Saturday, April 19, 2025

Levels Are For Video Games

Today, "leveling up" is a central feature of countless video games, from sprawling open-world RPGs to mobile idle clickers. As anyone who reads this blog of course knows, levels come from Dungeons & Dragons, which introduced them half a century ago as a way to mark a character's growth in power and ability through play over time. What began as a simple abstraction to track advancement has since become a core gameplay loop in video and computer games, where clear, incremental progress has come to be seen as essential to keeping players engaged. 

As video games came to outshine the tabletop games from which they borrowed mechanical concepts like levels, it was perhaps inevitable that tabletop RPGs would return the compliment by inflecting their own designs with assumptions shaped by digital play. Over time, many adopted video game-inspired approaches to advancement: faster progression, more frequent rewards, and clearly defined “power-ups” that echo the dopamine loops of their digital descendants. The result is that some players now approach tabletop RPGs expecting the same steady drip of mechanical achievement they get from a screen, treating levels, feats, and skill boosts not as optional frameworks but as the very point of play. This feedback loop between mediums has reshaped how many people think about character advancement, often narrowing it to the accumulation of stats rather than the growth of an in-game persona, his relationships, or his impact on the wider setting. It’s also made me increasingly skeptical, if not outright critical, of levels themselves.

Before we get too far, let me be clear: this post isn’t an attack on levels. They’ve been a part of tabletop RPGs since 1974 and I'm not advocating for their abandonment. In the Gygaxo-Arnesonian conception of levels, a character can cast more spells, survive more wounds, and fight more fearsome foes as he advances. In this conception, levels bring a sense of scale and direction to campaigns and help frame a rough arc of a character's growth after the fashion of, say, Conan's rise from a young, inexperienced warrior to a battle-hardened general of Aquilonia (and, eventually, its king). It was, therefore, only natural that early computer RPGs, like Ultima and Wizardry would follow suit. Computers are excellent at tracking numbers, after all, and early video games needed straightforward mechanics.

As the years went by, the leveling paradigm took over. Players of video games came to expect a steady stream of mechanical rewards for their investment of time. Kill monsters, gain experience, level up. It’s a feedback loop as familiar and addictive as a slot machine and just as tightly engineered. With the massive success of MMORPGs and action-RPGs, the model has became entrenched and, unsurprisingly, it has filtered back into tabletop gaming. Many players now approach tabletop RPGs with the assumption that leveling up, or some equivalent form of mechanical advancement, is not only expected but essential.

And that brings back to something I've been feeling for some time: tabletop RPGs don’t need levels. In fact, they don’t need mechanical advancement at all.

Plenty of games, some of them quite old, have already demonstrated this. Consider my favorite roleplaying game, Traveller. Characters in Traveller begin the game with their skills already in place, having completed careers before adventuring begins. There is no leveling system. Characters can improve, albeit very slowly, with years of in-game training, but mechanical advancement is not central to the experience of playing Traveller. Instead, the game focuses on exploration, commerce, politics, and survival in an indifferent universe. What matters is what one's character does within the setting, not how his numbers go up.

The same could even be said for a game like Call of Cthulhu, where the main arc of a character’s life isn’t defined by rising power but by gradual decline – into madness, death, or at best, retirement from delving into the Mythos. He might get better at Library Use or Spot Hidden, but he’ll never become an investigator resistant, never mind immune, to cosmic horror. That’s not the point of the game. Even RuneQuestthough it includes skill advancement through use, eschews levels entirely. A seasoned Gloranthan character is still vulnerable, still mortal. Advancement, when it comes, is more than a matter of increasing skill percentiles, but rather one of reputation, relationships, position within the world of the Third Age.

These games remind us that the real power of tabletop RPGs lies not in mechanics, but in meaning. Unlike a video game, which must quantify progress to function, a tabletop RPG has no such constraint. The game lives in conversation and imagination. If a Traveller character becomes the right hand man of the subector duke, or earns the ire of an Ine Givar terrorist cell, or uncovers the secrets of the Ancients, those are significant achievements. No hit points were gained, no XP awarded, yet the character has advanced in ways no level system can fully capture.

This is not to say that mechanical advancement is inherently bad, because I've used to good effect for decades. Leveling provides structure and creates a sense of forward motion. These are good things. For some players, it also scratches an itch that is very real. However, when mechanical growth becomes the primary – only – form of advancement, it distorts the nature of tabletop play. Players start to see everything through the lens of optimization. They choose actions based on what yields the most mechanical benefit, rather than what makes the most sense for their character or the world he inhabits.

