A Low-Level Run is a Self-Imposed Challenge that often requires the player to go out of their way to avoid gaining as much experience as possible by avoiding battles or EXP-giving quests. However, some games help you overcome that by allowing you to voluntarily adjust your level or letting you use something to prevent you from gaining experience. This usually comes in the form of a menu option, item, or piece of equipment.
This often happens for a few reasons. One is to keep the game challenging. If a game lets you carry over your levels to New Game Plus or you become overleveled by doing too many sidequests, a Level Limiter can keep battles interesting and fun by allowing you to lower your level. Another reason is to get better advantages from being low-leveled. Maybe you get better drops at a certain level or maybe you can get higher stats from leveling up later rather than at the start of the game, or perhaps the game gives you bonuses in other areas as a tradeoff for not gaining experience.
Note that if a game allows you to spend points to level up or some other way of manually applying upgrades, it should allow a way to lower your stats or stop gaining experience points. Simply choosing not to use upgrades or avoiding actions that give EXP is not enough.
Compare Skill Point Reset, where you can lower your level to reallocate your stats. Contrast Experience Penalty, which usually forcibly reduces your EXP intake to discourage grinding rather than as a positive, and Level Drain, where you lose your levels by force rather than voluntarily. See also Power Limiter for the non-video game version of this trope.
Examples:
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Fan Games
- Final Fantasy VI Brave New World has No. Exp Eggs, which prevent a character that equips them from obtaining EXP.
- Pokémon Infinite Fusion: RageCandyBars can be used on a Pokémon to lower their level by 1.
First-Person Shooters
- Vermintide II: Modded Realm is a gameplay mode that grants access to Game Mods but doesn't award experience points, loot, or progress toward Challenges.
Hack-and-Slash
- In Fire Emblem Warriors, you can reset your levels to get character-specific materials. This cost a lot of money in the first game but could be done for free in its sequel Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes.
- In No More Heroes III, you can reset your upgrades by paying UC at Naomi's Lab.
Metroidvania
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: The Harder Than Hard, "Nightmare" difficulty. Its enemies have the same stats and locations as Hard difficulty, but the levels of Miriam and her familiars are permanently set to 1 for the entirety of the playthrough.
- Castlevania: Two games in the series have a hard difficulty unlocked as part of New Game Plus where reduced level caps can be imposed. (In both cases, experience is still tracked internally, for the benefit of any later playthroughs with higher caps)
- Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin: One feature of the hard difficulty is that you must pick a reduced level cap, the choices being 50, 25, or even 1. Special stat-boosting items are unlocked as a reward for beating the game on each cap.
- Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: The reduced level cap is optional this time, with the available caps now being just 50 and 1. Completing either unlocks a special item with high stat boosts. Completing the level cap of 1 also unlocks the ability to invert this by raising the already Absurdly High Level Cap of 100 to 255.
MMORPG
- City of Heroes allows you to switch XP progression off, which is primarily meant to help you get missions done without outleveling them until you're ready.
- EverQuest II allows you to turn off both combat XP and quest XP if you want to level lock your toon or restrict your advancement through one method or the other. It also has the Chronomentor system, which allows a player to reduce their level range to farm lower-level content for loot.
- Kingdom of Loathing has several items with negative stats, and since level progression is based on Stat Grinding, this effectively reduces a character's level, which is useful for certain level-locked dungeons (such as the Cola Wars Battlefield which you can only access at Level 6). It also has the Black Cat familiar and the Bad Moon zodiac sign (effectively two different ways of achieving the same result), that severely reduce or outright negate encounter rewards (although a player on a Black Cat/ Bad Moon run can learn the "Torso Awaregness"(sic ) skill that lets you wear shirts.
- Toontown: Corporate Clash: Because the toontask system got a complete overhaul from the base game with laff boost actually granted from a regular level-up system, players were able to choose to have their toon be stuck at a certain amount of laff, even being able to have a toon with only one laff point. However, the ability to make such a toon was removed. There is intent to bring the feature back though.
Role-Playing Games
- In Bravely Default, the Golden Egg accessory doubles your money intake in exchange for reducing EXP and JP gained to zero.
