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A statistic in a game that is given a rather vague description from almost all sources, even official. Of course this stat will go under scrutiny by the fan base for its purpose in the game.

Common interpretations of the Ever-so-Vague Stat:

• It determines how often a Critical Hit can happen.
• It determines how often you get nicer things from Random Drops.
• it determines how more often you hit and/or get hit.
• It determines how lucky you are at the Mini Game, especially the gambling based ones.
• It helps raise the other stats every now and then by just a little bit.

The fact that this is probably the hardest stat in the game to raise permanently and temporarily doesn't help to add to the mysticism. Expect a guide to arise explaining what the stat actually does (if the guide itself isn't vague about it either).

Named after the ever-so-vague Luck Stat that appears in video games and gets paired with the aforementioned ever-so-vague description. Of course, this also applies to other kinds of stats.

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Examples of THE Luck Stat

• The Might and Magic games have this. Luck is tied directly to your magic resistance. It's hard to say what, if anything else, it affects.
• Appears in the Dragon Quest series. This troper has done extensive research on its function in Dragon Quest IV in particular, and determined that it seems to affect little more than the odds of dealing high-end damage with spells (which dealt fixed amounts of damage rather than damage based on intellect - intellect, ironically, was useless as far as I could tell), as well as receiving low-end damage when hit by them.
• The Tales Series has a luck stat that requires luck to have at a high level, since it randomizes every time you stay at an inn.
  • In Tales Of Symphonia maxing the luck stat at the expense of physical attack power is a potential route to awesome power; it seems to affect not only critical chances but the amount of damage critical hits do. Getting a critical hit on every single attack for greater multipliers can make up for lower stats in other areas.
    • Zelos's luck stat in Tales Of Symphonia also seems to increase your chances of getting a better item when talking to women with Zelos as your avatar. Equipping Zelos with two Rabbit's Foot items is one of the best ways to raise Gald and gain great items in the game.
    • Also in Tales Of Symphonia, Sheena's luck stat influences her Personal EX skill. Every time you encounter an enemy with it active, there's a chance the enemy won't engage, allowing you to avoid a battle. A high luck stat can make enemies bouncing off of you four or five times in a row a common occurance.
• Although the luck stat in Fire Emblem games is generally well-understood by veterans, its lack of in-game explanation has lead to confusion among beginners. Contrary to what many beginners think, luck does not affect a unit's critical hit rate, but does influence accuracy, evasion, and critical evade.
• Even among veterans, the luck stat in Seiken Densetsu III is not fully understood. It has a noticeable effect on opening booby-trapped chests, but beyond that its vague effects may or may not include getting rarer items, avoiding enemy counterattacks, or increasing accuracy.
• In Nethack luck affects a number of things, but the oddest is that it determines your deity's reaction when you pray. One would think that your deity's attitude towards you wouldn't be influenced so much by random chance...
  • Nethack's "luck" statistic is perhaps inaccurately named; the term that best describes it is perhaps "divine favor". The most common factors for increasing one's luck stat are sacrifices to your god, and offerings of gems to co-aligned unicorns.
  • In most of the other Roguelike games with a Luck Stat its primary effect is determining the quality of items created when a level is first generated. Ragnarok/Valhalla goes a step further, as well: a wand of wishing can be used to create a stack of items up to the character's luck in number.
  • Incursion puts some player-visible oomph behind its Luck stat. While it has the standard "determine items and affect random events" effects, there are also a few abilities based off of it, most noticeably the protection offered by the spell Mage Armor, the saving throw bonus from one of the halfling's abilities, and how many times you can use a Place of Sanctuary. (It is also damnably hard to train; you have to wander around on dungeon floors deeper than your character level.)
• Some Final Fantasy games have a luck stat. It is invariably responsible for critical hits but may influence steal rates or certain Limit Breaks, depending on the game.
  • In Final Fantasy X, luck is basically the most powerful stat, as it increases your chance to hit, your chance to land critical hits, and your chance to dodge attacks all at once. It's also the most difficult stat to gain any points in.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 has units get a random chance of scoring critical hits and having Opportunity Commands pop up. One of the clan benefits lets you increase your luck to make critical hits and Opportunity Commands come up more often.
• The instruction booklet's description of the Lck (Luck) stat in Sonic Chronicles:The Dark Brotherhood is the critical hit one, plus increasing the chance of beginning combat with an ambush. (Basically, every character in your current party gets to use a normal attack against a random enemy once without being attacked themselves.)
• In every Castlevania with RPG Elements, Luck determines how often items Randomly Drop.
  • In Symphony of the Night it also determined the damage done on a critical hit, but not the rate in which they occurred.
• Luck is the last stat in Fallout's SPECIAL system, and vital if you want to get a lot of critical hits or beneficial random encounters.
  • Or, you can lower it all the way to 1, and have very few critical hits...but very few other problems. Perks available as you level up can give you pretty much every thing else that luck confers as well.
  • Then again, extremely low luck in the first two Fallout games would trigger a variety of harmful random encounters in the world map. Pariah dogs, toxic waste dumps, and general nastiness. Nothing game-breakingly horrible, but generally unpleasant.
