what is level from lore perspective?

[Chiramu]

Then Ultima Weapon comes along and displays itself to be significantly more powerful than the primals, and is again a higher level.

Ultima stole the power of Ifrit, Titan and Garuda, of course he is going to be more powerful >.>.

To me, levels in lore always just seems like growing up and learning more.

[WyrahFhurrst]

I like to think of it how Log Horizon put it that experience is literal memories that you experienced and learned from. If that's the case, then levels are milemarkers by which experience (learning experiences) are measured by, during which you figure out or learn how to use new skills, and learn how to use your old skills in better ways, making them stronger, and perhaps yourself stronger through exercising your physical and magical muscles.

[Bombast]

Interesting, though as there are cases of humans getting shot to the head and surviving, how would you gauge that in terms of damage? Would it simply be a luck role that negated the majority of the damage from it, or would it be that said human had higher HP? Or a combination of the two?

EDIT: I would like to note that I'm not a D&D player, so my knowledge of mechanics within it is very rudimentary at best......

Saving throw?

Generally, when you are subject to an unusual or magical attack, you get a saving throw to avoid or reduce the effect. Like an attack roll, a saving throw is a d20 roll plus a bonus based on your class, level, and an ability score. Your saving throw modifier is: Base save bonus + ability modifier.

[Vanifae]

Hit points don’t really translate to real life though, sure some people are tougher than others but health and damage are not very straight forward. You could take a grievous injury and survive and then be felled by a slight cut that gets infected. HP correlates usually to challenge, something with more HP should take longer to kill and allow it more time to kill you. In reality weapons are not designed to chop off points of health, they are usually designed to kill and a warrior will try to make the fight as short as possible in most situations because injuries by weapons tend to be life threatening and not just a minor inconvenience of losing two percent of health.

Even the most basic sword will kill if used properly, weather you are the greatest warrior on earth or just an innocent bystander noncombatant. MMO’s and RPG’s abstract this by adding health but in reality getting hit with a great sword or great axe more than once is probably going to be a very terminal day for that individual.

Anyway, 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 to others in some arbitrary number ranking system.

[Niwashi]

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.

[Laerune]

I dont think level has a role in lore, its more for the gameplay part of FFXIV. The guards are level 5, because the player meets them at the start of the game and the ones at other location are higher level, because the player meets them later. If FFXIV was compared to a real life you could see it like:

Starter town = Pre-school
Level 10-20 zones = Elementary
Level 20-30 zones = Middle School
Level 30-40 zones = High School
etc.

We grow up as we become older, our characters grow up as they increase the level.