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Hi All, My partner has just started a blog for all things gaming, fantasy, fiction and scifi. He is an aspiring novelist (watch this space), but in the meantime he's just started to build up his portfolio starting with a blog. He's got a tonne of ideas and is busy writing his 3rd blog today (BIG mug of tea in hand), but he'd love some feedback from his target audience, and even some input on what you the reader would like him to "unpack". There's a "contact me" page on his site, go nuts! He'd love some traffic on his page, but fighting anxiety all the time means he's holding off on advertising his arrival to the blog scene... which is where I come in! >>>> www.packupyourdinosaurs.com <<<< Anyway, the reason this is relevant to this forum is that his last post was a comedic review of The Outer Worlds. If you're at all curious, please feel free to go and have a read. It would make his day! Afterall, it's not like any of us are short on time at the moment! Enjoy

I have a bit of a hang-up with games like Pillars of Eternity: I get really, REALLY anxious when I run into a "skill check" or something and my stats aren't high enough in one area to achieve success in it. The best example is probably Neverwinter Nights 2, which was my favorite for years. I tended to want to play high Intelligence, high Charisma characters, even if that wasn't the key stat for my class, because I didn't want to fail Diplomacy, Bluff or Intimidate checks, since my own character was the only one in the party who could USE those skills, and I also wanted to be able to select conversation options from other skills like Acrobatics, Lore, and Spellcraft. This led to me using cheat codes so my Shardbearer could basically make every skill check in the game by themselves. My admittedly limited experience with Pillars of Eternity, both in the game itself and from reading the builds on these forums, indicates that this game is gonna drive me crazy. Each of the checks I've seen in the introduction sequence alone requires a stat of at least 15, and there's literally no way to make a character with a 15 in each stat. There IS a way to get 1 rank in each skill starting out by picking backgrounds that fill the gaps your class has (a Cipher/Slave, Fighter/Drifter or a Monk/Merchant or Scientist). And all the builds I've seen insist on dumping one or more stats down to the bare minimum to get their core combat stats as high as possible, so they can do things like Solo or Path of the Damned, which I've really got no intention of doing as I'm here for the story. So where does that leave someone like me who doesn't want to get a bad outcome to a quest because one of my stats wasn't high enough, or where the kid in Defiance Bay loses some fingers because my Survival wasn't high enough by the time I reached him in the game? I'm a real perfectionist/obsessive-completionist when if comes to the RPGs I play, and I'm well aware that I can't do EVERYTHING in this game (the Knights of the Crucible, the Dozens and House Doemenel are mutually exclusive), but I want to get the best possible outcomes in everything I do, and I'm not sure how to build a character capable of doing that with ANY class...