>>14524840Your questions aren't stupid, don't apologise.
Characteristics are IV related. A characteristic represents which IV is the highest in a Pokémon.
For example, a Pokémon with the "Likes to thrash about" characteristic COULD have a 31 (the highest possible IV) in Attack, but it could also have 1, 6, 11, 16, 21 or 16.
It's very difficult to perfect IVs and not really worth a lot of effort unless you're hardcore into competitive battling, in which case you should just be using the Pokémon Showdown battle simulator rather than trying to breed for perfect IVs.
Bulbapedia has a pretty simple table for the IVs here:
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/CharacteristicBut that is out of date now, as I have seen new characteristics ("likes to take lots of siestas") and with Hidden Power now set to a flat base power of 60, and rumours of IVs being set to a flat number for pvp, they don't seem to matter anymore.
