Talk:Tier Magic/@comment-88.203.126.251-20170428183010/@comment-45.56.46.26-20180816212747

It's a matter of level caps, ultimately.

We know that level caps exist in the New World, and that once you reach your level cap that's pretty much it. We also know that the typical level cap is below 20, meaning that most people can't cast spells higher than 3rd tier no matter what, and even to cast that takes great dedication to becoming a magic caster.

It's not clear whether the level cap in the New World is 'hard' or 'soft', that is, whether the level schedule just ends at your cap or the amount of XP necessary to level up further is just so high that it is practically impossible.

We also don't know what the native variation in level cap is for non-Godkin, we know that people can hit their cap well below the average level cap, like Gondo. But while we can infer that isn't a result of anything to do with God-kin, it's possible that Gondo is actually the norm and the average level cap being higher than that is because of unacknowledged God-kin lineages.

For example, let's say that your personal level cap will be the average of your parents (this probably isn't exactly the case, but bear with me). Let's say that, before Players show up, the level cap for human races in the New World is 10. 600 years ago, the 6GG show up and some of them decide to have a little fun on the side. The resulting kids have level caps of 55. If they breed back into the general population of the New World rather than with their siblings, the next generation level cap is 32-33. After that it drops to 21-22, then 15-16. Okay, let's say that having a high level cap confers a survival advantage, and is also considered sexy (I would tend to assert both as fact, but for now we're working with assumptions). Once we're no longer talking about siblings or first cousins, there is a strong tendency for folks with higher level caps to seek out mates with high level caps (well, for everyone, but people with low level caps are disadvantaged in both survival and finding mates). So what you get is second/third cousin mating producing a fairly stable hybrid race that is approximately one-fifth Yggdrasil and the rest New World.

This hybrid race outcompetes the pure-strain New World race with limited further opportunities for interbreeding...it's just too disadvantageous to be or marry a pure New Worlder.

Now, the picture is a lot more complicated. For one thing, we can basically see that level cap isn't a simple average of the level caps of the parents, it's probably a complex result of multiple hereditable factors. Maybe even factors that aren't 'genetic' in any normal sense (I'd say likely, even). Also, people who live lives of ease and luxury aren't going to hit their level caps (cause duh). So certain kinds or degrees of social/reproductive success make innate level cap an irrelevancy. Also, Players have been hitting it big in the New World every hundred years for quite a while...most of them are probably a lot less celibate than Ainz (both by personality and racial characteristics).

Still, the oversimplification gives us an interesting result. Is this intentional on the part of Maruyama? I wouldn't put it past him. Overlord is a remarkably deep story in a lot of ways, a bit of simple arithmetic like this doesn't seem out of place. Or it could be an intuitive leap. The point is, it is very reasonable to suppose that all level gain into what we'd identify as clearly super-human ability rather than just what could be attained by talented humans from our world would have come from the diffusion of God-kin and other Player lineages across the population.

New Worlders themselves seem to accept most of this as matter of fact (though of course they could be completely wrong, the point is that it is not obvious to them that the mechanics contradict their reality).