When your protagonist gets a passive that reads "increased strength when fighting opponents above your tier," you have quietly handed yourself a difficulty slider and hidden it inside the character sheet. The good news is that the underdog tension is keepable. There are at least four well-tested ways in litRPG and progression fantasy to write a hero who punches up without quietly retconning the system that made the punch matter.
Why "fights stronger when fighting stronger" feels like a cheat
A power system in litRPG and progression fantasy is the law of physics your book runs on, and an auto-buff that scales with the opponent's tier is the fastest way to repeal that law without admitting you did. I think the reason it rankles readers is mechanical, not aesthetic. When the system tells you that a rank-three monster destroys a rank-one human in the same way a forklift destroys a watermelon, you tune your expectations to that fact, and then if the rank-one human just walks up and arm-wrestles the forklift because of a single line on his character sheet, the rest of the world quietly downgrades in your head. Every other adventurer becomes incompetent for not having the same skill, every other tier becomes notional, and every fight after that one has to clear a higher bar to feel like a real fight, because you have already shown the reader that the bar can move whenever the protagonist is in danger.
Aleron Kong's The Land leans on this kind of mechanic at points, and the effect is that when Richter pulls off a kill many levels above him, the reader is not so much thrilled as braced for the inevitable hand-wave in the next chapter. I do not say this as a takedown of Kong, who built the modern litRPG audience more or less single-handedly, but as a structural observation. A power system that is allowed to bend whenever it would otherwise be embarrassing stops being a power system and becomes a stat block dressed as one. That is the trap, and it shows up the moment the author writes themselves into a fight where the math says the hero should die.
The Cradle solution: let the hero cheat, not the system
Will Wight's Cradle is the cleanest answer to the problem in the genre, and what makes it clean is that Lindon never once gets a passive that reads "you are stronger against stronger people." He gets nothing of the kind. What he does instead is study his opponent for weeks before the fight, build a custom construct, beg an Iron-realm refiner to enchant it, and then, when the fight finally lands, use a trick the opponent has never seen before and would have countered in three seconds if she had. The system stays intact. The cultivator above him is genuinely above him, and would mash Lindon flat in a fair exchange of power. Lindon wins anyway, because Wight lets him cheat the encounter without asking the system to cheat the rules.
My feeling is that this is the gold standard, and the reason it works is that it gives the reader two payoffs instead of one. The first is the win. The second is the satisfaction of seeing how the trick fits the established constraints, which only feels good because those constraints have not been quietly relaxed. 'You meant for the cavern to flood,' the antagonist realizes too late, 'and you knew about the salt deposits in the wall, and that is why you brought the water mage.' That is the moment Wight has built a hundred pages of setup to deliver, and the reason the reader trusts it is that the cultivation system around Lindon has been honored every step of the way.
The He Who Fights with Monsters solution: make the gap a symmetric law
Shirtaloon's He Who Fights with Monsters takes a different route that I think is underrated in conversations about power scaling. In that world, damage you do to an opponent is multiplied by the rank gap in both directions. A silver-rank facing an iron-rank does catastrophic damage with a casual hit, but the silver-rank also takes weirdly disproportionate damage from a clean iron-rank attack, because the rank gap is a law of the world rather than a personal advantage. Jason getting weirdly survivable against higher ranks is not a passive on his character sheet. It is a property of the universe that applies to every silver who picks on an iron, and the book makes a point of showing what that property does to other characters too, not only the protagonist.
The reason this works is that the reader is not being asked to accept a private exception. They are being asked to accept a world rule, and once they do, the underdog fight stops being a contradiction and becomes a tactical puzzle. How can a lower rank survive long enough to land the disproportionate hit? That is a question the reader can actually answer alongside the protagonist, and the answer is rarely "the system buffs me." It is usually that Jason has dragged the fight into a context where his particular kit lets him hold on for thirty more seconds than the math would predict, which is enough.
The Primal Hunter solution: buff the reward, not the parity
Zogarth's The Primal Hunter is a useful third example, because it shows that you can write a "this character thrives on punching up" arc without giving the character free stat parity. Jake's defining trait is an obsession with fighting opponents above his level, and the system rewards him with extra experience for doing so, not with the ability to actually match those opponents in raw output. When Jake punches up, he still gets punched back, and a meaningful fraction of those fights are won by being absurdly stubborn rather than absurdly strong. The system is not bending around him. It is paying him a premium for taking on harder work, the way real-world piecework rates pay more for dangerous jobs without making the danger go away.
I think this is the single most underused design move in the genre. It is much easier to write a passive that quietly closes the stat gap than to write a fight where the protagonist is genuinely outclassed and has to earn the kill in some other way. But the readers who notice are exactly the readers who will become evangelists for your book on Royal Road and stick around for the next ten volumes, because you took the time to honor the math they were tracking in their heads. That kind of trust compounds. Every time the system holds during a hard fight, the reader's confidence that the next fight will also be honest grows, and the tension you can wring out of every future encounter rises with it.
