Gaming Stat Tropes - TV Tropes

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
• Dump Stat
• Experience Points
• Hit Points
• Luck Stat
• Mana
• One Stat to Rule Them All
• Skill Scores and Perks
• The Six Stats
• Tech Tree (also called a Skill Tree)
• Three-Stat System
• 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"
• Character Class System
• Character Customization
• Class and Level System
• Class Change Level Reset
• Competitive Balance
• Delayed Level Benefits
• Empty Levels
• Factor Breakdown
• Forced Level-Grinding
• Honest Rolls Character: When your stats are determined entirely by Random Number Generator.
• Jack of All Stats
• Job System
• Level Drain
• Level Scaling
• Level-Up Fill-Up
• Low-Level Advantage
• Master of All
• Max-Level Bonus
• Min-Maxing
• Morale Mechanic
• Multi-Stat Attack Scaling: Attacks and skills that factor in more than one stat.
• Nonstandard Skill Learning
• No Stat Atrophy
• Point Build System
• Skill Point Reset
• Surplus Damage Bonus
• Stat Death
• Stat Grinding
• Stats Dissonance
• Tech Points
• Vague Hit Points
• Vague Stat Values
• Vanilla Unit: A unit defined by how it only has stats — no special ability.

---