I’ve seen it happen; I suspect most of us have. A party bypasses an intriguing mystery because it offers no clear reward. A player makes choices like navigating a skill tree, optimizing for mechanical advantage rather than what fits the world or character. That mindset can make sense in a video game, where content is finite and progress must be explicitly marked. But tabletop RPGs aren’t software. They aren’t bound by code or limited to scripted outcomes. Their flexibility is their greatest strength. A character can change the world – or be changed by it – without his stats shifting at all.

If there’s one thing my House of Worms campaign has taught me, it’s to lean into that flexibility. We should reward clever thinking, bold risks, and engagement with the setting over mechanical upgrades. The most satisfying kind of advancement comes from caring about a character and his place in the world, not just from tallying experience points. When advancement does happen, it should feel earned not because the rules dictate it, but because something significant has happened.

Levels are great. Experience points can be fun. But they are tools, not goals. Tabletop RPGs aren’t about reaching 10th level. They’re about entering and exploring an imaginary world through an equally imaginary character. What matters isn’t how many hit points your fighter has, but what you do with them. Success might mean founding a colony, retiring in disgrace, making a terrible bargain with an otherworldly power, or changing the course of an empire. These are the kinds of outcomes that emerge from choices, consequences, and collaboration with the referee and other players, not from ticking boxes on a character sheet. Advancement in a tabletop RPG is ultimately about meaning, not math.

Those aren’t the kinds of achievements a level-up screen can show you and that’s exactly what makes them worth chasing – or, increasingly, it’s what keeps me playing after all these years.

37 comments:

  1. To me *D&D quickly became a textbook example of how not to design an RPG game (hit points, armor making you harder to hit, saving throws, experience and levels...).
    I understand that being there first they had no previous art to inspire them... but Traveller was more or less the same age and undeniably much better.

    Also, AD&D was definitely a missed opportunity to design a better framework.

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    1. To each their own. I found Traveller’s concept of rolling up a character and then having that character experience zero personal growth over the entirety of the campaign to be the quintessential example of poor game design. Levels aside, I continue to learn new skills and improve existing ones. I can also focus on improving any core ability - strength, knowledge, dexterity, willpower, endurance, charisma, etc. And, of course, abilities eventually begin to decline with age if you’re so inclined to model that.

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    2. Fair enough but...

      1) Traveller was designed in a more rational (and modular) way, so if you wanted to replace one of the subsystem, like how Armor works, or making PC generation point based, you could easily do that without having to modify the rest of the game.
      (in fact, Armor was redesigned went through at least two design revisions while the rest of the system: 2d6 vs. Target Number was still perfectly suitable).
      2) For your specific issue, levels provide possibly the worst solution. I.e. a thief could get enough XP by taking part in fights and/or true the acquisition of treasure... and yet they will immediately increase Finding Traps, Climbing Walls etc.
      In terms of "internal consistency" (I would not even try to defend "realism" there) something like BRP/CoC makes vastly more sense... and Runequest came out not that longer after AD&D either.

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    3. 1) Any game is modifiable without changing the core mechanic. 2d6 vs a target number is perfectly suitable as long as skills don’t exceed two or three. So, the game effectively models the tired trope of almost all aliens being humanoid and roughly human sized. The 2d6 mechanic can’t effectively handle a wider variation in power levels.

      2) Even with a point buy system, a thief could go through an entire adventure never finding a trap and still choose to improve their Find Traps skill. Killing monsters and acquiring treasure for xp is easily changed to whatever method you want to use to determine xp. The real issue with levels is that low level characters tend to be underpowered and high level characters tend to get overpowered. This is also modifiable. For D&D, I have characters start at first level with max hp and gp (to buy better armor). You could also simply start them at level two or three. At the upper end, I’ve found the fun drops by the early teen levels, so you could either implement a level or xp cap or just end the game at that point. You could also reduce xp awards if you want to slow level advancement.

      Again, to each their own. These are just my opinions as your statements are just your opinions. As long as you’re having fun it really doesn’t matter!

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    4. @Derek the Hunter: On point 2, RuneQuest/CoC/most BRP don't use point buy for improvement, but rather a usage system where using a skill (plus other requisites) allows a roll to improve the skill. While other options like training exist for improvement, they remain "diegetic", as it were, with direct correlations to actions/events in the setting rather than being entirely arbitrary game mechanics. The point being that improvement in finding traps is directly related to finding traps (or training in that activity) rather than, say, swinging a sword.

