Statistically Speaking

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.

Sanity

The very first 'fourth statistic' (less prestigious than the fourth Haim sister) was pioneered by Steve Jackson in an early title, #10 House of Hell -- the player should roll one die and add 6 to the total to get the maximum number of Fear Points they can accrue. Fear Points are scored by being scared, and should the player ever reach their maximum, they die of fright!

Peter Darvill-Evans uses a similar idea in the Lovecraft-inspired #25 Beneath Nightmare Castle with the WILLPOWER statistic (computed by 1d6 + 6). The player will be prompted to Test their Willpower at various points throughout the adventure in much the same way as they Test their Luck (roll two dice, the total must be equal to or less than their current score for the roll to succeed, a point must be deducted from your current WILLPOWER score whether the roll is successful or not). Whilst failing a WILLPOWER check is not necessarily fatal, if your WILLPOWER drops below 6 and you fail a roll, you will lose your mind and get a unique 'game over' to that effect.

Darvill-Evans also at one point uses the statistic to basically rub salt into the wound:

You step out of empty air into a place that you know at once is alien and wrong. The magic portal has transported you across unguessable gulfs, and you are in a place that has not a single element of familiarity. It is night, but the breeze carries the perfume of unknown flowers; the shapes of the trees are all wrong. The moon is too big, too yellow. It seems to have a sardonically winking face...

If you can successfully Test your Willpower, you will remain sane; but you will never return to Khul.

A FEAR score is also used in one of the science-fiction entries in the series, #27 Star Strider by Luke Sharp, again calculated by 1d6 + 6; unusually, this statistic can never be changed at any point throughout the adventure, but the alien Gromulans have a penchant for holographic illusions and Testing your Fear Factor is required to check your susceptibility to these (with unsuccessful rolls having penalties for other statistics).

Heroism

Jackson's superhero-themed #17 Appointment with F.E.A.R. features Hero Points, which can be gained by successfully apprehending supervillains, but lost by accidentally killing a villain you are attempting to subdue or harming innocents. (A defeat of a supervillain which nobody witnesses and which you can't take credit for because you are in your civilian identity at the time gains you no Hero Points, to the player character's frustration!) Interestingly, Hero Points never actually have an effect on the game itself and appear to be included simply as a way of upping the book's replay value.

Several other books feature something not dissimilar: a way of tracking the character's honour. The Japanese-influenced #20 Sword of the Samurai (Mark Smith & Jamie Thomson) has an HONOUR score which, should it ever reach 0, will result in the player committing seppuku on the spot.

#38 Vault of the Vampire and its sequel #58 Revenge of the Vampire (both by Keith Martin) feature a FAITH score, as does #53 Spellbreaker by Jonathan Green, and #43 The Keep of the Lich-Lord (Dave Morris & Jamie Thomson) uses RESOLVE; all of these, in effect, determine your willpower against the undead creatures you fight in the book. In both Vampire books the score is initially computed by 1d6 + 3, Keep's by 1d6 + 5 and Spellbreaker's starts at a default of 1; all have broadly the same system of testing them as "roll 2d6 and you must score lower than your current score", sometimes with modifiers to make the roll easier or harder.

#64 Night of the Necromancer (Jonathan Green) utilises a similar concept with the WILL score, which always starts at 6; the player character is a ghost seeking to discover the reason they were murdered, and tests of the WILL statistic occur in scenarios such as trying to enter holy ground, attempting to master new abilities such as walking through walls for the first time, or resisting banishment to the afterlife, whilst the score can be negatively affected by using evil artifacts or boosted by learning more about your quest.

Two further books by Keith Martin, #46 Tower of Destruction and #52 Night Dragon, also use HONOUR scores which, whilst not denoting an instant 'game over' should they hit 0, affect what actions are available to the player if they have been too dishonourable (such as pillaging a village recently attacked by the titular Tower for supplies). Jonathan Green also uses HONOUR for #56 Knights of Doom, which is balanced against that book's 'time' statistic: you need to get your HONOUR up as high as possible for the game's final battle, but if you run out of time you will be too late to stop the titular knights, so opportunities to gain HONOUR must be balanced against the time lost.

