What are your favorite examples of non-standard stats?
So I've recently been going through my stash of RPGs and taking a look at what each uses as their base stats for a little bit of personal research. I've been keeping an eye out for games that use particularly thematic or unique stats, but going over so many rpgs, you really start to see how ubiquitous D&D's impact on how games are designed in terms of the stats characters have. Even in games that are supposed to be evoking very specific genres often fall into a generic physical/mental split with social or spirit/magic occasionally. If there's more than one physical stat it's almost always a str/dex split.
I understand why this is — the classic str dex con int wis cha covers a VERY broad range of pretty much anything a character can do in an adventure. Key word there is adventure. But in many non-adventure genres these stats are practically non-applicable to what you're actually doing in play.
What drew my attention to it was the fact that so many horror rpgs I own still stat you out like you're supposed to be fighting the horrors by adhering to the very physical oriented stats, and those that don't often forgo stats entirely. I went looking for rpgs that had stats but didn't stat you out like an adventurer.
Here's some of my personal standouts:
Don't Rest Your Head
Roll stats: Discipline, Exhaustion, Madness
You're an insomniac and your insomnia gives you powers. All the stats are addressing the tenuous balance in maintaining your sleepless state as your mundane abilities are basically not that useful. Unique in that everyone starts with a discipline of 3, and madness and exhaustion fluctuate on each roll. You can increase each of them various ways to add to your final dice pool for a skill roll, but the consequences of adding too much can come back to bite you. Discipline and Exhaustion basically both act as hp bar too, as losing all your discipline or filling your exhaustion are the two ways to die. The only thing that's a little disappointing is it does mean that every single character is technically the same at the stat-level (your madness and exhaustion powers differ), but that's not so different from a lot of story focused rpgs.
Dead Teenager RPG
Stats: Cowardice, Calamitous, Curiosity, Compulsion
If you can't tell by the name, this is a game about playing out a classic slasher movie. It's more about collaborative storytelling than playing a specific character which means the characters are very expendable. Unlike Don't Rest Your Head however, they DO get to assign individual stats. The stats are more about how likely they are to fall to any particular horror movie cliche that puts them in the killer's sights than their actual skills or abilities. Cowardice has you running away from the cat jumpscare, calamitous is you tripping when trying to run away, etc. It was actually one of the things that inspired me to look for more "genre targeted" stats.
Lasers and Feelings
Stats: Lasers, Feelings
The OG one page rpg I felt like I couldn't NOT put it on here or it'd be all anyone would point out in the comments. It avoids the physical/mental split by instead going hot/cold. Passion, power, and emotion for feelings. Logic, science, and precision for lasers. Obviously a lot of its derivatives do the same thing with their stats, but I'm not sure I've seen any that cover the broad range of actions and situations that the original does quite so elegantly.
Masks
Stats: Danger, Freak, Savior, Superior, Mundane
I was hesitant to highlight this. I feel like there are certain stats that get pigeonholed into some of the more classic roles for various stats. Danger is pretty much a punch/physcial stat. Often mundane is the charisma/empathy stat. Finally, Superior's almost always the "intelligence" stat. But with the introduction of the more superhero-y stats of freak and savior I feel like these shake up and take big enough bites out of the other stats to blur the lines away from classic stat lines. You could roll Savior to do a stirring speech, or danger to goad someone into a fight. The framing of these as "labels" rather than your characters inherent abilities does a little bit for their unique implementation as well.
Some honorable mentions:
Credit rating in Call of Cthulhu and its spin-offs
Luck stats - Toss up between being a resource and a stat like any other in many games that's definitely not a typical strong/smart/social stat. So common at this point that I don't really consider it a unique enough addition on its own though.
Triangle Agency - very thematic names and they have slightly more ambiguous roles than most stats, but I think they struggled filling out all 9 without overlapping and in my experience it's a bit hard for some players to understand when subtlety vs duplicity should be used for example.
World of Darkness - the 3 x 3 stat "grid" of Physical, Mental, Social split each with their Power, Finesse, and Resistence stats was pretty innovative for its time, really brought the social pillar of play into focus in comparison to its main competitor D&D... at the time. These days I think it's less interesting and I do think it still struggles finding a role for some of the social and mental stats.
PbtA games - there sure is a lot out there and they tend to be more thematic in their stat conventions, but I didn't want to list a ton here and I've found there's a surprising amount that just rely on moves rather than stats.
A note: I didn't count games where the stats were entirely freeform or assigned by players. Games like City of Mist or FATE where characters are more a collection of tags that conditionally apply in certain situations are too loose. I was more interested in stats that every (player) character has that truly define and put of a scaffold of expectation for what sorts of things they can and will be doing during the game.
I also didn't take secondary skills into account, as that's once again a buffet that players are picking from, rather than a design choice highlighting the core actions a player is expected to take.