Tri-stat had, even in its title, made a virtue out of having only three stats.
The other night Sun Boy was telling me about how he found a game (that I didn't recognize, perhaps someone here can tell me its name) that has only two stats: "combat" and "non-combat".

On the other side, you have games like Shadowrun or Alpha-Omega, who feel the need to have 15 stats and a half-dozen extra secondary stats (and in A-O's case another half dozen tertiary stats).

How many stats are the right amount?

For me, the ideal is between 5 and 8, with 6 being the best choice.

RPGPundit

My game has around 20. I like having a lot of statistics.

6 is good - the game I made myself from first principles had 6 - Strength Speed Skill Agility Stamina & Magic.  Or the classic D&D six.

Twerps (The Worlds Easiest Role-Playing System) had two, Physical and Mental. Physical was mostly for combat, unless it was a spell, then it was Mental.

For me, the stats you use and how they're used is intrinsically part of the flavor of the game. I couldn't say there was perfect number unless you were talking about a particular game in question.

I think D&D works well with six stats. Gurps works well with 4 (and a few derived stats). Toon does well with Five. WoD is perfect with it's 9.

I will say, I thinks it's dumb that a lot of games use mental stats for socializing (Gurps and Palladium for example). But in the end, it's the system that determines the flavor of the game and how many or how few stats is never EVER something I consider when deciding to play one.

I prefer no stats at all.

Stats are so 20th Century.

Just abilities are the way to go.

Quote from: KrakaJak;309644Twerps (The Worlds Easiest Role-Playing System) had two, Physical and Mental. Physical was mostly for combat, unless it was a spell, then it was Mental.
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Actually Twerps just has the one stat, Strength. What you then have are a bunch of skill and special abilities that provided bonuses to Strength for specifc activties.
In that respect the name "Strenght" is someone misleading. "Level" might have been a better name for it.

I'm not saying Twerps is a great system or that is was ever meant as anything more than a joke at the expense of Gurps, however it actually works a good deal better than it  ought to. Especially in the supers version, it did not seem to matter that much that character only had the one stat, when in effect the superpowers did he job of differentiating the characters well enough.

But in the end, it was the great artwork and the funny text that make Twerps a minor classic.

I like that The Fantasy Trip only has three, but I also like how Top Secret has six, with another eight secondary and tertiary stats derived from those starting six.

So, it depends on how they are implemented.

Quote from: Soylent Green;309649Actually Twerps just has the one stat, Strength. What you then have are a bunch of skill and special abilities that provided bonuses to Strength for specifc activties.
In that respect the name "Strenght" is someone misleading. "Level" might have been a better name for it.

I'm not saying Twerps is a great system or that is was ever meant as anything more than a joke at the expense of Gurps, however it actually works a good deal better than it  ought to. Especially in the supers version, it did not seem to matter that much that character only had the one stat, when in effect the superpowers did he job of differentiating the characters well enough.

But in the end, it was the great artwork and the funny text that make Twerps a minor classic.

Your Twerps was different from my Twerps.

EDIT:Although I never had the rulebok myself, that's how we played...but Twerps was fun.

Obviously, it depends, but I prefer when stats are tied to the game that I'm playing. Tri-Stat obviously wanted to get them out of the way, and I understand that since, at their heart, I feel that stats (as they're typically used) tend to cause problems.

D&D, which I have gotten a lot of mileage out of, started off with stats that were pretty intuitive but I think that many other games (even ones that I also enjoy) try to use that same type of stat regardless of if it lends anything to the game.

I thought about it a lot, and when I came up with a home-brew, basically it was set up to run a series of stats that default to '1' that define the main things people want the game to be about. (In a swords and sorcery fantasy game, you might only have two or three stats - one governing might-based activities, one governing intelligence or wisdom-based activities, and one governing charm, if you want it). I like to throw in an 'everything else' stat, in case none of the above was any use. Obviously not every game needs a setup like that. (It was a generic type game for running something on the fly).

I like to stay away from too many derivative stats these days. Generally 'generic' stats remind me of d20-clones at this point.

