In A Little Lily Princess, you will encounter the familiar schedule-planner to set your activities for the week and boost those numbers on the side of the screen:
(You may notice that those bars don't go very high. There's a reason for that, which we'll get to in a moment...)
After you've selected all your activities and begin the week, the outcomes for each day's activity are determined:
And at the end of the week, those icons are totted up and added to your side stat total.
When the weekend rolls around, you have the opportunity to pursue extra scenes with various characters (common scenes happen every week regardless). To unlock a scene, you must meet the stat requirement. If you choose to play the scene, you spend the associated stats.
In this screenshot, Jessie has a free event available. Lottie's event requires 5 Belief, which the player doesn't have at the moment, so can't be played. Lavinia's event requires 3 Grace. If the player chooses to play Lavinia's event, the Grace stat will drop from 4 to 1.
That's why they're really more resources than they are character stats. They represent things that the PC has done recently, not changes in her overall skills. Having 10 Grace doesn't mean she's changed to become more graceful, and spending 10 Grace doesn't make her suddenly clumsy.
More importantly, the targets for any single event are always within reach. It can be a problem in some sim-style dating games where you're interacting happily with a character only to discover at the last minute that you needed 200 Wisdom in order to get their happy ending... and you need to back up several months and grind that stat in order to get it that high!
Here, you are constantly spending and regaining. It's worthwhile to build all your stats instead of just one, because you never know what might be needed for the next event. The low cap means that an event can't ask for more than 10 of a stat, so even if you have nothing in that stat and need to build it way up for your next event, it won't take too long to meet the requirement. The intent is to create a feeling of consistent progress - progress which requires a little effort, but not a huge amount of frustration!
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