  • Not to mention the high-level Sniper perk, which raises your critical hit chance with ranged weapons to Luck times ten percent. In other words, with 10 Luck all your hits will be crits.
  • It's less prominent in Fallout 3, but each point of Luck is worth an extra multiplier chance of critical hits, provides bonuses to all starting skill levels. It also changes the odds of the Alien Blaster falling into your lap, and what can be found in containers across the world.
• In Oblivion: "Luck has an effect on everything you do, but governs no skills." The most prominent example of the Luck stat at work here is that a high Luck stat reduces the cost of all spells.
  • In Morrowind however, the Luck stat would reduce the already existing failure rate of anything (i.e. picking locks, making potions, etc.) and determines the quality of stuff in containers and on people.
    • Luck is pretty much impossible to raise having no associated skills  ^*
      ^{leveling up a skill increases how much you can increase the stats at level up, up to 5 points per level, luck can only have 1 new point at level up and pretty much requires setting it as a favored attribute (giving a free +10 at character creation) to get to max}
      and gets ignored by many players. In the first expansion to Morrowind, Bethesda pointedly included an annoying NPC with his Luck cranked up to stupidly high levels. The end result was nigh invulnerability; if you somehow managed to sneak a hit onto him, he'd most likely reflect all the damage back at you.
    • Luck raises (or lowers, if it's below 50) the effective level of all your skills (up to a maximum of 100 in Oblivion). Every ten points of luck is equivalent to four points in every skill.
  • Daggerfall was even worse than the sequels, and a luck score in the mid-90's would allow the player to find Daeadric Daikatana in cupboards. Or on slain bandits. Or bears. There were, presumably, other effects, but most generally stopped caring by that point. Daggerfall is kind of like that.
• Most of the Mega Ten games have a Luck stat, which affects critical hits (if they exist in that particular game) and item drops.
  • It's even a plot point in King Abaddon. Gameplay-wise, "Bad" Luck increases the chance of running into Fiends, but also increases the chance of being able to fuse a Fiend on a New Moon.
• Almost all RPGs by Spiderweb Software (makers of the Avernum and Geneforge series) have a luck stat. It claims to have a variety of effects, but the most visible one in the Avernum games is to randomly leave a character at zero hit points but alive when an attack would kill them—even if they were already there, at times. In Avernum games it is the only skill to require no gold to train in (as the trainer presumably doesn't do anything) but is quite costly in skill points, but in Geneforge it is among the cheapest skills.
  • The wonderfully confusing Luck stat in Geneforge. The only thing this troper knows it does is increase the chance of body parts getting dropped by creations in Geneforge 3.
• Planescape Torment has a hidden Luck stat, that gives a small bonus to just about everything (and your enemies small penalties to same).
• The relatively obscure Magi Nation played this one very uniquely: Luck would never increase with levels and would have to be modified with things like equipment. This was because luck was not necessarily beneficial; it would increase the disparity between your attacks' damage. In other words, having a high luck could make your attacks do more or less damage than they would otherwise, while a lower luck would cause damage to gather around the average. The game explains that luck represents both good and bad luck, and as such isn't necessarily beneficial.
• Legend Of Mana has an example of THE Luck stat, which governs what items enemies will drop... officially. Players have attributed dozens of other things, ranging from how quickly new stats are earned to sync range. For similar stats everything related to the crafting system.
• The earlier Wild ARMs games had a luck stat, although rather than being a number it was just a 5 point scale from Worst to Best, and changing randomly every so often. Incidentally, having bad luck made it more likely for your luck to get even worse, and vice-versa, because the luck stat was used in determining what your new luck stat would be... along with everything else (damage range, crits, dodges, everything). Fortunately, there is also an item that boosts luck in those games.
• "Ragnarok Online" has a luck stat that varied in usefulness throughout the game's life. On its most basic level, Luck would increase a player's chance to land a critical hit 1% every 3 points, and increase the player's "Perfect Dodge" rate by 1% every 10 points. Luck was popular early in the game with katar Assassins and 2-handed sword knights, as criticals punch straight through defense and is not based on basic accuracy. Perfect Dodge was a stat that allowed players to completely null attacks if their flee stat would ever fail. However, Critical-based builds fell out of favor in later patches, as the Luck stat of whatever player or monster one would fight can now damper the already meager critical rates most players had. Perfect Dodge-based tanking has still maintained a bit of popularity though.
• The old series of "Fighting Fantasy" books had a luck stat that was called just that. Your character starts with a specific luck number, and every time they rely on luck to do something, they both lose a point of luck and have to make a dice roll to see if they are lucky. The dice roll has to be below the luck stat number. So relying on luck a lot would eventually make your luck run out, literally.
• The Table Top RPG Shadowrun has the Edge stat, which is essentially luck. It can be spent and slowly regenerated to help a character's chance at a particular task, and 'burnt' (that is, permanently lower the stat) to ensure a critical success or avoid certain death.
• Dark Heresy, the Warhammer 40000 tabletop RPG, has Fate, which is basically a renamed version of Edge from Shadowrun.
• Luck is one of the many attributes in the Quest For Glory game series. Good luck figuring out what it does.