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    5. @faoladh Ah, got it. AD&D assumes training by someone more knowledgeable and repetitive practice prior to leveling, which are equally important to using a skill occasionally in real situations. It still feels like a weak answer as to why leveling is “the worst solution”. But, thanks for the clarification.

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  2. "And that brings back to something I've been feeling for some time: tabletop RPGs don’t need levels. In fact, they don’t need mechanical advancement at all."

    ...as that's something I have been advocating for a long time, I can not but agree! It's not bad, but we should not think it's the only way.

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    1. Yeah...I totally agree. I'm happy with in-story achievements and rewards. I'm okay with small, incremental improvements to a character but I find it hard to suspend my disbelief when levelling up means that in just a few months of in-game time a character can go from zero to superhero.

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  3. To be honest, this obsession with levels can be pretty obnoxious in video games, too. I loved Left 4 Dead and its sequel, games where you just killed zombies, ran from zombies, and tried to get out alive. Many clones/follow ups, while being pretty decent games, lose some to unnecessary progression systems and the inclusion of dedicated classes (whereas int he originals, you just grab the gun that suits you at the moment).

    I've also been having fun with a game called Sea of Thieves, which is a sort of first person pirate game where you just go make adventures happen on a huge MMO-style map. There's no levels and no classes, you just go and play and do what you feel like (There is faction reputation, so there's things you can work for). Very refreshing.

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  4. It depends a lot on what you mean by “mechanical” advancement. You seem to be using “mechanical advancement” as if its definition excludes Runequest-style advancement, which makes no sense to me. I think the traditional differentiation is between direct advancement and abstract advancement, but both are mechanical. They both improve the character’s/player’s chances of succeeding according to the mechanics of the game.

    There are games that have no mechanical advancement at all, but they’re rare. The one that comes to mind for me is Everway, and even there the author later published a potential mechanical advancement method.

    It sounds like what you’re really complaining about, however, is not levels or advancement, but the reduction of options to what is stated in the rules or the adventure. This has nothing to do with levels except insofar as it has to do with the importation of video game methods to roleplaying games. I’m including so-called cinematic roleplaying under this umbrella. The real problem isn’t that video games imported levels from RPGs and then RPGs imported levels from video games, but that RPGs (the exemplar being D&D) have imported the mindset of video games/cinematic storytelling. There is a solution; in video game-style playing or cinematic-style playing, it is the goal of the players to find that solution in the code/find the plot at the end of the script. It is not the job of the players to Kobayashi-Maru the adventure and make a completely new solution or generate their own narrative that may even differ from player to player.

    That’s what leads to players treating the game as “ticking off boxes” as a replacement for progress. They’re not just ticking off boxes on advancement, they’re ticking off boxes everywhere in the game.

    Sorry for the length. Believe it or not I actually cut it down. It will probably become a blog post at some point!

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  5. Great post, and timely, as I just purchased Dragonbane off the back of your previous post. I'll be playing with my ten year old and some of his friends and I will be sure to weave this ethos into our play as being foundational. The are heavy into both Minecraft and Fortnite. I am keen to see how this training weaves itself into the DNA of our game as well!

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  6. I do think that players like having some way of measuring, to some extent, the progress of their characters, so I've come to appreciate systems like enumerated contacts and favors, and related mechanics such as persistent character ties like loyalty or hatred or other reputations, and so on. I think I first saw a formal list of contacts in Shadowrun or one of the games derived from Champions (maybe Espionage or its revision, Danger International), and games like Pendragon, Lace & Steel, and GURPS have really expanded on those ideas. Those social-net mechanics let characters have perceptible advancement without resorting to levels or even increasing skills.

    Even from the earliest published form of D&D, of course, characters were expected to advance outside of the level system, using money gained through adventuring to build a faction, by paying for hirelings and a headquarters of some sort. It was very early on in the publication of details about the World of Greyhawk, too, that Gygax included details of the troops employed by named figures from the setting like Mordenkainen and Bigby.

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  7. At a certain point you need so many xp to level up in pre-3E D&D type games they ddsort of settle down out of the frenetic pace of leveling up. I agree it gets exhausting with all the constant expectation of improvement. I really like the concept of Traveller where all the advancement is in the characters engagement with the game world itself (better stuff, knowledge, allies etc.) . I'm speaking as a DM here though.