#40 Dead of Night (Jim Bambra & Stephen Hand) has an interesting inversion of this statistic with the EVIL score, which always starts at 0 and rises with certain actions that are either morally dubious or put you in contact with demonic creatures. Failing when you Test your Evil will frequently result in death (including an absolutely unavoidable one you need to succeed in to win the game); the player can also choose three of seven special abilities and the Dark Veil talent, since you have learnt it from demons, will automatically increase your EVIL score by 1 every time you use it.

Notoriety

Every single book which uses this statistic gives it a different name, interestingly enough; with one exception, they all have the common link of starting at 0, and increasing based on how much attention you have drawn to yourself in the course of your mission.

#41 Master of Chaos (Keith Martin) calls it NOTORIETY, and only uses it in the early stages of the adventure in the seaport city of Ashkyos; whilst trying to prepare for your mission, you must try to avoid committing too many crimes or otherwise drawing the attention of the city's militia. Should your NOTORIETY score reach 8, then you must leave the city to start the next part of your quest immediately; being forced to leave the city in this way can also have negative effects further down the line.

The Keep of the Lich-Lord only introduces Alarm Value once you have entered Lord Mortis' keep and the book's endgame begins, representing how much attention you have drawn to yourself since entering the castle; your AV being too high can trigger additional combats at certain points if you fail a stat check, but there are multiple different ways of approaching the game's boss battle with Mortis, and attempting to fight him within the castle means certain death if your Value is 9 or more, as he is too well prepared for your arrival. A more or less identical statistic, called simply ALARM, is also used in one sidequest in #62 Howl of the Werewolf (Jonathan Green), triggering an additional battle if you fail a roll against it in the Countess Isolde's tower.

Another Darvill-Evans book, #45 Spectral Stalkers, uses a TRAIL score which, as its name suggests, measures the strength of the trail you leave behind you which the titular Stalkers follow; at certain points in the book you must Test your Trail Score (3d6) to see if you are detected by your enemies or not. Failing a roll and so being detected by the Stalkers is not necessarily lethal, but can transport you to the endgame before you are fully prepared and make it significantly harder.

Two further Keith Martin books, #51 Island of the Undead and Night Dragon, also use a similar idea: the former's is PRESENCE (computed at the start of the book by 1d6, divided by two, then add four), which represents the favourable impression you make with people you meet (which attracts the enmity of villains and monsters), whilst the latter's NEMESIS score denotes how much your enemies have learnt about you and their attempts to stop you. (This is used in conjunction with the book's TIME TRACK statistic; at certain points, both TIME TRACK and NEMESIS scores will have to be so high for certain events to happen.)

Steve Jackson also uses a similar statistic in #70 Secrets of Salamonis (co-written with Jonathan Green), although it's one that significantly crosses over with 'Heroism'; your AMONOUR score (a term used in the kingdom of Salamonis to refer to someone's fame and fortune, which Jackson had invented for the non-interactive novel The Trolltooth Wars in 1989) increases as your reputation as a daring hero grows, but you can be penalised for acting dishonourably. A large part of the adventure involves completing quests for the local Adventurers' Guild, and the Guildmaster will not let you take on certain jobs if your AMONOUR score is not high enough from previous quests, which I think just shades it for putting it here and not under 'Heroism'.

Infection

Jonathan Green uses this in #59 Curse of the Mummy, with many of your enemies having poison-based attacks, which will drive your POISON score up, and should it ever reach 18 (representing the strength of your built-up immunity to such poisons) you die. The earlier Spellbreaker also features an INFECTION score which is only used in one sequence where you contract the plague, with the INFECTION score reaching 15 resulting in death, although possessing a Heal-all can be used to bypass this at the point where you would otherwise die. (Luke Sharp uses a POISON statistic in #35 of Daggers of Darkness to represent the, er, poison flowing through your system, but that is essentially a 'time' statistic by any other name.)

Green also uses a not totally dissimilar (but far more ambitious) idea, CHANGE, to represent lycanthropy in Howl of the Werewolf; your CHANGE score can never drop below 1 once it starts building up (you gain 3 points the moment you find out you've been bitten by a werewolf), and failing a test of your CHANGE score means the wolf within gets the better of you. Failing such a roll at a crucial point in the endgame means the transformation becomes total and irreversible and renders the book unwinnable, as upon killing the Arch-Lycanthrope you become its new host.

