Skills that make a LitRPG MC stronger when fighting stronger enemies are not inherently broken, but the flat unconditional version is just a difficulty slider the writer forgot to hide. Three patterns keep the trope honest, and one common implementation quietly drains every fight of stakes.
What's wrong with a flat "stronger against stronger enemies" skill
What's wrong with a flat "stronger against stronger enemies" skill is that it short-circuits the contract the rest of the power system has been writing with the reader, and it short-circuits that contract without paying anything back. A LitRPG power system spends chapter after chapter convincing the reader that levels and tiers and stat blocks mean something, that a level-twenty mage and a level-thirty mage are not in the same conversation, and that an unranked adventurer wandering into a bronze-rank zone is in genuine trouble. And then the MC gets a passive that says, in effect, the bigger the enemy, the bigger I get, and the gap the book has been so careful to establish just stops mattering.
I think any power system is, in its bones, a contract between writer and reader about what the numbers mean. Travis Bagwell's Awaken Online is exacting about this. Will Wight's Cradle is, too. C. Mantis's Path of Ascension is willing to make Matt grind for genuinely small gains for entire arcs at a time. The reader signs that contract because they want the satisfaction of seeing it honored, not because they want to be lied to with numbers. A passive that scales the MC up to match an opponent the moment the fight starts is the writer breaking the contract and then asking the reader to clap.
The trap, then, is not the trope itself. The trap is the unconditional version of it, the flat passive with no cost and no constraint, in which the only thing the skill actually does is conveniently produce underdog fights the MC almost always wins. My feeling is that what readers are reacting to when they call this "lazy" is the absence of any real cost, not the presence of the mechanic. A buff without a cost is rubber-banding, and rubber-banding works in Mario Kart because the genre there is comedy and we like to laugh when the blue shell hits the leader. It works badly in books, where the genre is competence-porn and we are here to watch someone earn things.
When the mechanic earns its keep
The punch-up trope earns its keep when the writer has paid the reader back somewhere else, usually by making the rule a law of the world, by anchoring it to character identity, or by replacing it with a more interesting mechanism altogether. Take Shirtaloon's He Who Fights with Monsters. The rank-gap math in that series runs in both directions; a higher-rank fighter does cataclysmic damage to a lower-rank one, and a lower-rank fighter is, correspondingly, mostly a nuisance against a higher-rank one unless they bring something exotic to the engagement. The result is that the rule reads as a law of the world, not as a buff selectively handed to Jason because the plot needs him to win. The system is unfair, but it is unfair consistently, and that consistency is the difference between worldbuilding and convenience.
Or take Zogarth's Primal Hunter. Jake's whole relationship with stronger enemies is, structurally, an experience-gain ramp rather than a stat ramp. He has to fight up the curve to grow at all, and the story is unembarrassed about treating this as the cost of who he is, not a gift the system handed him. The trope, in Jake's hands, becomes an identity constraint. He cannot grow by grinding weaker foes, which means the rest of his characterization (his appetite for risk, his social isolation, his uneasy alliances) has to do the work of explaining why he keeps walking into fights he should lose. I am the kind of person who can only grow by being almost-killed is a substantive trait. I have a passive that makes me hit harder when the enemy is bigger is not.
Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl does something subtler and harder. The system in DCC is openly, malevolently designed to favor higher floors and higher-class crawlers, and Carl and Donut survive less because the math is on their side and more because they exploit the rules' edges, find loopholes, and accept costs the more comfortable crawlers would not. The book never gives Carl a "stronger against stronger enemies" ability. It gives him a willingness to suffer and a knack for being a problem, which are mechanics in their own right.
The thread that ties these examples together, I think, is that none of them treat the punch-up effect as a gift. It is either a law of the world (as in He Who Fights with Monsters), an identity constraint (as in Primal Hunter), or replaced entirely by a more interesting mechanism that does the same narrative work (as in Dungeon Crawler Carl). The unconditional flat passive is the only version that asks for nothing in return, and it is the only version readers consistently call out as lazy.
The three patterns that fix the trope
Three patterns let a writer keep the punch-up effect without losing the stakes, and the common mistake is to ship the upside of all three at once while paying the cost of none of them. The first pattern is what I would call the bidirectional law. If your world's physics says "rank gap amplifies damage in favor of the higher rank," then it has to also say "rank gap amplifies damage in favor of the higher rank when the higher rank attacks too." Both directions, no exceptions, no quiet edits when the plot needs the MC to mow through mooks. The cost of this rule is that you have to write the mook-mowing scenes a little differently. The MC cannot tank fifty arrows from level-three guards just because he is level twenty, and you will have to come up with something else for him to do (precise area attacks, fear-based control, ignoring the fight entirely because it is beneath him). That cost is a feature, not a bug. It tells the reader the rules are real.
The second pattern is system-bias cancellation. This one is harder to write but much more satisfying when it lands. The setup is that the system itself inherently suppresses lower-tier characters in some explicit way, perhaps with a stat-reduction debuff when facing higher tiers, perhaps with a damage-resistance buff for higher tiers, perhaps with both. The MC's special ability does not add power on top of their base stats; it merely neutralizes that suppression. The fight, with the ability active, is the fight as the unmodified math would otherwise have it. The narrative effect is that the MC's "punch up" feels like leveling the field rather than tilting it, and the reader's instinct is to root for the level field rather than recoil at the tilt. This is, in essence, the mechanic Andrew Rowe gives Corin's improvised attunement work in Sufficiently Advanced Magic; Corin is not stronger than his opponents, he is just unwilling to accept the system's defaults about what his class can do.
