Urist_McDorf

Well then what makes something "optimal" if you're not punished for not using it? Either there's an optimal choice and you are implicitly punished for not using it, or there's no optimal. That's kind of my point. Ideally, there's no optimal and all the choices have merit. In practice, that's almost impossible to achieve (and I'm speaking from experience as a game designer, albeit a rather hedge one), and so you should probably pick the optimal choice for your build. And my point is that when you want to wear, say, hide, because that look suits your character, but plate is more optimal for you, you should be able to wear plate while looking like you wear hide. Perhaps you refluff it as something like wearing heavy hide in your head, I dunno. Alternately, you could have appearance kits for categories or armour - like tier III heavy could look like adamantine plate, or a set of dragon scales, or a bunch of rune-covered stones glued together with MAGIC or something; but they'd all have the same stats and so you aren't screwed over for picking the stones just because a barbarian in plate would be sillier-looking than that.

Star Wars Saga Edition has a great implementation of talent trees, essentially expanding the five base classes into tons of more narrow ones. I'd love to see something like that in PE.

Respec is important. It's unlikely you'll understand the whole system behind the game on your first try (much less when creating your first character), yet first impression is the most important one. If an average player ends up screwing his build too much for it to be useful on his first go and only realises that some time in the game, he's just as likely, if not more, to just stop playing instead of trying again. It is not adding consequences to choice, it is punishing for not having system mastery. For actual consequences to choice, quests exist. That said, some things are core enough for their ability to be respecced to not be vital - race and class, for example, as long as there're at least a few viable builds for a given race+class combo. The retraining shouldn't be costless, either, so you're encouraged to learn as opposed to being permanently punished for not knowing something initially.

I'd prefer if all the general armour types (cloth, leather, hide, chain, scale, plate, for example; you can guess where I got that from ) were available from the beginning, and upgrades to them were "fluffy" - material or craftsmanship as suggested in the OP. Getting an upgrade from basic leather to something like dire rabbit leather would be more immersive than to leather +1 or hide. That said, there should also be an option to have cosmetic armour, like what some MMOs have - wearing plate mechanically, but putting cloth in the "vanity" slot so that you can look nice while still getting the mechanics bonus. I'm an avid supporter of refluffing in PnPs, and that extends here - you shouldn't be punished mechanically just because taking the more optimal choice doesn't fit your idea of the character.

Don't care, the game should tell me. I love mathematically complex games, they're fun to figure out and play with. However, I'm most likely in the minority, and the complexity is largely vestigal to actual gameplay - if you can make a simple game mechanic be as fun and balanced as a complex one, you'll ensure that more players are satisfied than with a complex mechanic. Simple mechanics are also easier to design and balance, leaving the devs with more time for other important stuff (and time is what Obsidian often needs, judging by some of its games). Thus, I'm happy either way, as long as I can make an informed decision with the game's aid. Making it without the game's aid is nice, but not essential. Substantial, none. That's easy enough. As I've mentioned, I love playing with complex mechanics, and to do that properly mechanic transparency is required - the more, the better. Lack of character skill shouldn't obstruct that, since it's the player who's interested in the underlying maths, not the character. Essentially none. Refer to the explanation on the first point. Gameplay takes precedence over comprehension.