Gulliver

No. No, you really couldn't. While I appreciate the point you made in general (i.e. "the greatest problem with trying to simulate "realism" in a game is that first, you have to determine what reality is"), in this specific case the notion that one could just as well argue the opposite is simply not true. The brain is mutable, sure. But it is well established that you can't really train your general intellect. It's not like you can do math for a year and thereby increase your IQ by 15 points. It simply does not work like that. If you, however, haven't been working out a lot and then start going to the gym for several hours a day, six days a week, every week of the year, your strength and endurance will increase massively and quickly. (Unless you have some sort of serious medical condition.)

Some of them might change with time and effort. One thing that always bothered me about increasing attributes is that it treats physical and mental attributes the same way. Attributes like strength, dexterity and endurance would certainly change with time. The more you work out, the fitter you are - hence your strength and endurance increase. (I know PoE uses might, I'm using strength as an example). But when you look at mental attributes, this doesn't really apply. Okay, maybe an attribute like resolve might change, but intellect? People with average intelligence will never become geniuses, no matter how much effort they put in. They could do intense mental work for a decade, but their basic intellect would change marginally at best.

Love the elf portrait. These 4 portraits are pretty much exactly what I was hoping for.

You're exaggerating. Took me 52 hours on my first playthrough and I am a completionist (at least in the sense of doing 100% of all quests). You should also take into account what kind of content you get. I can't remember any quests in D:OS that had multiple solutions resulting in substantially different outcomes (other than the occasional opportunity to skip content). Lots of the length of the game comes from combat taking longer to happen due to the round-based system.

1. What does any of that have to do with romance themes? 2. Seriously, it's just meant to be a bit of fun. Geralt is a lady's man, after all. 3. You do realize this isn't tumblr?

What the **** is wrong with sex cards? They were a fun little gag meant to stir people's desire to collect things and to give some nice visual feedback for the romps in the hay the game offered. And **** had nothing to do with 'romance'. (Unless you consider casual sex romance, of course.)

Still missing the point, I see. It's not about what you meant. It's about the kind of language you used to illustrate the meaning of might. Actually, it's an argument for might to determine the overall energy of a spell and for intellect to decide to what degree you can manipulate the energy density while keeping the total energy constant.

Way to miss the point. You intuitively associated might with the ability to make big explosions. In this case, that's simply false. Might does not make fireballs big. At the same time, larger explosions would intuitively come from more 'boom' behind the spell, which is what might is supposedly describing. Your particular choice of words when explaining what might does is a perfect illustration of how little sense the mechanical effects of might and intellect towards spells make considering what they're describing according to the lore.

Yes, I do. But the fact that you made that 'mistake' illustrates the problem that people have with this attribute system. From a mechanical standpoint, the attributes work okay. And that's what they were designed for. They seem to be sliders for tweaking the combat abilities of your characters. At the same time, attributes are supposed to describe what kind of person your character is. What they fail to do, however, is to establish a reasonable connection between the character they are supposedly describing and the mechanical effects they have for that character.

As you can clearly see, I asked that question. Now, care to explain how I implied in that post that in this game might equals strength? The question asked was whether or not the fact that it doesn't is reflected in attribute checks and if so, which other attribute would get checked for cases where strength would be the usual go-to attribute. You do realize that I'm the one who made that point? Of course you can do exercise after studying magic. The point is that such exercise requires extra work. A wizard in DnD could also be strong - all he had to do was increase his strength. As for the second point: Might stacking wizards aren't the ones with the really big fireballs. Intellect increases aoe, might increases damage. So for some reason, intellect doesn't enable you to do more damage per area, but it does make you capable of putting an extra 77%(or 33%? is it radius or area?) of energy into your spell with 18 int, as opposed to 30%(I think?) extra for 18 might (assuming damage is proportional to energy density), which is somehow concentrated better. If might governs how much power (or energy to be less colloquial) you can put in your spells, why is the energy increase for intellect greater (or at least the same)? How does that make any sense at all?

Well, thank you for pointing that out to us. If you'd read the thread, however, you would be aware that no one here claimed that might equalled strength. The point of the discussion is that given that might isn't strength, what is? Is the physical body of people in this world independent of their ability to smash boulders? Will we see hordes of shaky old men rip people apart with bare hands due to their enormous soul power?

That would also be a possibility. But as I pointed out, more area with the same damage would equal more total energy, which doesn't really make sense from a lore standpoint. One way to solve this would be to scale the damage inversely with the area. Also, the scaling could work in both directions, say from -15% to 30% for max int. Frankly, I'd think that the possiblity of making aoe spells smaller would be far more useful than making them larger. In fact, them being larger might often hurt more than it helps.

It depends on what the atmosphere and style of game and story will be like. If it's supposed to be epic, the main theme should be epic. If it's a melancholic game, the main theme should sound melancholic. If the story is about mysterious things happening, then the main theme should sound mysterious. No way to tell if the main theme fits at this point.

Have you even read anything that was written in this thread?

It creates a sensible impact of intellect on spellcasting. Why on earth would a fireball of a mage with high intellect have a larger area of impact? In fact, why would any spell? More area really just means: more of the same stuff. Sensibly, putting more energy into a fireball would make a bigger explosion. Why does being smarter make you able to disperse energy over a larger area, but might enables you to create a higher energy density? If might governs the energy of spells, then neither duration nor area make any sense as a result of intellect. Energy = energy density*area or energy=power*time...both should thus be governed by might, if anything. Frankly, the mechanical impact of intellect seems to have no connection to what that attribute is supposed to describe. Also, it creates reasonable restrictions on a muscle wizard as a powerful, but simple wizard.