The third pattern is identity-anchored cost. The ability exists, it does roughly what it says on the tin, but it pays rent on the character's life elsewhere. Maybe it inflicts a recovery debt that scales with the gap, so that fighting a tier-five means spending the next month healing. Maybe it imposes a penalty against weaker enemies, so that the MC genuinely cannot grind low-tier kills for resources. Maybe it requires a setup ritual that has to be done in advance, which means the MC has to expect the fight, which means he has to be willing to walk into ambushes he half-anticipates, which is itself a characterization choice. 'Why didn't you use the buff on the easier fight earlier today?' the captain asks. The MC stares at the floor. 'Because I'd already used it on the harder one this morning, and it doesn't come back until tomorrow.' That tiny exchange is doing more characterization work than any number of stat-block reveals.
The mistake, then, the one common mistake the unconditional version of this trope keeps making, is to give the MC the upside of all three patterns and the cost of none of them. The skill works in both directions of the gap (which violates the rules of the world). It adds raw power on top of an already-stacked opponent (rather than cancelling out suppression). And it imposes no recovery cost, no opportunity cost, and no identity constraint on the MC (rather than paying its rent through character). It is, in that form, exactly what readers say it is. It is the writer reaching offscreen, sliding the difficulty down, and then walking back out hoping no one noticed.
What this means for your power system
What this means for your power system is that you have to decide, before you start designing skills, whether the system exists to enforce a hierarchy or to give the MC permission to punch through it, because those are different systems and they do not combine cleanly. The mistake I see in a lot of newer LitRPGs is the writer trying to do both at once. They want the satisfaction of a brutally hierarchical world (in which the rich kid's gold-rank tutor makes the difference between life and death) and the satisfaction of the underdog MC who personally bypasses all of it (because of his unique super-special skill). Those two are in tension, and the unconditional punch-up passive is the cheapest way to resolve that tension, which is why so many writers reach for it.
The harder, better resolution is to admit that the hierarchy is real, that the MC will sometimes lose, that some fights have to be solved by something other than escalation. Aleron Kong's earlier work in The Land gets this right surprisingly often; Richter does not always win the way Richter would like to win, and his cleverness has to do real load-bearing work in the fights where stats alone would not save him. Sarah Lin's Street Cultivation makes a similar move in a much grittier register, where Rick has to budget every breath of qi against rent and food and his mother's medical bills, and the punch-up dynamic, when it appears at all, is woven into his economic precarity rather than handed to him by a system. These are books where the writer has accepted the constraint and asked the constraint to do work, and the work it does is exactly the thing readers come back for.
The reader does not actually want the MC to win every fight by being secretly bigger. They want the MC to win every fight by being more interesting than the antagonist. A punch-up passive without a cost lets the writer skip the more interesting part. The three patterns above are all ways of forcing the writer to do that work, and the work, in my experience, is the thing the reader showed up for.
Common questions about LitRPG power scaling and punch-up abilities
What is a punch-up skill in LitRPG?
A punch-up skill is any ability that makes a character stronger when they face an opponent who is at a higher level, tier, or rank than they are. The classic version is a passive that scales the MC's stats upward when the enemy's stats are higher, which conveniently produces underdog fights the MC almost always wins. Variations include experience-gain bonuses against higher-tier kills, damage-resistance buffs against higher-tier attacks, and skill-cooldown reductions in fights that are technically out of the MC's league.
Why do readers complain about increased-strength-against-stronger-enemies abilities?
The complaint is that the skill bypasses the work the rest of the power system is supposed to do. Tiers, levels, and stat blocks exist so the reader can feel the gap between fighters, and a flat unconditional buff against higher-rank opponents collapses that gap on demand. The result is that every underdog fight reads as a difficulty slider being dragged downward rather than a genuine triumph, and the contract the book had with the reader about what the numbers mean quietly gets broken.
Does He Who Fights with Monsters do power scaling well?
Most readers think it does, and the reason is that rank-gap math in He Who Fights with Monsters runs in both directions. A higher-rank fighter does devastating damage to a lower-rank opponent, and the inverse is also true, which means the rule reads as a law of the world rather than a buff selectively handed to the protagonist. The system is unfair, but it is unfair consistently, and that consistency is what lets the reader take the stakes seriously even when Jason is doing something improbable.
What about Primal Hunter? Jake gets stronger fighting things above his level.
Primal Hunter handles the trope differently from the flat-passive version. Jake's relationship with stronger enemies is mostly about experience gain and identity rather than a flat damage boost; he has to fight up the curve to grow at all, and the story treats this as the cost of who he is, not a gift the system handed him. That framing turns the trope into a character constraint instead of a difficulty slider, which is why most readers accept it even when they object to the broader pattern in other books.
How should an author design a "fight above your level" ability without it feeling lazy?
The right answer is to make the ability pay rent. Tie it to a real cost, such as a recovery debt that scales with the rank gap, a stat penalty against weaker foes, or a long cooldown the MC has to budget around. Or bake the rank-gap effect into the world's physics so the rule cuts both ways, the way He Who Fights with Monsters does. Or restrict the ability to neutralizing a system bias the reader already accepts, instead of adding raw power on top of an already-stacked opponent. Any one of those moves keeps the underdog fight feeling earned, and a reader will forgive a lot when the math feels earned.
by Jacob Tam · June 15, 2026
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