How you manage the relative strength of characters and threats across your story so that conflicts stay meaningful as power grows.
Power scaling is the way you calibrate how strong characters, creatures, and magical forces are in relation to each other, and how that balance shifts over the course of your story. It's about making sure your protagonist faces challenges that feel proportionate: not so easy they're boring, not so impossible they require a sudden, unexplained power-up. When scaling goes wrong, you get power creep, where every new threat must be exponentially bigger until the stakes become absurd.
If your hero can topple empires by book two, what's left for book three? Power scaling keeps your story's tension alive across its full arc. It forces you to think about growth as something the reader can track and believe in, rather than an escalating arms race that spirals out of control.
The classic cautionary tale of power creep. Each new villain is exponentially stronger, leading to absurd power levels that undercut earlier achievements.
Sanderson keeps scaling in check by emphasizing clever application of existing powers over raw increases in strength.
The Nen system is designed so that raw power matters less than compatibility, strategy, and the conditions users place on their abilities.
Vary your threats. Not every antagonist needs to be more powerful; some can be more cunning, more politically connected, or more morally complex.
Foreshadow growth. Show the training, the sacrifice, or the discovery that justifies the new capability before the moment it's needed.
Give supporting characters distinct roles that don't depend on raw power. The strategist, the healer, and the diplomat stay useful even when the hero levels up.
Map your protagonist's power at three points in your story: the beginning, the midpoint, and the climax. For each level, write down one threat they could handle and one they couldn't. Check that the gaps between levels feel earned and that each increase comes with a cost or trade-off.