How involved is the story in Wizards 101? If the story almost seems separate from the mechanics of the game itself, you may just decide to ignore them completely.

I have more experience with World of Warcraft as the only non-flash MMO i've ever played - while I'm sure alot of people like making sillier stories that reference levels and spending gold for spells, the better stories are the ones that ignore that aspect completely and focus on the characters of the Warcraft lore, which is backed up by 3 games prior to the MMO.

If you've ever read any novels based on Dungeons and Dragons, you can see similar things happening - DnD is a very rules-based game, but the novels make no mention of levels, make references to classes only when there are extremely obvious archetypes associated with them (I cannot recall any Salvador novels actually labeling someone as a Rogue).

Dann already brought up the example of City of Heroes, where Security Levels (and the villainous equivalent, Threat Levels) are stamped on an ID card every character carries around and must display to get into certain areas -- it'd nearly impossible for anyone in that setting to not use the terminology. In sufficiently 'meta' games, such as S4 League, it'd make sense for everything visible to the players to be visible, since the characters are canonically just avatars for their players. In comedy, I think you can have characters randomly reference levels and other "universe rules" without it being a problem: the Order of the Stick and its various heirs, many World of Warcraft comedies, and some other series do this on occasion.

On the other hand, it's very easy to accidentally end up with narmy "It's over 9000!" sorta things. The class schedule or how long someone's been there may be a lot smoother to write, especially since you can go to relative values rather than end up with painful-to-write level numbers. Another option would be something similar to the "years" comparisons from Harry Potter; someone five ten levels above you would be from a higher year, someone five or ten levels under from a younger year. Wizards101 does shameless emulate borrow from Harry Potter enough for the overlap to work.

Alternatively, you may not want to use that information at all. Characters don't know everything, and metagame is often something that's very easy for them to not know. It removes the easy method of simply telling information about power, but there are a lot of other ways to establish strength -- everything from method of dress to weaponry to powers to movement tells a lot in most MMOs. Lots of opportunity to show, rather than tell.

As Techno-Dann correctly Googled, it is indeed Wizard101. Sorry for not mentioning that earlier. I think I need to go reclaim my brain; it seems to have wandered off somewhere and begun a game of hide-and-seek without telling me.

Anyway, I like the idea of the levels being more tied into education. I'm reluctant to use words like 'grade' or anything else so recognizable, but they're supposed to be at school anyway, so that makes sense. (We're ignoring here the fact that a student wizard, especially one who comes from a distant land that doesn't know about magic, is in change of saving the world. This game is really frighteningly similar to Harry Potter. Really. But I digress.)

On a side note, would the PPC deal with this kind of story? Not the subject, but the fact that the people who write them are just plain bad writers. I haven't been able to get through enough of any one to see if they involve 'Sues, but they're just badly written. Would they be left alone, or is it something a department like the Dept. of Technical Errors might handle?

Thanks for ideas and replies,
--anamia

Anyways, except for certain types of parodies, it is traditional to not refer directly to game mechanics, unless the game story itself mentions them explicitly in the story and gives a specific explanation for what they are. Keep track of what level the characters are, though, so they don't have inconsistent power levels.

You'll note that pretty much all single player roleplaying games considered to be of high quality never mention level in dialogue. It's on a level with saying, "The sword does 2d6+1d10fire". The level is part of the game, but presumably the characters don't actually know what level anyone is.

The only 1-to-50 game that I'm familiar with is City of Heroes, where players have a "Security Clearance" that's effectively their level. There, I think it would make sense, as it's handled like an in-game number. On the other hand, using Levels in WOW fanfic would be jarring and out-of-place.

*does some googling*

I'm not terribly familiar with Wizards 101, but there has to be a better system - could you convert levels into class numbers? Those tend to go from 100 to 499 or so, so that suggests some sort of mapping.

(And by the way, don't be embarrassed by the games you play. I just got into the Lego Universe beta, and am happily ignoring college homework to play it.)

...do it as something along the lines of 'threat levels'. Probably 1 is the equivalent of a small harmless forest mammal and the highest is death in a barrel, and the assigned number is something that a certain item can tell you, or a file, or whatever. Still keeping the sort-of level mechanic, but making it make a bit more sense.
I'm not explaining this particularly well... Hm. I don't know about this game, but in most of the games I play there's an item or spell that gives you a detailed look at the other person's stats, and can usually be handwaved to say that it gives you a rough approximation of strength, etc., and then the estimated level of threat.
Um.
Hopefully there's something in there you that helps a little.

Hey there! Nice to meet you!

I'd avoid using the term levels. Saying stuff like "I was more experienced than so-and-so, but hadn't explored as much as she had" makes the story flow better than using numbers and levels. It's better to think as the numbers as there for the players benefit rather than the characters.

I like to think of it as an age. If you start adventuring at the age of eighteen then that is level one. Add one year for every level. This works because the older you get the more experience you have and the more spells you are likely to have learned.

It might also work to just not mention the level. Instead, refer to the characters level of experience. To use your example, "I was further advanced in my studies than my best friend Sabrina FireWeave, though I had yet to make it to Marleybone and she was already there." This allows you to keep the relative power levels without explicitly saying what level the characters are in the game.

Hope this helps.