Some games are simple affairs when it comes to Player Characters: you rush toward your enemies, your Infinity +1 Sword held aloft, and either they die or you do. This is the basic premise of the One-Hit-Point Wonder. Other Player Characters, though, are a bit more complicated.
How many more hits can your guy take before it's Game Over? How high can he jump? How much damage will his Incantation of Incineration inflict? If these answers aren't fixed or completely random, then they're most likely determined by your character's Stats.
Stats (short for Statistics) are basically the numbers that represent your character's abilities, and they're used to calculate how well your character will do at various different tasks (e.g., Strength being used to determine jumping height, damage dealt on attacks, or the number of objects that can be carried at once). They're mostly associated with combat-oriented gameplay, although any genre that offers goals and a chance of success or failure can have them (e.g., a Dating Sim). While some stats are common to the point of being almost universal, there's no actual law determining what or how many stats a game uses in its system. A given game can have anywhere from 1 to over 400, and chart anything from Hit Points to Pulchritude.
See also Role-Playing Game Terms and Stat Meters. Not to be confused with Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
Types of Stats
- Character Level
- Detrimental Stat: A stat that's made to make things worse if raised.
- Dump Stat: A stat that’s made low to facilitate other stats being high.
- Experience Points: Acquired points that build towards level-ups.
- Hit Points: How many hits a character can take before dying/getting knocked out.
- Luck Stat
- Mana: A value that’s expended in order to use magic or special moves.
- One Stat to Rule Them All
- Skill Scores and Perks
- The Six Stats
- Tech Tree (also called a Skill Tree)
- Three-Stat System: A game has only three stats.
- Video Game Weapon Stats
Stat-Related Tropes
- Anti-Grinding
- Atypical Attack Scaling: When an attack or ability scales its effectiveness off of a different stat from the norm.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": Hit points are referred to by an unusual name.
- Character Class System
- Character Customization
- Class and Level System
- Class Change Level Reset: You can switch to a new class, but it'll cost you your levels.
- Competitive Balance
- Delayed Level Benefits
- Empty Levels
- Factor Breakdown
- Forced Level-Grinding: Want to level up? You better be ready to do a ton of repetitive tasks to gain the required experience points.
- Honest Rolls Character: When your stats are determined entirely by Random Number Generator.
- Jack of All Stats: A character with decent values in every stat.
- Job System
- Level Drain
- Level Scaling
- Level-Up Fill-Up
- Low-Level Advantage
- Master of All
- Max-Level Bonus: Reaching the maximum possible level comes with a boon.
- Min-Maxing: Developing a strong character by heavily prioritizing the most useful stats and deprioritizing the less useful ones.
- Morale Mechanic
- Multi-Stat Attack Scaling: Attacks and skills that factor in more than one stat.
- Negative Stat Value
- Non-Standard Skill Learning
- No Stat Atrophy
- Point Build System
- Skill Point Reset
- Stat Death
- Stat Grinding
- Stats Dissonance
- Surplus Damage Bonus: Something special happens when a character takes damage greater than their remaining HP.
- Tech Points
- Vague Hit Points: It's not explicitly clear how much HP a character has.
- Vague Stat Values: It's not explicitly clear how high a character's stats are.
- Vanilla Unit: A unit defined by how it only has stats — no special ability.
