Week 10 Session: The Grind Is a Curve Someone Drew

The level curve against the encounter table — six experience groups, the ratio that defines grind, and the level where fights-per-level doubles

26 April 2027

Difficulty in a JRPG is mostly a question of when you fight something, and when is set by two curves the game never shows you.

Six numbers. Each is the total experience a Pokémon needs to reach level 100, depending on which of the six growth groups its species was assigned.

The extremes differ by a factor of 2.7. Every species sits in exactly one group. Nothing in the game tells you which, and two Pokémon levelling side by side in the same party will drift apart for a reason that is never shown to the player.

The curve is half of it#

An experience curve on its own says nothing about grind. What produces grind is the curve divided by what the world pays you:

fights per level = (experience to next level) / (experience per fight available here)

Both terms move. The numerator climbs — cubic, for four of those six groups. The denominator climbs too, as the encounter table in each new region pays more. Grind is what happens when the numerator pulls ahead: the world stopped getting richer as fast as you got expensive.

Plot that ratio against level and you don’t get a slope, you get a sawtooth. It spikes at the end of each region and drops when you reach the next one. The spikes are where players go and fight the same enemies twenty times, and the height of each spike is a design decision somebody made — usually by accident, by placing a region boundary one level too late.

Two ways a designer moves it#

They can change the curve, or they can change the table. Changing the curve moves every spike at once, which is why it’s rarely the right tool. Changing the encounter table moves one spike, which is why almost every fix ships as a revised enemy list.

The Generation III additions are worth a look here: Erratic and Fluctuating are piecewise — the equation changes partway up. That’s a designer saying “the shape should be different after this level”, in the most direct form available. Four smooth cubics and two functions with joints in them, in one game.

Exercise: the curve against the table#

Pick a game with published experience tables and encounter yields. Plot fights-per-level against level, using the best enemy available at each point. Find the level where fights-per-level doubles against the level before it.

Then answer one question in writing: is that spike a wall or a pause? A wall is a spike that the next region immediately relieves, so the player grinds for twenty minutes and moves on. A pause is a spike the game expects you to solve some other way — with the party from week 9, or the break system from week 8. Games that don’t know which one they built ship both and call it difficulty.