I'm back! Sorry for the long delay since my last post, I got sidetracked.

Anyway. This is the standard cycle of power. Also known as power creep.

When a story first starts out, the main character will usually be in a position of weakness. No, not physical weakness, though that counts. Weakness can be anything: mental, political, even geographical.

When the story focuses on someone like a king, it usually starts in one of three ways.
1. The king faces a threat to their power in the form of a rival/prince and can't just shrug it off. They have to carefully consider everything they do or their very guards will turn and a bloody coup will ensue. The weakness here is political. The king can't outright order the rival executed or the muscle will turn traitor, so he has to step carefully. Another example is a rebellion. There's something going on in the kingdom. There are vampires feeding on the villagers, taxes are unsustainable, or there's not enough food and people are starving. The peasants want blood, but the king can't send his army to cut them down or they'll have his head in the inevitable coup.
2. There's an invading army! Sound the alarms, get the border patrols in place, and stop letting the men get into the liquor cabinet. They can go down to the tavern and buy the cheap stuff like everyone else. This one's obvious: the king may be powerful, but the invading army (to pose a threat) is more powerful still. It could be more powerful through sheer numbers, technology, tactics; anything really. Power isn't absolute; the king doesn't have to be a chained, emaciated version of himself to be 'weak.'
3. The king's been drinking a lot. He's also raised taxes, released vampires into the streets, and sung the smile song from My Little Pony in the streets to the vampires. He's sabotaging himself. Mental weakness here.

So now what? What happens in the cycle of power? Well, taking from the above example again, the king still has his throne. He has his bodyguards, and subjects are loyal to him, though maybe not that loyal. This is the first step.

Next, is step two. Either he'll prepare, get more guards, send out his stores of food to the villagers, and get rid of the vampires, and things will start to get better. Or he'll go directly to step three, and his food stores will feed the rebels, the vampires will escape and go into a frenzy, and the guards will desert him.

This is where the power starts going to the antagonist. The antagonist can be pretty much anything. An idea, a person, technology, anything.

Power flows away from the protagonist and toward the antagonist.

And keeps on flowing.

The better the story is, the more power that deserts the main character(s). Mostly. Up to a point.

And again, no, it doesn't mean you have to put the king in chains and let him rot in the dungeons. Though it definitely can. It just means that he's losing pieces. He lost his rook, then his knight, then both his bishops. It helps if it's because of mistakes he made, as long as they don't make him look like an idiot. It must make sense but still be wrong. But that's a post for another time.

Anyway. A good number is three. Have the protagonist try to fulfill their goals by their own agency, then fail. Then try again, and fail. Once more—fail.

This is step four. The lowest of the low. The protagonist is in dire straights. He either has nothing to lose, very little, or everything is about to come crashing down. The stakes are at their highest. It's do or die. So the king rises after going through a "power up" phase. It can be an epiphany. Of course the starving children need food! How could he have been so blind? Or an actual power up. He finds the ancient crown that tells everyone who the real ruler is. His trading contract goes through and the neighboring kingdom rushes to his aid. He finds out that one of his advisers has been conspiring with the vampires. Again, make sure this is because of his own actions. If things just magically start to get better, that's a Deus Ex Machina. And no one wants one of those in their stories.

The power flows back to the protagonist.

Step five now. He's all powered up. Now he uses it. Rising action, climax, here we come! The army crushes the enemy, the villagers actually get fed, the vampires are hunted down and killed.

This is the standard cycle of power. You can break it. Rules are meant to be broken. But if you follow it, your story will be that much better. Unless you're super skilled.

This cycle can continue for several books. First time it's physical strength, and Gráinne Mhaol, queen of the pirates, trains and slices off the head of the other pirate captain who'd dared sail in her waters. Next it's political. Those kingdoms think they can impose restrictions on pirating, huh? Sending a spy into their courts to assassinate their leaders? Not a problem.

The problem is when the cycle becomes noticeable. This is when it becomes known as simply 'power creep.' All the options are exhausted. The protagonist has fought duels, tamed beasts, been dropped into foreign lands where everyone speaks different languages, been dropped into a different time period, fought magical dragons, stolen their powers, fought magical wizards, stolen their powers, and now she's just fighting ever-more powerful enemies while gaining power herself.

To avoid power creep, don't stretch something out for too long. Know where to end it.

Even if it makes you cry to leave behind the characters and world you built over years, you need to bring closure. It doesn't have to be the end, though. You can start the cycle again with another inhabitant of the world, or the king's son, or Gráinne Mhaol's awesome pirate sidekick that she's started teaching after retiring from the 'profession' herself.

But you must bring some sort of closure or rebirth to a story after the cycle repeats enough times.

