Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Game Mechanics: Primary Stats
Most games have primary stats like Strength, Agility and Intelligence to represent a character's most basic abilities. Different games have a staggering variety of different primary stats. What combination makes the most sense?

COMBINATION VERSUS DIVISION

One of the most fundamental questions is whether similar traits should be grouped together under a broad heading, or whether they should be divided into finer traits.

If many abilities are grouped together under one broad primary stat, this can mean that a character cannot be good at one of those abilities and bad at another. For instance, if Perception covers both sight and hearing then a character cannot have sharp eyesight but weak hearing, or vice versa. This means that if a character suffers an eye injury and his Perception drops, his hearing gets worse as well. This is plainly absurd.

Similarly, in Stormbringer, Charisma represents charm, fearsomeness in battle and force of personailty. A facial injury can lead to loss of Charisma, because the ugliness makes the character less charming, but one would expect facial scarring to increase the fearsomeness of one's appearance and to leave force of personality unaffected.

Such examples of this show the danger in too much combination. Why, then, do we not sub-divide as much as possible, creating games with very many primaries?

INTERDEPENDENCE

Often, different primaries represent abilities that should go hand in hand: bigger people tend to be stronger, so in a game with Strength and Size as primaries it should not be possible to have maximum Strength and minimum Size. But in most games, the statting of primaries is independent: many games (eg). Call of Cthulhu, MegaTraveller, D&D in all its guises) allow a player to roll up a character with maximum Strength and minimum Endurance/Constitution, or with maximum Education and minimum Intelligence. There is simply no justification for this, yet writers keep bringing these games out as if there were no problem.

So, one problem with a high level of primary stat division is that it creates stats which should be interdependent on each other. This means that the character creation system must either have mechanisms for keeping these close (adding complexity) or else allow obviously interdependent stats to be wildly diferent (bad game system).

OMISSION

Often, the primaries in a game seem to be a random assortment: many normal human areas of ability are simply not covered. One of the most frequently omitted areas is willpower: many games simply have no stat covering this. Of course, some might argue that this is covered by Endurance, but I could easily imagine someone who is physically weak yet has a great mental determination. Other games have tried to use Intelligence for Willpower, but this is blatantly absurd: it's easy to imagine a 'big dumb ox' who is rather dim but would never break under torture, and the scientist who is highly intelligent but a physical coward, and would talk at the mere threat of torture.

Another problem with fine division is that it can leave areas omitted. If we get rid of Perception and replace it with Sight and Hearing, then what stat can be used for the sense of smell?

WHICH STAT TO USE?

Division can also lead to problems knowning which stat to use in a given situation. Suppose a PC is following an NPC through woodland, trying not to be noticed, and the GM wants to roll to see if the NPC notices. Reasonably, the PC could be given away by being seen or by being heard. If the game has simply a Perception stat, this is obviously the thing to roll on. But if there is no Perception, but Sight and Hearing instead, then the GM will be unsure which is the best to use. Finer and finer division will only increase such problems.

MISNAMING

I am frequently annoyed by games that give stats misleading names. A particular case in point is Appearance in Call of Cthulhu. CoC developed out of games with a stat called Charisma, which implies that it involves personality. CoC changed the name of this stat to Appearance - which makes it sound like it's only about physical appearance. Yet the rulebook says that personality is involved too. So why isn't it called by a name that impies the involvement of personality - something like Charisma or Charm? There's just no sense to it, and it irks me.

SKILLS AND PRIMARIES

Primary stats tend to represent the native, inborn abilities of an individual, whereas skills are more commonly used for learnt abilities. But of course this line is blurred. Strength and Size are very much inborn or basic, rather than learnt tricks. But Intelligence develops with learning, and Charisma can include learnt strategies for dealing with people, acquired through life experience. Education is certainly learnt, but it is broader than most things that are statted as skills.

So, the archetypal qualities of primary stats are that they are basic or inborn, and that they are borad areas of ability. The archetypal qualities of skills is that they are learnt and narrower.