The hardest and best version: preparation, terrain, allies, combos
The oldest answer to the underdog problem is also the best, and it is the answer the early martial-arts novels and the long-running web serials in the cultivation tradition have been quietly using for decades. You let the protagonist actually outthink the opponent. You let them spend three chapters scouting a hunting ground, baiting a creature into terrain where its own size becomes a liability, coordinating with a side character whose niche skill matters for ninety seconds and then never again, and triggering a combo whose individual pieces the reader has watched the protagonist train for. The fight is won before the first blow lands, because the protagonist has done the work that the system rewards naturally, which is the work of being smarter than the people who outrank them.
The reason this approach is the strongest is that it converts an underdog fight from a math problem into a story problem, and stories are what books are for. A single skill line that says "you fight harder enemies better" is a math fix applied to a story problem, and the reader feels the genre slip every time the author reaches for it. My advice, then, when you find yourself writing a fight where the level gap is uncomfortable, is to spend two days plotting before you spend two hours writing. Decide what the protagonist knows about the opponent that the opponent does not know about the protagonist. Decide what specific terrain, allies, and timing the protagonist has bent to their favor. Decide what the protagonist has practiced for this kind of encounter that an outsider would dismiss as a hobby. Then write the fight, and let the system stay exactly where you put it.
The downside test: would you let this rule kill your protagonist?
Every house rule you add to a power system should be capable of hurting the protagonist, and an "increased strength against stronger opponents" passive almost never is. That is the diagnostic. If the rule is one-directional and only ever cuts in the protagonist's favor, you have a difficulty slider with a face on it, not a piece of world-building. The cleanest fix, when an author has already committed to this kind of skill and does not want to cut it, is to bolt an equal and opposite penalty onto it. The character cannot earn experience from kills below their level, or takes psychological damage when they punch down, or loses something the reader cares about every time the buff fires. Once the rule can hurt them, the rule starts to mean something, and the underdog fight starts to feel earned again rather than scheduled.
Everything I have said above can be, and has been, successfully contradicted by stories that lean into the absurd power-fantasy register and ask the reader to enjoy the cartoon. That is fine. Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl breaks all kinds of rules and is one of the best things the genre has produced this decade. But Dinniman is not breaking the system to bail himself out of an underdog fight. He is breaking it because Carl is supposed to be a chaos engine, and the reader is signed up for that. If your protagonist is meant to be a tactician, a craftsman, or a grinder, the system you build around them has to hold its shape under load, and that means resisting the temptation of the difficulty slider hidden in the character sheet. Build the constraints, then let your hero be clever inside them, and the genre will reward you for it.
Common questions about power scaling in litRPG and progression fantasy
Is "increased strength when fighting above your tier" always a bad mechanic?
It is not always bad, but it is almost always worse than the alternatives, and that is the case to answer. It works when it comes with a real downside the reader can see, when it is a property of the world rather than a personal passive, or when it sits on a side character whose role is to model a different design choice. As a default on the protagonist with no string attached, it tends to undercut the rest of the system the author has built and quietly tells the reader that the rules can be moved whenever the hero needs them to.
What is the cleanest way to write an underdog fight in a system-heavy story?
Let the protagonist outthink the opponent. Spend the chapters before the fight establishing what the protagonist has prepared, what allies they have lined up, what terrain or timing they have bent to their favor, and what specific weakness in the opponent they have studied. Then let the math hold during the fight itself. Readers will accept a much larger rank gap if they can see the work that went into closing it, and the win will feel earned rather than gifted.
How does He Who Fights with Monsters handle rank-gap scaling differently from most litRPG?
In Shirtaloon's world, damage scales by rank gap symmetrically, so a higher rank dealing with a lower rank takes weirdly proportionate damage when the lower rank lands a clean hit. It is a property of the universe rather than a passive on Jason's character sheet. That symmetry is what makes the underdog fights feel earned, because the same rule that gives him a chance also makes the chance scary, and the rule applies to every other character in the world the same way.
What is the difference between Cradle and The Primal Hunter on power scaling?
Will Wight gives Lindon no parity buff at all and lets him cheat the encounter through preparation, allies, and tricks the opponent has never seen. Zogarth gives Jake a buff to experience gained from fighting above his level, but not to raw stat parity, so Jake still gets clobbered in the moment and has to win the fight on grit, tactics, or both. Both keep the underlying system intact. They simply choose different shapes of earned reward.
Do readers actually notice when a power system gets bent?
The careful ones do, and the careful readers are the ones who write reviews, recommend your book on Royal Road and in genre Discords, and stay with the series across ten volumes. My feeling is that you can lose the casual reader at the page, but you keep the dedicated reader at the system, and the dedicated reader is the one your career is built on. Treat the power system as a contract with that reader, and they will reward you accordingly.
by Jacob Tam · June 18, 2026
I run IlorisNovel, a platform for writers of web fiction. If this kind of craft writing is your thing, the rest of the blog lives here.