You have the same issue with Fantasy Role-Playing Games. The characters start out without equipment in a slave ship, there's a rebellion, the ship makes it to a friendly shore, they take employment with a local to survive, etc... and eventually own their own ship. (Which if you're a particularly cruel GM, you find a way to get them to carry slaves in) They fight their way to a fleet, and invade a country, and... See what I mean?

6080119
Isn't the problem, that GMs seem to only think up "Power" threats?

That's what it sounds like.

6080095
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this if it's done well, though. It's called "raising the stakes." It's a fairly standard procedure to keep doing that and raise the tension of the story by making scale of the conflict ever so much grander until the eventual climax.

It's a problem if you have no real idea of the power level your story is supposed to finish at or what the real stakes of the story ought to be - but frankly, if you haven't planned that far ahead, your story has a bigger problem.

6080095
Umm. I think your premise must be split, or presented more succinctly? Your weird focus lost me at some point. This is just confusing.

You don't seem to mention the paper kingdom problem. A real king that can't protect his people wouldn't be cared for much anyways. If he can't at least satisfy nobles, why would people mind his existence? If the king's the protagonist, wouldn't his feelings and honor be more important? Why focus a story on power?

You seem to care of when things break and feel artificial and forced. And that is less power creep and more about a the take-over of fate and destiny. Like when you're so strong that nothing can hurt you, but your guys are the only ones like that. Or when you keep on finding stronger artefacts, fighting stronger foes, but never even met them before you were strong enough to at least flee.

To me this power creep is like xp grinding in a world where you finished most of the story anyways. To me this power creep isn't a problem itself. It just makes for lame events. The real problem is that the story itself must feel like something personal. Emotional or new in a good way.

TL;DR Power is less important than what you do with it. If you don't know someone you don't care about their fighting power. If you write a world with video game like rules, you must take it into account. Some people love stuff that could be called power creep. Some don't. I don't see that as a problem.

6080815
You're confusing actual power with the relative power level of protagonist versus the antagonist of the story here. In general, in an adventure story of any type, the protagonist will be weaker - often massively weaker - than the antagonist. This is by design. He needs to be, because any villain who is actually threatening is, in some way, stronger, more capable or better situated than the heroes who oppose him. If he weren't, he wouldn't be a threat to begin with. It doesn't have to be physical power: social, intellectual, verbal, any power will do, so long as it is capable of framing the conflict between the two primary forces within the story's cast.

This is necessary to keep up a sense of tension. There is (or at least you are expected to pretend there is) a great chance that the hero will fail. He is up against something that is intimidating and dangerous, in a fight which is likely to cost him his life. He fights anyway, which is what makes him heroic in the most proper sense. It is also what allows a sense of growth to be felt in the character. As the protagonist acclimates to his new circumstances, gains allies, personal competence and knowledge of the greater situation, he gains power himself. Not necessarily enough to defeat his antagonist in a straight fight - whether physical, verbal or intellectual - but certainly enough to survive and be a credibly threat in his own right. There is a definite sense of development of not only his situation, but also himself as a person. The hero rises to the proverbial challenge.

The most obvious potential issue with this, of course, is the described power creep. This is a symptom of bad writing, not the power growth as such. It happens when the author is not quite clear on just what the power and agency of both his protagonist and antagonist mean and what they're really supposed to be for. A hero adventuring to avenge his razed home village ought not to be casually shattering continents by the end of the story. In a situation like that, power becomes nothing but a flourish, rather than an integral part of the plot arc.

Conversely, it may happen that the hero fails to become powerful enough. This is an issue because it stretches credibility and can, quite easily, result in a situation where it feels like the antagonist never earned his victory - he stumbles into it, with circumstances conspiring to make him succeed in spite of all rhyme and reason. This is unsatisfying to the typical reader, who wishes to see the protagonist succeed in a way that is internally consistent and narratively satisfying.

Power balance is, as such, an important aspect to keep in mind in any story, if only in figurative terms.

6080825
Ah. I see. Thank you.

In his post I didn't see clear enough mention of tension. Or the flesh to the bones of what he meant. But the focus is clarified. And you actually defined this power creep pretty well.

Thinking of DBZ, the mention of continents makes me laugh though. Thanks.

6080836

Thinking of DBZ, the mention of continents makes me laugh though. Thanks.

A great example to bring up, actually, because Dragonball Z is pretty much the definition of bad power creep. The (literal) "power levels" pretty much exist for no reason whatsoever besides continuously increasing - they're nearly entirely decoupled from what little actual plot there is. They inflate to the point where there's no longer any real meaning to how powerful anyone in the story is. What's really the difference between smashing a planet, a galaxy or a universe in a story that centers around the relationships between individual people? In the end, it's about a hero who is weaker than the villains, becomes stronger than the villains, and then defeats the villains. How strong they actually are, in absolute terms, is nearly an afterthought. It's entirely there for the sake of spectacle.

If there's to be one perfect example of how to do it wrong, DBZ would be it.