What is min-max ?

They ought to have it so that choosing your class automatically chooses a particular "landscape" of attribute levels, but then you have leeway to put a few points up or down here or there for particular flavour.

I mean, if you're talking any sort of realism, a character would not have gotten to become a particular class without having those attributes as part of their nature.  A physically weak "warrior" would have died quite early in life, a dumb "mage" wouldn't ever have gotten into mage college.

But you might have a mage, who's a mage (i.e. still somewhat effective as a mage, passing skill checks for magey-ness), but a bit stupider than other mages, and a bit more physically strong.  Or, you could just min-max and put extra into those stats that reflect the class speciality and dump the others - then you'd have a particularly intelligent mage, who's particularly physically weak.

Then the game ought to track and reflect those choices you've made (i.e. present you with dialogue options to suit) (i.e. if you have a somewhat stupid but physically strong mage, then the game should shape itself a bit around that - maybe give you a dialogue check that that would allow you to physically intimidate someone).

It's really the whole idea of choosing random attributes for a random person and then choosing a class, that's borked.  i.e. it's the disconnect in choice there - you either choose a class (and thereby automatically choose the attributes that go with it), or you choose a random person with random attributes (and thereby automatically choose a class in which those attributes will be effective).  But you can't choose both separately, it just doesn't make any sense.

The other approach would be to, yes, create a random person with attributes you want, but have them discover a class that suits their attributes in the course of gameplay - i.e. they become a class through the course of the game by discovering what they can and can't do with the attributes they have.

Edited April 5, 201510 yr by gurugeorgey