Though, I haven't read a lot compared to others so...my experience of it isn't broad.
>w<

X

 

[Puji-Maki]

You got a point, though I don't how to respond. I think authors just want to portray their characters as OP, so they wrote those stuffs to exaggerate the readers mind. And even if they write nonsense stuff, I will still read it if it's interesting.

 

[Deleted member 29316]

I think it's like that because the author's aim is to impress the readers? I mean, 5000 seems to be a weak number compared to 5 million (just an example).

Well, just like what my brother (a journalist) is always telling me, "Don't try to find logic in an illogical setting."

 

[FDSIO]

"Don't try to find logic in an illogical setting."

I disagree. It's more like ’Don’t apply your logic to an illogical setting but the already established logic of the setting.’

For example, the setting says humans can jump up to 10 meters as the norm. Of course, your logic would disagree with that but that's the setting... We could accept that. We could even accept exceptions as people jumping 100 meters as exceptions to the norm for irregulars exist everywhere. Special training, special types of bodies... magic...

But if several chapters after, you see people jumping 100 meters as the new norm... Or fuck that, better make them flying for why not? Well, that's a problem. That's where the setting logic is trampled upon.

 

[Deleted member 29316]

I disagree. It's more like ’Don’t apply your logic to an illogical setting but the already established logic of the setting.’

For example, the setting says humans can jump up to 10 meters as the norm. Of course, your logic would disagree with that but that's the setting... We could accept that. We could even accept exceptions as people jumping 100 meters as exceptions to the norm for irregulars exist everywhere. Special training, special types of bodies... magic...

But if several chapters after, you see people jumping 100 meters as the new norm... Or fuck that, better make them flying for why not? Well, that's a problem. That's where the setting logic is trampled upon.

More like the same. It's just a general concept, but you get the idea.

 

[Devour]

 

[Nahrenne]

The devour mechanic has appeared!
'o'

X

 

[UYScuti]

A lot of Xianxia build off ancient/traditional Chinese measurements such as time and distance. As for 10,000 years millions, billions, and trillions, I don’t believe these numbers are meant to be taken literally. It’s like in the Bible, often you’ll see stuff like like 40 years, or 40 days and 40 nights. They are not actually referring to 40 days. That was a way to say something took a long time.

The only thing to take away from billions and trillions is that it is a large amount. As for Xianxia having 10,000 year old cores being valuable in one chapter, then dirt cheap in another, it is always explained by region. Like 10 of some currency here might be nothing in its own country, but take it to another country and it might be enough to feed a large family for a week.

 

[Freesia.Cutepearl]

I'm not familiar with this specific "Xianxia" thing at all.

But as for the game mechanic bit of it, I feel like there are many different good ways to handle this sort of thing.

Honestly it kind of perturbs me that so often what is ok as a game mechanic is taken into a story where those limitations don't apply and the only way to get strong seems to be to kill others. Logically, whatever energy you gain from the things you kill, they had to have gained some otherway if you go down the chain enough.

This is evidenced in real life, where the Sun is the source of the vast majority of the energy on our planet, and plants and microorganisms harvest that directly, then other things eat those, and others eat the things that eat them and so on.

If you have a world where magic is a thing, it seems feasible that there should be some way to capture that energy more directly or efficiently.

As a writer, you're not limited by a game engine, or a control scheme, or a programming/artistic budget, etc. So there should be a lot of room to explore there.

 

[Discount_Blade]

My only gripe with xianxia's regarding numbers, well not my only, but my biggest, is their timelines. They have Empires that have supposedly lasted 900 Million years....and then events that they can remember that happened billions of years ago. I mean come on guys. We can barely keep up with anything past a few millennia with ANY degree of accuracy!!! That's like me saying "I remember that time me and Joey ran from that T-Rex and I tripped and broke my ankle".

Hint: T-Rex's were about 65 Million....which STILL PALES IN COMPARISON to the time lengths xianxia use......900 Million years people!! 900 Million. I remember reading this in one!!! And the event I mentioned that was billions of years ago? All it was, was the election of soime great Primordial King or something. Nothing even important. Just a random footnote in history....but it was billions of years ago and they remembered it with perfect clarity. Yeah. Uh-huh....
It's fucking absurd.

 

[Freesia.Cutepearl]

....but it was billions of years ago and they remembered it with perfect clarity. Yeah. Uh-huh....
It's fucking absurd.

That sounds... oof. I can see it being pretty immersion breaking.

