Quote Originally Posted by Vanifae View Post
Hit points don’t really translate to real life though, <snip> I say all this to reiterate that level is purely a game mechanic and not a lore one other than denoting how “powerful” an individual is.
That might be equating level with hit points a bit too much.

I'd certainly agree that hit points, as they're normally implemented, are an artificial game mechanic. A more realistic version would have hit points remaining pretty much constant, but level increases improving your chances to hit, and your chances for your hits to be solid ones doing crit damage. At the same time, they would also make you better at blocking / parrying / dodging so that your opponents blows are less likely to hit and less likely to crit even when they do hit. All that would, however, have been more complicated to compute, particularly in the pen and paper RPGs the genre evolved from where all such computations were being done by hand. For gameplay purposes, it mostly got streamlined into increasing your number of hit points instead of updating your hit, crit, block, parry, and dodge rates.

(Adding the increase as extra hit points also allowed another useful but non-realistic element - wide variation in weapon damage. Realistically, a good sword will cut better than a cheap one, but not ten times better. A cheap sword in the hands of a skilled swordsman is more deadly than a finely honed blade in the hands of a novice. But a game provides lots of rewards by having lots of chances to upgrade gear with increasingly stronger stuff.)

So levels, as a measure of how skilled you are (and to a slightly lesser extent how strong, but mostly how skilled) fit with lore, but the specifics of how they're implemented into gameplay, with their increasing hit points, and the exaggeration in how drastic of an advantage they give, don't.