I don''t see anything wrong with wanting to level up (i''m ignoring you game-balance issues and instead I''m focusing point 5 made in your last post). As in real life, there comes a certain satisfaction from improving yourself. I used to play DnD, and I looked at my level 9 character with pride, knowing how hard I had worked to get him there.
Don''t get me wrong though. I believe Role-playing is the stronger of the 2 when it comes to Dnd. Our group were very serious Role-players. We could go through a whole session without 1 fight and have an amazing time. I''ve also played in campaigns with no role-playing. It was all numbers, and it was hell. The problem with computer games, though, is it''s very difficult to get the role-playing experience with a keyboard. This hopefully will change with advances in technology. When quality real-time speech is available over the internet, the potential for games will be absolutely astounding.

A toast to Thrump!

Speech recognition would be a fantastic advance in game communication. I hate having to choose between walking and talking. I was discussing this very thing with a friend, while you were beating me to the punch...

Hail Thrump and his mighty suggestion!

-The can strikes again!
SpittingTrashcan

Actually SpittingTrashcan you might find it interesting to run some searches on what already been discussed in this forum. I know of quite a few threads on Speech recognition alone. Taking a few hours to look through this stuff might give you some ideas.

One thing I feel I should point out is that skill or stat increases should be non-linear - a weak character will make great progress using light weights to train, while a stronger one will gain almost nothing unless (s)he uses heavier ones.

This can be achieved by making ''experience'' gain linear and using a logarithmic function of experience as the actual value for strength (and other things, strength is just the easiest to use for this example), or by gaining experience in a non-linear fashion.

And definitely make use of a resource like Fatigue to limit training - a strong character will be fatigued less than a weaker one by using lighter weights, and so can train for longer, using up time as well as Fatigue. A weak character may well be able to lift a heavy weight, but only a few times before Fatigue is depleted.