This is maybe only tangentially related, but I considered this sort of thing for the real story I want to write, once I feel confident enough. A far future Scifi story, inspired by Issac Asimov's short story "The Last Question"

Even considering that in the hundreds of billions of years it would take for most stars to burn out and have humanity subsisting on black holes for energy, being at this point purely technologically based, there are still fundamental physical limits, and things in the distant past would be relegated to archival storage, much of which would likely be centrally stored and not local to the individual.

Our biological brains, the structure, whether natural or being emulated by a simulation, are not super great at things like memory retention and memorization. It's sort of an energy tradeoff, biologically we try to use as little energy as we can, we're optimized for other things, decision making and pattern recognition are huge strengths we have that traditional computers don't.

But they are far superior at complex calculations and data acquisition, storage, and retrieval. Short of having some way to combine the two sorts of computation, it's probably unrealistic to expect detailed recollections of things 150 years ago, much less 1500, 15,000,000, or more.

Maybe you could recall a few sentence summary of a conclusion you came to after a ton of research, 100 years later, but you're probably not going to remember everything that went into that.

Edited: Grammarly changing words on me gah!

 

[UYScuti]

This is maybe only tangentially related

Yeah... They punch tree’s and stand under waterfalls in Xianxia. Data is recorded on godbeast skins. White dwarfs and black holes are just another realm to conquer.

 

[UsernamePending]

I mean, to keep readers hooked, you have to go higher and higher. I know some novels (uh, off the top of my head, Cultivation Chat Group and Stop Friendly Fire) in which there are only like 10 levels, but the difference between each of these levels is insane. Like, taking CCG, a 5th stage cultivator can squash a 3rd tier with just a thought. Otherwise, the numbers just get even more insane as the authors try to keep up with the character's growth. A lot of these stories are wish fulfillment, and that's not necessarily bad. But once you've killed Achilles, you have to kill Zeus next, then Gaia. After you've defeated God of the Bible himself, what next?

 

[Laeyioun]

A funny thing. Inconsistencies or outright ridiculous requirements to level up in RPG novels ("Devouring" or "refining" in xianxia).

Let's say that an MC kills "5242" mobs around his/her level to go from level 325 to 326 - Doesn't that mean that for a thousand people to do the same, 5 million monsters/people have to be killed? Shouldn't that pretty much mean that most monsters/people should go extinct quite fast?

Obviously this can't be applied to "game" style genres, dungeon genres nor FULLY applied to stories where things are naturally born at a ridiclous level due to respawn reasons etc.

There's clear reasons as to why it takes so many mobs to level up, since if you only needed to kill a few, the story would either be over in 100 chapters or become a super-high level grind where the MC rarely even farms, or simply have a ton of repetitive "level restrictions" that stump the story for 30 chapters, but since I started noticing the massive plothole that these "experience/devour" mechanics have I always bug myself about how idiotic the design is.

I think the main problem stems from the fact that authors tend to overplay numbers far too much. Xianxia usually uses the word "billion" or "trillion" when just 10 thousand would do fine and be more descriptive.
If monsters are truly dangerous, the main character could only fight a few at a time, struggle and get realistic rewards for succeeding. Normally in power-grind novels it's quite the opposite where the first encounter is super hard and levels them up twice whereas the next paragraph goes like "And then they killed 421 monsters and earned 1 more level" or "Over the past next few months they kept farming relatively easily and earned another level"
That kind of writing makes no sense. Why would a single fight level/almost level you up, take an hour but the next few months of constant fighting barely have the same effect?

The worst offender in this type of problem is Xianxia novels, as they usually describe for example "spirit beasts" as ancient 10000 years old rare creatures, while their cores are being sold in the thousands at every street corner and the MC always ends up pretty much pushing them to extinction.
The close runner-up would be power-fantasy RPG stories, but they at least sometimes have some kind of redeeming factor such as dungeons to respawn monsters.

Well, this was a pointless post but I just wanted to hear your opinions, what do you guys think about the level up design of most novels?

This is the case with the popular "Everyone Else is a Returnee". Extinction did happen there.

I think it would be better for the questing system. Like after doing a mission, dungeon, trial, quest, or storyline, the characters get xx experience and rewards. They can also gain experience from other things such as crafting, milestones, defeating or killing enemies and more. Depending on the story, fighting other humans give experience so that monsters won't be hunted to extinction.

This is the case for novels like Legendary Mechanic or even other game-like system novels.

The problem is limited premises.