A Level is a measure of how experienced or powerful a character is in terms of the game rules. Thus a 10th level warrior would be more dangerous than a 1st level one (who would be just starting). Players achieve new levels for their characters by accumulating Experience Points awarded by their Games Master. Many roleplaying games use some level system (often also called rank), and their ranes are normally comparable, with 1 to 4 being a standard level 10+ being powerful, and 15-20 being the normal sensible limit.

The concept of levels can be traced to D&D, in which there was a fixed and inflexible system of rewarding players experience points as rewards for killing monsters, gaining treasure and finishing games. Later games, including AD&D relaxed the requirements slightly, but retained a level system. Newer games, however, have had a tendancy to abandon the concept of fixed levels and instead allow charcters to gain power simply by accumulating better skills or charcteristics. This may be more realistic, but nevertheless the oncept of levels remains convenient for describing characters from different systems.