Lron

The environment looks amazing and the stat sheet looks even better than I could have hoped for. I really like the way the attributes are designed right now. Like others above me have said, I don't really see the problem with lumping magical damage and physical damage into the same stat in a setting where a characters soul powers his/her abilities. The attributes seem abstract enough that they don't describe a characters physical abilities, but her souls abilities. A) This is great. *thumbs up* B) This presents an excellent example to clarify to those folk who think the physical/magical distinction doesn't matter at all (I just want to re-iterate that I'm not trying to bash the system, and I realize that it's a lot simpler the way it is in terms of balancing and mechanic/system coding, etc., and I'm not trying to say "THAT DOESN'T MATTER, FIX THIS ANYWAY!" -- I only want to make my minor concern clear and understood, as some seem to not understand it, exactly) Wouldn't the game suffer if, instead of those various methods above, you simply had a Persuade skill that represented all three of them? Put some points into Persuade? You're now: 1) Better able to intimidate people with physical bullying, 2) Better able to appeal to people's interest in reason and logic 3) Better able to intangibly compel people to believe you due to the sheer conviction of your presence and words. That would be worse than having Might affect physical things, which someone might happen to be intimidated by, having Resolve affect people's compulsion to believe/trust you, and having Intellect affect your ability to use reason and logic, which certain people might be quite concerned with. With Might, what if you, as a Wizard, try to intimidate another Wizard, and he knows the workings of all your spells and has immense magic defense or something, and thusly isn't really worried about magical attacks to his person? OR, what if you try to use a big, burly Fighter to intimidate a bigger, burlier Fighter? He's probably not that worried about you taking him down, but someone who just manifests fire in his hand (a Wizard) or lifts him up into the air without even touching him would probably be pretty scary. With everything jumbled up into Might, those two distinct scenarios don't even exist, because everyone's just either Mighty or they aren't. If you're mighty, you're scary. If you're not Mighty, you're not scary. Going even further, it's a bit like anything else in the game with distinct, contributing factors. Race. What if someone HATES godlike, AND Orlans, and you're a godlike Orlan? Wouldn't you want a system that represents that, as opposed to just shrugging and saying "You've got decent Resolve, so this person trusts you just as well as they'd trust anyone else who WASN'T a godlike Orlan, u_u"? Reputation. Well, this faction isn't very fond of you, BUT, this individual within this faction happens to be smitten with witty folk, and you're quite witty, so you get the combination result of their faction rep + their liking of your wittiness. So, I just don't see how Might offering absolutely no distinction between burliness and magic is somehow completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Again (because people don't seem to see this when I say it), I don't think it's the biggest problem ever, or that the entire character system is screwed up because of it, but I simply think that, ideally, there'd be a distinction, and the game would benefit a bit from that distinction. All that being said... @Josh, if I might ask, is there a plan for such non-combat-damage-related situations and interactions in relation to Might? Is it just going to be a Might-check no matter the circumstances (ignoring the specifics of anything being physical or magical, or affected by that distinction at all) for things such as Intimidate, or moving heavy debris, or throwing something really far, etc.? I'm okay with the system as is, if that's how it's got to be, but I'm just curious how that will be handled, is all. I remember reading some quote from Sawyer saying that his focus is on making sure all attributes are viable options for all classes in combat. How the attributes are used in dialogue is more up to the writers. The examples you listed above don't describe a problem with the attribute system, but with the writers implementation of stat- and class-checks. In your example with the Brute not being intimidated by a mighty warrior PC, but by a mighty wizard, what hinders the writers from checking both the class and Might-stat of the PC to determine if the Brute is intimidated by the PC? So a Warrior might attempt to lift the Brute with physical force and fail if his might is too low, while a wizards tries to pick up the brute with magic - with a lower might check - and fails if his/her might is too low. And what hinders the writers from scripting in reaction modifiers so that the reaction from being a Orlan godlike with high resolve is negative, but not as negative as if s/he had low resolve? If the writers forget to differentiate such checks between classes it's not the attribute systems fault, it's the writers or that most evil thing of all - lack of time and it wouldn't be different if magical and physical damage was influenced by different attributes. And aren't you tired of always going for the same 2 or 3 stats when creating a specific class in the IE games?

Why make it possible to fail anything if you're going to reload right after anyways?