In other words, if someone interacts with a bot in any way basically, I'd like to be able to inc and dec a variable that has the same name as their nick for easy retreival later on.
if i understand you correctly, then you can do that by: /set $nick %nick $nick can be replace by the actual nick (ie. if your typing it in yourself) along with other identifiers such as $2
If you have other variables it might be safer to use something like inc $+(%,botcount.,$nick) to avoid situations where someone has a nick that makes a %var from another script increase...