I've checked. The game in question was "3:16 - Carnage Amongst the Stars". The stats are "Fighting Ability and "Non-fighting Ability". What a waste of a perfectly beautiful cover. Well, Ron Edwards gave "Game System Advice" and the game won a Ronnie.
On-t, I find that usually anywhere between three and eight is just fine, with less than three lacking and more than ten being a pain. I was gonna say 5, but then I remembered tri-stat. That one worked just fine.

Games differ in what they call "stats". In general, games make a distinction between innate talents, or learned things which don't change much once you're an adult, and skills, things which you can learn or change relatively quickly as an adult.

Thus, strength is commonly an attribute, since while you can change it as an adult, to make a lasting change, one that lasts once the training stops, this takes some time. Whereas running is usually a skill, you can learn to do it better, much more quickly than you can change your underlying strength, reflexes and fitness.

With that in mind, the minimum attribute split that makes sense is Brains and Brawn. But people usually like to be able to distinguish between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan and some marathon runner, so we split Brawn into Strength, Agility and Fitness. Likewise, we like to be able to distinguish between someone who is "switched on" but not well-educated, and someone who is confident but not very aware or well-read, so we split Brains into Perception, Education and Confidence.

Thus we end up with six, three physical and three mental. Some games will omit the Confidence, as they prefer to leave that to roleplaying. Others will merge two of the others, such as Perception and Education being rolled together into Intelligence.

Others still will want to have some stats like Quickness, deriving it from Strength and Agility perhaps; but usually it's not a true attribute, since it doesn't change on its own, it comes straight from Str/Agl. Most commonly derived attributes appear in large amounts in games which have relatively few primary attributes, for example GURPS has 4/6 (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity, Health, and Basic Speed, Move, Hit Points, Fatigue Points, Perception, Will).

It's well-known that humans tend to remember up to seven digits well, more than that and they might forget. So with that in mind, not more than seven attributes seems best. If as in GURPS you have just four attributes, it's easy to remember them all. If as in Rolemaster you have 12 (or was it 10?), probably not. I think it's important for a player to remember their character's attributes, since this helps them get into the events of the session; every time you look at numbers or charts, you're reminded of the "game" part of "roleplaying game". We want some game for the fun, but not so much that the roleplaying is overshadowed.

So between "so few that the characters all look the same", and "so many you can't remember them", there's a sensible middle ground of 4-7. For my particular style of play, 6 works well.

I have to say, that was a nice little essay.

I find 6-7 is the magic number of stats for me. More than that and things feel to broken up. Less than that and it seems like there is something missing.

Quote from: The Shaman;309652I like that The Fantasy Trip only has three,

Bull. It has 5. ST, DX, IQ, MA, AdjDX. The latter two are figured by race, encumbrance and armor, and are required for play.

Likewise, GURPS has 4, and three figured:
ST, DX, IQ, HT; MA, Passive Defense, and Active Defense are figured
Plus the pseudo-stats derived from others:
ST/Fatigue
Health/Hits
Int  (Will/Charisma/Magic)

Kyle: RM has 10, with an option for an 11th.

I like 5-8 primary, and 0-8 figured from them.

I accept Kyle's definition ("stuff that doesn't change much") although there you probably have to add that we're talking about stuff that takes a range of values as opposed to 0/1 toggles like Advantages.

I think stats ought to be broadly applicable and universally relevant to the PCs. E.g. I seem to recall a game (Harnmaster? Pendragon?) that has a stat for how nice a voice you have. Now this may matter quite a bit in a chivalric game so I don't begrudge the example system, but it's silly to include a stat like that in other games. If a PC has an especially nice or unpleasant voice, it can be handled by a special case rule (an Ad/Disad) or just made up and roleplayed. No need to have everyone track that stat.

I also think that stats, especially primary stats, ought to represent qualities that are fairly independent of each other. I mean the idea that Strength and Constitution need to be generated separately and independently is a bit silly, isn't it? True, the world's strongest man may not be immune to catching colds but there's obviously a correlation between mass, strength, and ability withstand damage--yet the classic "roll 6 abilities straight across" approach is prone to producing freaks--and so is a point-buy system that forces/allows you to buy strength and damage capacity completely independently.

Between these two concerns I agree with the emerging consensus that 10 is probably an upper limit, though I'm not sure if that's purely because of the human capacity to track a number of different elements, or if it's related to some deeper truth about the "dimensionality" of human potential and its "eigenvectors", so to speak.