When one hears the word system, many things can come to mind. Some will think of an order of operations or in other words, what keeps relationships (both corporal and friendly) going. Others will think of coding and the systems which are used to make machines run. However, the word system inspires in me a different idea. The definition which I think of is that of the screen or object which one uses to keep track of their stats. What I mean by this isn’t statistics themselves but the numbers one finds in games like DnD and other incremental RPGs within the weeb world. The first known records of this player system becoming widespread trace back to the creation of DnD. Shortly after its beginning, people started creating different stats and skills which they would keep track of along with their health and damage. This would eventually inspire RPG makers later down the line with the creation of the first action RPG. Now, while one could go on for ages about the whole history, I plan to skip to way further down the line. With the popularity of DnD staying high even to our current day, people tried to reproduce this in mangas and animes, yet to no avail. This would eventually change when a few high school students would write a webnovel and eventually make a webtoon called Solo Leveling. As with all mangas, it started small without much impact or buzz but that quickly changed. Solo Leveling managed to get people interested in the status board (the system as they’d later call it) and popularized what some may even consider to be a new subgenre.
This brings me to my main point, what exactly does this system consist of? The answer can greatly vary. At its base lies damage and health, normally represented as HP (hitpoints) and Dmg (damage). The damage from this part being represented as the attack stat. If one wishes for simplicity, they don’t need any more than this. However, there are several ways which one can complicate it and make it more or less fun in consequence. Firstly, defense, which reduces damage taken by a percentage or entire amount depending on the game. Sometimes they even do both of the previously mentioned types of defense in a single game. It’s way easier to imagine and plan for more options than to decide to just not do them later and have to randomly add a new factor to a project. Moving on, there’s crit(critical) chance and other special factors but let’s start with the idea of a critical hit(crit). Crits generally are a low chance within a game to do double damage. However, the crit chance and damage multiplier may vary depending on the game.
As for other stats, you’ll find some games which have multiple damage stats. Like how Pokemon splits both damage and defense into the physical and special categories. Moving more towards action RPGs, you’ll often see either an agility or dexterity stat (or both). These stats can represent speed and ease with one’s hands respectively. However, these two stats are the two which are the most often confounded. Then there’s wisdom, knowledge, education and magic. These four are so similar in their utility (excluding education) that using them interchangeably is simply the norm. They are generally used to increase magic capacity, increase magic regeneration rate or do both. However, this only applies in worlds that have magic to begin with. In other worlds, it is used more for appraisal since not all worlds contain magical skills.
All of this is just a very brief summary of the system and all that goes on in my brain but feel free to keep researching since I plan to cut this slightly short. What I’ve decided to exclude is classes, skills, abilities, jobs and even more similar categories connected to the system. As the system’s popularity is likely to grow, do not be surprised to hear more about it in the future and if this text interests you, keep your ears open for people tend to talk about it more often than even they themselves realize they do.
