In the year 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone devised the basic combat system for the very first Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. This system would require the player to keep track of three statistics which measured their combat SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK -- whilst the 'luck' statistic could be used to decrease the stamina the player lost, or increase the damage done to their enemies, it would also be used in situations outside combat where the player had to Test their Luck to see if the gods of fate were smiling on them or not.
As the range went on, and was opened up to other authors once it became apparent new titles were needed faster than Jackson and Livingstone could possibly hope to write them by themselves, the basic system held, but many writers wanted to add more to it, and a common way of innovating with the format was an extra statistic which measured something unique to the book. The most common of these was a stat that kept track of the passage of time, which has appeared in around a fifth of the books published to date. But here is a look at some of the other things various authors in the franchise have required the player to keep a record of.