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  8. Not a fan of levels myself and haven't been since the first time I played an RPG that lacked them, which was probably FASA Star Trek back in 1982.

    Nowadays none of the games I regularly run/play have them: ALIENS, Champions, Star Trek Adventures, Star Wars D6, classic Traveller, and I could certainly go on and on.

    More and more it seems like modern game designers are leaving them in the past and as you say, in the realm of Computer/Video Games.

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  9. That’s some great food for thought.

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  10. I don't think I've thought about this before, or if I did only very fleetingly. But this post made me stop and really appreciate that _all_ the game systems I've used, from the very start, have been non-level ones. (Aside from a very brief dalliance with Rolemaster long ago, which felt more like a tourist excursion even at the time, and another very recent vacation into D&D 4e.)

    I don't think that was ever conscious or intentional on my part, but I don't think it's likely to be random chance either. Perhaps it was just early imprinting (starting with Runequest and Traveller) shaping how I went forward, from behind the scenes.

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  11. Video game levels, like dungeon levels, are a way of reducing the game world to a section that fits in computer memory or on a sheet of paper. Character levels are a different debate that I didn;t expect

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  12. I've been turning this post over in my mind all day long, trying to figure out what I have to say about it -- so thank you for a thought-provoking article, anyhow! ;-)

    My observations boil down to this: character level, much like hit points, is a concept that has lost its definition over time, and in most of the same ways and due to most of the same culprits. In the earliest days, the concept of "experience level" made perfect sense; the game was one of diving into a dungeon that gets increasingly dangerous the farther down one goes, and, as one gains "experience," one becomes more adept at surviving its dangers. So far, so good. As the scope of the game expanded, though, the metaphor began to crack; why would time spent exploring caves underneath the graveyard help one survive on the Elemental Plane of Fire? Why would the mayor thanking you for rescuing his daughter spontaneously make you more experienced? Why would *any* amount of dungeon crawling be not only helpful but *necessary* for creation of a golem to serve in your laboratory?

    This problem was brewing long before Wizards of the Coast came along, but, as with many things, 3e really brought the absurdity to the fore, decoupling the concept of "experience level" entirely from its apparent meaning, and gaming it right up as just a score target that needs to be hit to gain new anime superpowers. You can even use that experience you gained to "level up" as some class completely unrelated to anything you've ever done. Why not? It's just a computerised currency, after all!

    All of which is my noodley way of saying that, while I surely agree that experience levels are not essential to the hobby, most of their problems are caused by the metaphor being extended in ways that don't make sense, and which began pretty much as soon as the hobby did. :-)

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  13. Despite my quasigrognardosity im convinced that D&D xp and levels are a pacing mechanism not a reward system.

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    1. That makes sense of DMG 1e's onerous rules on gp cost for level advancement, which forces PCs to go adventuring just to gain gp for tuition. The moratorium on earning xp during these tuition-gathering expeditions would have the effect of slowing down progression dramatically.

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  14. "Level up" even entered the lexicon of UK politics between 2019 and 2024. We had a Dept for Levelling Up, the idea being that towns and urban areas that had lost their former industries would be redeveloped and modernised. A worthy goal but more rhetoric than well-defined plan.

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    1. Apparently the origins for the term in politics go back to the 19th century, not video game culture (which starts 2003 or so?): https://ukandeu.ac.uk/levelling-up-the-surprisingly-long-history/#:~:text=The%20phrase%20(and%20the%20phrase,and%20Catholic%20churches%20in%20Ireland.

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    2. Actually, 'video game culture' started in the 1970's, in the arcade's - and at home with early versions of what you would today call 'consoles' (like the Atari 2600) - with releases like 'pong', 'breakout', and 'space invaders'.

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    3. @Anonymous: You could push it back perhaps to the '60s, even, with early computer games given names like "Space War" (or "SPCWR" or the like) or whatever being written on mainframes for the use of students and professionals with access.

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    4. Point taken. As you noted, there was "Spacewar!", which (wikipedia tells me) was written in 1962 on/for the DEC PDP-1. Although one could argue that this was not available for 'the general public'. Oh, well.

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    5. Sure, but we're talking about the origins of "gamer culture", not what the "general public" had available. The artisanally-written games that existed in different specific forms on different, unconnected machines are surely part of that.

