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Leaked Experience: Difference between revisions
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Many games adjust the level of a newly recruited character to match that of the lead character, in an attempt to make that character immediately useful. In other situations, it is the responsibility of the player to level them up, usually putting them in dangerous fights but protected by the stronger characters to level quickly. This strategy is known as “[[Munchkin|twinking]]”, "babysitting" or "piggybacking", and is frequently used in online games to get new characters to your level so you can play fairly together. Games which do not take this trope into consideration may end up with a player leveling his first character to the maximum level through [[Level Grinding]], and then all subsequent characters will join up also at maximum level, saving a lot of time gaining experience for side characters.
Some games will give unused party members a fraction of the experience points gained in fights, but many will just [[Let's Split Up, Gang!|force you to use those characters once in a while]] to make sure they don’t get too weak. Games allowing you to switch out characters at any times are appreciated for this reason.
The ability to switch members of your party in battle at any time may have been popularized by ''[[Final Fantasy X (Video Game)|Final Fantasy X]]'', although some games predate this usage. ''[[Breath of Fire]]'' had this in its first game, only to drop it for the next two.
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Used to fight the [[Can't Catch Up]] phenomenon. A good way to get the [[Magikarp Power]]. Compare [[Experience Booster]].
{{examples
== [[Action Adventure]] ==
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** The fourth character to join begins at level 1 as well, during a "Meanwhile..." sequence in which you control him solo during his zen final exam half a world away. The trope is given a halfway nod, though, when the spiritual breakthrough his exam is meant to confer manifests by pouring a load of experience into his empty coffers. He immediately jumps to just high enough of a level to obtain all of his primary psionic abilities (which are gained RPG-traditionally, no more than one per gained level), but still a good ten or twenty below the party's average at that point. This results in an unusual partial [[Leaked Experience]] effect, where a certain amount of [[Can't Catch Up|the antithesis]] also occurs when the player jumps right into the next full-party battle and finds the new guy still sporting definite weak-link traits.
* In ''[[Final Fantasy IV (Video Game)|Final Fantasy IV]]'', the ''main character'' is reset to level 1 once he reconsiders some important life decisions. However, the main character is usually nearly as strong after the reset as he is before, even though he loses levels, and he gains his first few levels quickly. Once he's been through a few battles, it's actually a common strategy to solo him-- almost everything in the area is weak to the element of his new sword after the level drop-- both because it's easy levels and because of leaked experience. New party members have a set level, but ones that leave and return gain the same experience the main character does while out of the party, and at that point in the game there's only three characters who you've never had in your party (and one of those three doesn't benefit from gaining levels anyway), so almost everyone gains the XP from re-leveling the hero.
* Unpleasantly averted in ''[[Lost Odyssey]]''. Characters not in the active party receive no experience or any other character advancement in the form of Skill Points. Due to a heavy dose of [[Let's Split Up, Gang!]], this can make certain parts of the game brutally difficult, if not almost impossible. Oddly enough, the game also tries to avoid [[Can't Catch Up]] syndrome; characters that are in use level up in very few fights, sometimes leveling up every single battle for a while up to an arbitrary maximum determined by the area you're in, at which point all experience gains quickly dwindle to near nothing. For characters who are level dependent on their skills, this allows fairly quick catching up. For other characters reliant on other ways to advance, it's still just down to [[Level Grinding]].
* ''[[Dragon Quest IV (Video Game)|Dragon Quest IV]]'' DS has both character swapping and leaked experience.
** ''[[Dragon Quest IX (Video Game)|Dragon Quest IX]]'' averts this by distributing a bigger share of the experience to the highest level characters, a method inherently biased against classes that require more experience to level up.
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[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]
[[Category:Leaked Experience]]
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