Hello!
Now that I have your attention, I'll finish my sentence: Escalation in a novel is BAD when it is simply for the purpose of escalation; what you should do instead is fulfillment and variation. Escalation for its own sake is boring, because it's just more of the same. A battle against 1d8 wolves is fundamentally the same as 1d6 wolves (Just ask Ginny Di in her video about making encounters not suck. That video has great advice). I'll layout the issue with escalation and then provide some examples from anime, movies and tabletop games of how to resolve this.
You should only escalate your story if it leads to the advancement of a plot or the completion of a character's goal. Escalation for the sake of escalation is actually a narrow way to write, which locks you into a particular narrative arc.
For instance, it's great if you want to write a tournament style story. With each victory, the protagonist climbs to a higher rank, and therefore each opponent should be a tougher challenge than the last. How else did the opponent last this long in the tournament? But if your protagonist is just wandering around a countryside, how are you going to escalate that? Make each area coincidently more dangerous than the last? You might find it difficult to hype up each new random opponent outside the structure of a tournament.
(Did you realize I was talking about Pokemon?)
I remember a class, way back in Elementary School, when our teacher had us read this "story". It was about a kid eating a cookie. Then he ate a bigger cookie and then a much bigger cookie and then an even BIGGER cookie. Then she asked us if that was a fun story. I think it had to do with vocabulary, you know, using words like "giant", "huge" and "titanic" instead of repeatedly using "big", but it works for the case of escalation in novels as well.
That story is escalation in its simplest form. It's about the kid eating cookies, and it escalates by him eating bigger cookies. Does the escalation make that story better? No.
What if the story began with his goal of eating the world's biggest cookie, as part of some "break the record" sort of ambition, and this had some great personal significance to him? Then the escalation serves a purpose. Eating that bigger cookie is a step on the road to the fulfilment of a goal, which can serve as a narrative arc.
Or what if, instead of just cookies, the story included other deserts, like pie, which would require tableware to eat without getting messy, or ice cream in a hot area, so he would have to eat it quickly and risk a brain freeze. Doesn't that sound more interesting than a kid eating progressively bigger cookies?
In the famous manga and anime, Dragon Ball Z, we find an example escalation that can get boring as well as an example of how variation can mitigate this.
The Namek saga is infamous for being very long, and its climactic battle with Frieza even more so. This can be seen as a simple case of escalation: battling through Frieza's minions from weakest to strongest and then Frieza himself, who goes through a series of transformation that reveal more of his true power. Very little actually happens plot-wise or character-wise.
(Personal aside - I really like Dragon Ball Z. I watched it every afternoon on Toonami after school. I watched the original Dragon Ball, G-T and Super.)
There is one particular area of this very long arc that is different, and that is the battle with the Ginyu Force. These are Frieza's Elite, and they have some variation to them. Guldo, for instance, is the weakest of the bunch. In fact, Krillin and Gohan outclass him in terms of straightforward combat power. However, Guldo has more than straight-forward combat power. He can read minds and freeze time. He is very unusual in this regard, and that makes his battle different in nature. He is like a palate cleanser in that regard, because his teammates are more straightforward. Then we get to Captain Ginyu himself. He is a body-snatcher. He can force someone to switch bodies with him, which he does when he starts to lose. He'll even deliberately injury himself before doing so to handicap his opponent. Again, this is a variation that makes him more difficult to defeat than simply beating him into submission.
Another example of variation comes from Yu Yu Hakusho.
In the aftermath of the Dark Tournament arc, the protagonist, Yusuke, has become the tournament's champion. He won by overpowering this tall, imposing brute of a fighter. You might think that his next opponent would be stronger, more powerful, and more of a threat, right? No. The very next group is actually weaker than him, but they have particular abilities that bypass simple power: causing paralysis by stepping on the target's shadow, creating a field where certain actions are forbidden and supernaturally restricted, or like in the Dragon Ball Z example, mind-reading. These requires Yusuke and his friends to think in ways other than "punch the bad guy really hard". This is deliberate on the part of Yusuke's mentor, who feared he would stagnate otherwise.
These are old shows. It's not a novel technique. Yet, in the aftermath of the MCU's Avengers: Infinity War and End Game, a youtuber posted a video saying what a terrible precedent it set for cinema. Viewers would be impossible to please, they said, because they would keep demanding escalation: more heroes, bigger stakes, more, more, more. But no. That wasn't the case. The very next MCU movie was Ant-Man and the Wasp, which was very (pardon the pun) small scale. Two heroes trying to save one person by finding them in the (to be laconic) wilderness, that's it.
Finally, Dungeons and Dragons. This classic tabletop roleplaying game shows what I mean by avoiding escalation for fulfillment and variation.
High-level play doesn't happen much. Players seldom reach level 20, the highest level in fifth edition, and when they do, they seldom stay there long. This is because it gets boring. Their characters have likely completed their character arcs by then. The story of the campaign might be over. Furthermore, many Dungeon Masters just throw tougher monsters at them as a way of escalating the challenge. This runs into what is called the "Chunky Kobold Problem".
A kobold is one of the weakest monsters: small, fragile and weak. A Tarrasque is one of the most powerful: big, tough and strong. Yet, fighting the latter is fundamentally the same as the former. It just takes longer. If used for the simple purpose of escalation, then the Tarrasque is just a big and chunky kobold.
Enter the infamous "Tucker's Kobolds". These little guys come from a short story where they are shown to terrify high level players with their creative tactics and refusal to fight directly and openly. They are not stated to be any more powerful than standard kobolds, but they lean heavily into the Kobold lore of being master trap makers. By using a variety of tactics, they can force player-characters much more powerful than them to think creatively as well. Suddenly, fighting kobolds is a multi-faceted event. It's not about more kobolds or more powerful kobolds or any sort of escalation. It's about what these particular kobolds can do and why the players are willing to mess with them.
As for the Tarrasque, the Dungeon Dudes present many fine uses for this creature that avoid making it a big and chunky kobold.
(Another personal aside: The Dungeon Dudes are awesome. They have so many videos on so many aspects of the game. Really deep and creative stuff, and their advice is system agnostic. You can even use it for novel writing).
One of the many ways they suggest running a Tarrasque is to introduce it EARLY in the story, when the player characters have absolutely no chance of defeating it outright. It is not a mere monster but a force of nature; you don't defeat it, you survive it. Gaining strength, developing powers, finding special magic weapons, all these are driven by the goal of ultimately defeating this ultimate monster. Thus, rather than some novelty to throw at high-level players who need something tough to beat down, it is instead the fulfillment of a narrative arc and the climax of a campaign.
...This is long. It's a bigger topic than I expected. I might write another post on a specific aspect later on.
Brian Wilkerson is an independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor's degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).
His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.
New book up! Catalyst for Glorious Change!
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