- In Bug Fables, the "RUIGEE" cheat makes enemies no longer give out experience points. Instead, an NPC will sell the player upgrades for money.
- CrossCode: Equipment with the Zero XP modifier prevents you from gaining Enemy EXP, such as the three Drills: Excalibro, Infinity Spiral Drill, and Singularity Drill. The first being a Joke Weapon, and the other two are made for material harvesting instead of combat. This modifier does not affect quest EXP, however.
- The "Workman's Wallet" accessory in Chrono Trigger converts your experience points into money.
- In Dark Souls II, the Agape Ring is a ring that absorbs all Souls (which serve as both money and XP for levelling up) instead of the player. This is mainly relevant for Player Versus Player multiplayer, as the game's matchmaker uses Soul Memory — the total amount of Souls the character has obtained — to limit which other players you can connect with.
- Doodle World: The Level-Down Cube is an item that does Exactly What It Says on the Tin — it levels down your Doodle. They can be bought at any Doodle Depot and are incredibly cheap at a measly $200 per pop (for reference, a single Basic Capsule is double that price). This can be done for a variety of reasons, such as to complete "Level Up" Doodlepedia tasks or to get a friendship evolution before the level cap is hit.
- Fallout: New Vegas: The Logan's Loophole Trait (picked at character creation or a special DLC medical facility) will allow you to use as many drugs as you want with no addiction risk, but caps your level at 30 (out of a possible 50).
- Final Fantasy:
- The Pixel Remaster versions of the first six Final Fantasy games have a Boost feature, which allows you to decrease or completely disable EXP gain.
- In Final Fantasy X, Clear Spheres can be used to erase stat nodes from the Sphere Grid, usually to allow you to replace them with higher stat spheres. Celestial Weapons have the No AP ability if they are unupgraded with crests or sigils, making them useless since you have to manually activate nodes anyway.
- In Final Fantasy XII, the Firefly accessory prevents the user from gaining experience. The New Game Minus mode in the Zodiac edition prevents the player from gaining levels.
- In Final Fantasy XV, the Nixperience Band stops EXP from being applied when you rest at a camp or hotel, letting you get better EXP bonuses later from better hotels.
- Several games in Kingdom Hearts have an ability called EXP Zero, which causes the player characters to stop gaining levels as long they have it equipped. In some of the games such as Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, and Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], EXP Zero is exclusive to their respective Harder Than Hard modes. In the case of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts coded, simply de-equipping your Level Up chips allows you to stay at Level 1.
- Fortune Summoners: The inverse, where Arche has to find Marks of Heroism to increase her level cap, otherwise she's forced to stay at a specific Character Level.
- In NieR: Automata, the Forbidden Fruit item lowers your level by 10, which can only be won by beating the Special Rank match at the Forbidden City Arena DLC.
- In the Rune Factory series, it's possible to unlock the ability to prevent enemies from giving EXP. This naturally allows for the player to do a Low-Level Run. While it's unlocked after beating the main story, it then becomes available in New Game Plus so the player can use it from the beginning of the game.
- In the remake of Trials of Mana, you can choose to reset your level in New Game Plus after Patch 1.1.0.
- In The World Ends with You and NEO: The World Ends with You, lowering your level raises the drop rate, giving you a higher chance of getting Pins.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2 lets you adjust your level in New Game Plus. This feature got carried over to the remastered version of Xenoblade Chronicles.
Roguelite
- Spellbook Demonslayers: The Time Splicer Aura reduces a character's level by 3 because it also grants an additional percent of damage for every Character Level.
Tactical RPG
- A core mechanic of the Disgaea games is "Reincarnation" which resets a character to Level 1, but allows them to keep a percentage of their stats when they do, thus allowing the character to become stronger when they level back up. In addition, generic characters can switch classes while keeping their non-Unique skills, thus allowing them to learn skills they otherwise couldn't.
Third-Person Shooter
- Splatoon 2 allows you to reset to a lower rank in order to make it easier on you (albeit with the caveat that you gain fewer points, and thus, get rewards slower.)