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    6. I meant the use of the phrase "level up" started in video game culture c. 2003 (it seems, according to online sources), not that video game culture itself started in 2003. I played Space Invaders c. 1980, & D&D starting c. 1981, but when you advanced a level in D&D back then, no one I knew ever called it "leveling up"; they called it "gaining a level." The phrase "level up" seems to have appeared this century (c. 2003) out of video game culture and replaced "gain a level," which was the terminology of the rulebooks (e.g., DMG 86) – or some such verb (attain / advance / reach a level); no one back then seemed to use “level” as a verb. We apparently have video game culture c. 2003 to thank for that – that was my point. Just a linguistic observation from a crotchety old grognard.

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  15. I think the first RPG I encountered without leveling was Marvel SH, and it made sense to me that way: The characters were all fixed at their established power levels, they "adventured" because that's what happens to comic book characters on a daily basis, and if you wanted the experience of playing a more powerful character, well, you played Thor instead of Captain America. And yes, there was some odd system in a sidebar about banking Karma to improve abilities, but it was so obviously tacked-on that I never took it seriously.

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  16. I just want to mention that the good old text adventure games never had levels either. It was all about exploration, puzzle solving and these days a lot more too.

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    1. Yes, the good old 'text based adventures', I remember them well. I will never forget the (lack of) interface of them. You knew what you wanted/needed to do, but just could not figure out the specific word combination that the developer chose/programmed for that specific action.

      > You stand in the middle of a room, with exits to the north and east. In the middle is a table, and a lamp stands upon it.
      $ pick up lamp
      > You cannot do that to a lamp.
      $ get lamp
      > You cannot do that to a lamp.
      $ take lamp
      > You cannot do that to a lamp.
      [ slightly frustrated now ]
      $ kick lamp
      > You kick the lamp, which falls on the floor, setting the table, the room, and yourself on fire.
      > You have died. Press 'N' to start over.

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  17. Well, you could just create characters at a desired starting level, then disallow advancement. I suppose most players want to see some improvements though and not because video cards have set the expectation.

    The bigger issue IMO is just the way DnD is designed. Classes, coupled with levels that allow large HP and power level gains. Advancement is faster than other games which puts a big gap between levels. A 10th level fighter vs a 3rd level fighter is no contest. Boring IMO.

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  18. (because it seems like gremlins ate my earlier post, I'll retry here: )

    When I (recent-ish) started playing TTRPG's (D&D 5e) for the first time, I was really looking forward to becoming a 20th level PC, with the power levels that go along with it. But after we finished that campaign (at mid-tier levels) and started a new one at level 1, I now think I prefer lower-levels of play rather than the higher levels. Even though I can't seem to find the words to express why that is so. Oh, well.

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  19. D&D also weirdly conflates power levels with social status, as seen with the level titles that go back to the earliest drafts of the rules. While there is some precedence for this (King Conan), it also means that every ruler in your fantasy kingdom is also (at least) a ridiculously overpowered killing machine.

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  20. Levelling up makes sense if/when it reflects a character getting better through experience (hence, XP). When the mechanic of levelling up becomes the point, then it loses the narrative of ludonarrative. Prestige classes in 3.5 really codified this - you have to have so much of *this* and so much of *that* in order to do this *other thing* - they attempted to mitigate this with subclasses, but I think they just shifted the focus from the top to throughout a character's journey. If games had more 'social prestige' systems to reward players, it might draw attention away from the mechanical combat focus of it.

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  21. Like many things in D&D (eg hp, AC), XP and levelling are abstractions - it's a fool's errand to try to look for a correlation between the activities that gain XP and the character improvements that XP lead to. However, it's certainly true that this can influence player choices - and if it's doing so negatively, then you should change the system (for example, awarding XP for different activities, or using milestone levelling).

    It's worth noting that the concept of PC progression is one of the major innovations of D&D, as compared to the wargames that came before it.

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    1. Leveling is not bad and is just one reward for players. For D&D however, it makes for huge jumps in power level for a character so I do feel it's implentation pushes people to focus on it more.

      I play Savage Worlds. It doesn't have levels but has Advances which are roughly the same. The power between advances are much lower so I do feel it's less of a focus. A new fighter with no advances is still a threat to a fighter with 10 advances. Players have to play it differently and you generally never feel like you're a god that can handle anything at lower levels.

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  22. I like leveling in some of my games but not others. If you want to play the kind of High Fantasy where the group eventually works their way up to fight Dragons / Demons or the like, it simulates that kind of game well. If you want to be smugglers trying to make their way through what life throws at them, then maybe slow / no advancement is better, weather their ship has a sail or a warp drive.

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