Examples of Similar Stats

• Pokémon: the Accuracy and Evasion stats that aren't listed in the Pokémon stat window. There's no way to permanently increase the stats outside of battle, but they can make or break the One-Hit KO moves.
  • A few Pokemon have a special ability Serene Grace which doubles the chance of special effects coming into play.
  • I'm not sure if this is a perfect example of this trope, but Pokemon also has the Happiness stat. While it isn't very mysterious to people who study and hack the game extensively, the Happiness stat is an unlisted (With the only method of checking it being a vague description provided by an NPC who inspects your Pokemon) stat that controls the evolution of certain Pokemon and the effects of two attack commands. Methods of increasing this stat include using a certain kind of Pokéball, having the Pokemon groomed by NP Cs, and simply walking with the Pokemon in your party.
    • In D/P/P, there's a Poketch app that can tell what are the happiness level of the Pokemon on your team. Though it is very general (no heart, one heart, two hearts, and two big hearts)
• Mario And Luigi has the "Stache" stat, which gives you discounts at shops and increases critical hit chances.
• In a literary example, the Felix Felicis potion in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince bestowed exceptional luck upon the drinker, giving them, for a short period of time, a sort of reverse-Finagles Law wherein if anything could possibly go right, it would. They also gives a kind of instinctive sense of how to be in the right place at just the right time.
• Final Fantasy IX's Spirit stat. Affects random damage, critical hits, how quickly the trance bar fills up, and just about anything else the programmers would normally just have a constant in the equations for.
• Final Fantasy XI's Charisma stat has been proven to affect Bard songs, Dancer dances, and Beastmaster charms, and a few other things... and also rumored to affect almost anything else at one point, and still does.
• Earth Bound has a Guts stat that determines the chance of a SMAAAAASH!!! attack as well as the chance of surviving (with 1 HP) what would otherwise be a fatal blow.
• Super Robot Wars has a very odd example in Morale/Will. While it on the surface merely seemed to restrict when you can do certain attacks and needed to be high enough to activate certain abilities, it in reality it effected pretty much everything. It started at 100 and almost never went down except for spells used by players or story events - 50 is the general minimum with 150 as the max - except for games with a skill that lets you take it to 170. The reason for this was that Morale was a percent in reality - 150 meant a 50% bonus to all attack damage and soon, making Break Morale Limit a very good damage boosting still.
  • In some of the early games, Morale can go as high as 200 without having to have any particular skills. Then you were playing with power.
    • Why stop at playing with power when playing with ZA POWAA can crank it to 300?
• Diablo 2 items can give the player an increased chance to find magic items and/or a boost to the amount of gold dropped.
• The Power stat in Paranoia can be treated as a luck stat (only to a limited degree, though - really lucky people don't live in Alpha Complex). Now report for termination, citizen - that information was outside your security clearance. (Also note that players don't know what their Power stat is, leading to much hilarity.)
• In zOMG!, Luck is useful since it controls item drop rates, which includes new rings and the Charge Orbs necessary to level them up. Luck also seems to be the only stat that isn't listed under your character's info tab. However, the game does mention ways to boost Luck: equip the Angel ring set, equip a Fitness ring, or learn Luck-boosting Ghi abilities and keep your Ghi meter filled. As of recent updates, you can also gain temporary Luck boosts by using Divinity or Coyote Spirit on yourself at higher Rage Ranks.
• In RPG Maker VX, the "Odds" stat is hidden. The purpose of the stat is to determine which party member the monsters will randomly pick to attack, using the simple formula of Odds divided by Party Odds (Your characters have 3/4/4/5 as their stats in a 4 party member group so your first character has 3 out of 3+4+4+5 (16) chances of getting picked to get smashed in the face). Ironically, your position in the party (Front, Back, Middle) modifies your Odds stat, which is why it remains hidden most probably. You'll want your front characters to have a high Odds stat and your mages to be on the lower end. An Odds stat of 0 will effectively crash the game or render the target untargettable.

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