Leveling Up!

The Curse of Role-Playing
The World's First Role-Playing game has its roots in wargaming (it says as much on the cover of the White Box). It is a battle game featuring magic and monsters drawn from myth and fantasy literature based on a previous set of wargame miniatures rules for tabletop medieval battles called Chainmail. One of the innovative concepts in the World's First Role-Playing game is the idea of going on adventures - in other words, discovering things while playing the battle game. Another difference from traditional wargames is that players typically control just one (or maybe two) characters rather than an army of many figures.
The practice of leveling up or advancing your character along a ladder of improved abilities is also a part of that first game and has become almost synonymous with role-playing, tabletop or electronic. It's a hamster wheel which never really gets you anywhere and it detracts from the "role-playing" focus. In the Original Game the accumulation of experience points leads to a character reaching the next level, which grants access to increased combat ability, hit points and new and more powerful magic spells. Al this empowers the character to take on more powerful monsters, but the "balancing" factor in the game is as characters get more powerful through leveling up, the monsters they encounter are also equally more powerful so that the game remains challenging. Really the novelty of a new spell and that of encountering a new monster must be the ultimate gain, because all the power advancements tend to equal out.
Other games have sought to eliminate experience points and levels altogether, but most retain some mechanic for character advancement and power increase. All this can become a distraction as the point of the game devolves into chasing advancement. Rather than this being the case, the game could be about adventure! Discovery and immersion... Role-Playing!
"It's not a game about winning and losing." We have all heard this phrase, but chasing experience points and leveling up can seem like winning. By contrast, character death can seem like losing. Role-playing is about suspending our mental focus on our real lives for a moment and imagining we are playing the part of a heroic character in some fantasy setting faced with mysteries and challenges that are interesting and entertaining. It's a form of "make believe".
I give Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu credit as the game that taught me how to role-play. Call of Cthulhu is an investigative game in which you play basically ordinary people who encounter supernatural things. Killing things and taking their stuff is not the point. Saving humanity from the things that go bump in the night is. Call of Cthulhu isn't about leveling up and characters seldom become much more powerful than they start out. Rather the longer one plays a character in Call of Cthulhu to more likely the character will become insane (and retired) from contact with that which mankind was not meant to know.
There are at least two recent games that eschew leveling altogether. Index Card RPG published by Runehammer Games and The Darkest Death by Bloat Games both rely on the acquisition of treasure, particularly magic items (frequently one-use items), to give players incentive, add variety and keep the game feeling fresh. This idea could be easily imported into lots of other systems, should players desire to make this so.
Chasing levels can be a distraction or an obsession. Powering up can be an illusion and can even lead to the game losing most of its challenge and appeal. By creating a character we find interesting from the beginning and role-playing that character through some interesting situations, perhaps uncovering some mysteries and thwarting the plan of some evil mastermind, we may find the game just as fulfilling as leveling up...perhaps more so. What is more interesting to discuss after the game, "Our characters are now level umpteen and have this and that new power," or "Our characters figured out the mystery and saved the day?"