Stats issues - help?

Hey there! I am the designated programmer for a game that my friends and I have recently begun work on. Today I began my research and have already gotten through a lot of the ChoiceScript Wiki, but one problem keeps cropping up: stats. You see, I made a small (by small I mean probably ten lines of text in total) game just to test out my skills and play around with it.

I have two opposing ‘standings’, as you will, and the game asks which one the reader is, and they answer. I’ve got it to the point now where the standings are on the stats screen, and have a bar… but both are at 50, and I don’t know how to change it. If, say, “P” is chosen by the reader, how do I make the value for that go up? And what about for “R”? Should I make it a boolean instead of a number value?

I feel as if once this little hiccup is solved, I can begin work on our actual game. If you need more info please let me know but I’d appreciate all the help I can get! Thank you!

Say the “real” stat was smart, and it’s opposed value was dumb. To make it so that “smart” is bigger than dumb, you simply have to do this:
*set smart %+ 5

It might help to have a look at how “Choice of the Dragon” handles stat changes in its first scene: http://www.choiceofgames.com/dragon/scenes/startup.txt

Also try reading the wiki page on arithmetic operators (the fairmath section explains more about what’s happening with CotD’s opposed-pair stat changes).