- Pronouns
- She/Her
One interesting thing is that, in a lot of cases, these numbers don't convey any information. They're not only a part of many settings, but an unexamined and unexplained part of many of the same. In this way, we can say they tell rather than showing, but they often fail to actually tell a reader anything.
In D&D you know exactly what the gain from 17 to 18 strength is going to be, how it will change your bonuses and derived statistics, how it will impact your ability to interact with the world. You understand, very strictly, the meaning of raising strength. It's a very reduced, simplified logic representing abilities, but it's a change with concrete effects. It's rewarding, not just because the number went up (though that is intrinsically rewarding) but because your ability to interact with the world has fundamentally changed. You are different in a meaningful and consequential way.
By contrast, a lot of bad LNs don't really ever ground a stat in any meaningful way, and when they do justify the stats, there's very little that the stats add to this justification. We see a protagonist doing training stuff and getting better and see that progress through some token fight against trash mobs and happen to get told that Swording went up by 4. The latter adds nothing, while the former would be equally useful without the stat changes.
They're not even a cheat to avoid showing things, because we still need to see them in most cases. Instead, they're a means of building hype. THE NUMBERS WENT UP is psychologically satisfying, even when the reader knows, or should know, that those numbers mean nothing.
That said, I do think almost every stat-based story trips into doing at least two things that are fairly interesting, even if somewhat accidentally and poorly in many cases. There are things inherent to the idea of introducing game mechanics to a setting that change the way it works, even if writers don't consciously explore the consequence of making their world run on game rules.
Firstly, people are quantified. You never really know who in the real world is going to be the best actuary, but in a lot of these settings you can actually hire the person with the best actuary skill. Or maybe you don't hire the person with the best actuary skill because their personality is shit. Either way, you're forcing a quantification of the self that, if not narratively comprehensible, allows for decisions to be made in universe that we could not make in our own according to reasons we can understand. We may not know how +1 to actuariness facilitates actuarying, but we can understand that people in the setting do understand this and that it is true. People know things on paper that couldn't rationally be understood through other means.
Real ambiguity is lost. Even something silly like a "Who'd win" fight between Mike Tyson and Rocky are much more solvable questions to the people in the world. Tyson has A+ boxing while Rocky has A endurance instead of A- but only A- boxing rating so...
Often, this isn't explored well, but it's very hard to have levels in a setting and not have people engage with the fact of those levels being known. Society is built around this quantification implicitly or explicitly, and that is something that intrinsically adds to a story, whether it's being used well or not is a different issue, but where stats are a means of not engaging with things in many cases, the social consequence of such stats being a thing that are known in universe are innately interesting and do tend to influence any story where they come up. Vegeta doesn't need to see Goku fight to know that Goku has more than 9000 power. It is a quantifiable thing in universe and people have to face the decision to trust that reduction of the self and of self-worth or fight against it. Does Vegeta trust the Scouter? Should he? There's a pretty fundamental philosophical question this brings up, and even bad series are usually forced to engage with this to some degree or another.
The exceptions would be, of course, the stories where only super-special MC-mcamazing has stats and can see only their own, which are depressingly common.
Another interesting feature is the nature of effort and extrinsic reward. In most such settings with stats, you can see a very visible increase in your abilities by virtue of practicing. You write 10,000 lines and your Writing skill raises from 10 to 12. You know this will happen and you can see it as it happens. There is a type of gamification in the psychological manipulation and quantification of rewards sense. The character knows they can improve if only they try, and this in turn serves as a motivation to try. In the real world, it's often very difficult to see incremental change, or to know how to improve. In Dragonlance there isn't a huge relationship between the number of goblins the heroes stab and their power. There's also relatively little incentive for the characters to go around committing genocide randomly. In a game-based setting, there is often incredible motive to grind, and, equally, a social pressure to grind. The fact that this is literally power for murdering sapient creatures in many cases isn't terribly well explored, but you do see some necessary implications of living in a Jessie Schell Gamepocalypse-style world.
In D&D you know exactly what the gain from 17 to 18 strength is going to be, how it will change your bonuses and derived statistics, how it will impact your ability to interact with the world. You understand, very strictly, the meaning of raising strength. It's a very reduced, simplified logic representing abilities, but it's a change with concrete effects. It's rewarding, not just because the number went up (though that is intrinsically rewarding) but because your ability to interact with the world has fundamentally changed. You are different in a meaningful and consequential way.
By contrast, a lot of bad LNs don't really ever ground a stat in any meaningful way, and when they do justify the stats, there's very little that the stats add to this justification. We see a protagonist doing training stuff and getting better and see that progress through some token fight against trash mobs and happen to get told that Swording went up by 4. The latter adds nothing, while the former would be equally useful without the stat changes.
They're not even a cheat to avoid showing things, because we still need to see them in most cases. Instead, they're a means of building hype. THE NUMBERS WENT UP is psychologically satisfying, even when the reader knows, or should know, that those numbers mean nothing.
That said, I do think almost every stat-based story trips into doing at least two things that are fairly interesting, even if somewhat accidentally and poorly in many cases. There are things inherent to the idea of introducing game mechanics to a setting that change the way it works, even if writers don't consciously explore the consequence of making their world run on game rules.
Firstly, people are quantified. You never really know who in the real world is going to be the best actuary, but in a lot of these settings you can actually hire the person with the best actuary skill. Or maybe you don't hire the person with the best actuary skill because their personality is shit. Either way, you're forcing a quantification of the self that, if not narratively comprehensible, allows for decisions to be made in universe that we could not make in our own according to reasons we can understand. We may not know how +1 to actuariness facilitates actuarying, but we can understand that people in the setting do understand this and that it is true. People know things on paper that couldn't rationally be understood through other means.
Real ambiguity is lost. Even something silly like a "Who'd win" fight between Mike Tyson and Rocky are much more solvable questions to the people in the world. Tyson has A+ boxing while Rocky has A endurance instead of A- but only A- boxing rating so...
Often, this isn't explored well, but it's very hard to have levels in a setting and not have people engage with the fact of those levels being known. Society is built around this quantification implicitly or explicitly, and that is something that intrinsically adds to a story, whether it's being used well or not is a different issue, but where stats are a means of not engaging with things in many cases, the social consequence of such stats being a thing that are known in universe are innately interesting and do tend to influence any story where they come up. Vegeta doesn't need to see Goku fight to know that Goku has more than 9000 power. It is a quantifiable thing in universe and people have to face the decision to trust that reduction of the self and of self-worth or fight against it. Does Vegeta trust the Scouter? Should he? There's a pretty fundamental philosophical question this brings up, and even bad series are usually forced to engage with this to some degree or another.
The exceptions would be, of course, the stories where only super-special MC-mcamazing has stats and can see only their own, which are depressingly common.
Another interesting feature is the nature of effort and extrinsic reward. In most such settings with stats, you can see a very visible increase in your abilities by virtue of practicing. You write 10,000 lines and your Writing skill raises from 10 to 12. You know this will happen and you can see it as it happens. There is a type of gamification in the psychological manipulation and quantification of rewards sense. The character knows they can improve if only they try, and this in turn serves as a motivation to try. In the real world, it's often very difficult to see incremental change, or to know how to improve. In Dragonlance there isn't a huge relationship between the number of goblins the heroes stab and their power. There's also relatively little incentive for the characters to go around committing genocide randomly. In a game-based setting, there is often incredible motive to grind, and, equally, a social pressure to grind. The fact that this is literally power for murdering sapient creatures in many cases isn't terribly well explored, but you do see some necessary implications of living in a Jessie Schell Gamepocalypse-style world.
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