Cool, I think we are making some progress. On another forum someone was suggesting merging all the stats and items into one table and using flags to delineate what each thing is. Personally that kind of seems like a pain in the butt. Why use flags when the table itself can be a flag. Wouldn't it produce more efficient queries if there are multiple tables more like I have it set up? However, I could treat the individual stats like we have decided to treat inventory here. Not sure if it is necessary. Would it make for more confusing queries? Or would it actually be more efficient, I could much more easily edit statistics. Ultimately stats are somehow going to be placed into formulas anyway in the code and the new stat_key table could hold easily adjustable portions of that formula.

USER_STATS
user_id
stat_id
stat_quantity

STAT_KEY
stat_id
stat_name
stat_desc

If deciding to go this route though it would not be a good idea to merge user and user_stats.