The CHANGE score can be kept at bay with medicine and magical treatments, but as well as naturally progressing with the passage of time it can also increase if you accidentally ingest blood, get caught in direct moonlight, are wounded by another were-creature, or any other number of scenarios.

At certain points in Howl the player also unlocks new abilities as their transformation progresses which can increase base scores and provide other benefits, and interestingly Green alters how the normal statistics are computed to balance the game better: SKILL is usually 1d6 + 6, but Howl instead uses (1d6 / 2) + 7, for a possible starting SKILL of between 8 and 10 (fractions should be rounded up), and STAMINA is normally 2d6 + 12, but here you should only add 10 to the roll.

Magic

Several of the books have a spellcasting system of some kind; the second book, Jackson's The Citadel of Chaos, requires you to roll 2d6 + 6 to determine your MAGIC score, but that is then immediately used in deciding how many magic spells you can take with you on your adventure, and isn't really a statistic per se. I've discounted a few other systems for similar reasons.

If you are playing as Lothar the Warlock in the two-player adventure Clash of the Princes (Andrew Chapman/Martin Allen), then you also have access to a magic system which has some similarities to the one in Citadel, but the difference is that instead of having to choose how many of each spell you want to bring into the adventure before starting, you can cast any spell at any time, but each spell drains your MAGIC points (2d6 + 12); should your MAGIC score reach 0, you cannot cast spells for the rest of the adventure.

#54 Legend of Zagor (written by Keith Martin, credited to Ian Livingstone) also uses Magic Points; the player has the choice of four pre-generated characters to play from, namely Anvar the Barbarian, Braxus the Warrior, Stubble the Dwarf and Sallazar the Wizard (the four main characters from the non-interactive Zagor Chronicles series, except for Sallazar, the brother of Jallarial the Witch, who died in the Chronicles). Each has a default starting number of Magic Points: the Barbarian has 1, the Warrior has 3, the Dwarf has 2 and unsurprisingly, the Wizard has 7. Certain magical items you can find during the course of the book need to be activated by spending a Magic Point, but only Sallazar has access to the game's spellcasting system, which works pretty similarly to the one in Clash of the Princes.

Miscellaneous

A small number of books feature totally unique statistics with no sort of equivalent in any other entry in the series.

The already-mentioned Star Strider also has an OXYGEN statistic (in a book which already has a separate TIME stat!), which is only used in a maze you need not even go through on a successful playthrough; you must deduct 1 OXYGEN unit for every section of the maze you visit. (Many of the science-fiction books also have unique rules for different types of combat, such as ship-to-ship battles or using phasers, but I consider those an extension of the standard combat rules.) Oddly, the book's Adventure Sheet has a box for tracking your OXYGEN score even though you may not need it at all.

#28 Phantoms of Fear (Robin Waterfield) uses a POWER statistic which represents your strength in the dream-world the Demon Prince Ishtra resides in; in certain combats this stat will be used in place of STAMINA. There are also two different ways of defeating Ishtra, depending on whether you meet him in the real world or the dream world; in the real world you need to have acquired certain items and know how to use them to banish him from the mortal plane, but another proviso is that "your POWER must be higher than it was at the start of the adventure", which is rather strange as it is very difficult for that not to be the case. If you want to face Ishtra in combat in the dream world, POWER is used in place of STAMINA, but your POWER must be higher than his for you to even have the option of fighting him there.

#30 Chasms of Malice (Luke Sharp) has a FUEL statistic which, when you are given the option to eat, allows you to gain an extra 2 STAMINA points from the meal if you have sufficient fuel to cook with. #63 Stormslayer (Jonathan Green) is another book which only introduces a statistic in the endgame, namely DAMAGE; once you board Balthazar Sturm's airship you must keep track of how much, er, damage you cause whilst sabotaging it. When you reach Sturm himself, there are three automatons you may have to fight before confronting him; your DAMAGE score will affect the statistics of the first, and whether or not you have to fight the other two at all.

It's debatable whether or not it counts as a statistic, but #65 Blood of the Zombies (Ian Livingstone) requires you to keep careful track of how many zombies you've killed, as you need to completely wipe out every single one of them for the successful ending (at the end of the book you need to turn to the section with the same number). Sadly, the book doesn't think to refer to this as your DECAPITATION score or anything.