Yea, fair enough. There’s a ton of min-maxing that goes on with the character creation that you have to deliberately break yourself out of if you want the game to continue being interesting.
Since we have much more configurable difficulty settings, it would make sense to remove certain traits from character creation if they would do nothing. Mainly ugly, truth teller, and psychopath come to mind when it comes to NPC’s being completely disabled (although I get the feeling that might make weighting your character towards certain mutation paths a little harder, but I don’t really care about that for the most part, lol), since they are mostly irrelevant at that point. But also for things like forgetful if skill rust is disabled, and similar situations like that.
As for separate stat/trait/skill spending, I mostly agree that it’s a system that is too easy to min-max, but I would hate for character’s to become semi-homogeneous in how they are ultimately.
Basically if you had to spend your points equally or mostly equally between stats, traits, and skills, you’d end up with less variance in stats, because you would want to be able play a character you can take to the endgame without being way to impaired. I would guess (maybe wrongly?) that most characters would be melee focused, since the removal of craft able smokeless gunpowder will limit the ammo you can access (mainly happens at higher difficulty settings if the difficulty is increased in whole or in part by decreasing item spawns), but also because you need some decent amount of strength to carry more goods, which the amount of goods you have will be scarce anyway… Anyways, sorry. I’m getting off track.
Basically what I want to suggest here is that perhaps the stat and trait pools should be one in the same, since these affect what your character is capable off through most if not all of the game. The only instance of you losing traits permanently that I can think of is medical mutagen/serum… I think. I could be wrong on that., and most people don’t hit that until endgame anyway, and even then it seems like there are better ways to go.
This way, some of the points can be set aside for skills, while still allowing a decent degree of flexibility to play some interesting builds. Professions and skills could share the same pool. Lastly, because I’m a terrible person who wants to destroy everything, maybe the first point giving you a 2 level boost in skill should only apply if your profession doesn’t have any skill in that skill normally.
As an example, I often play as the computer hacker profession and if I put a point into computers, I go from level 4 to level 6. That seems okay, but it’s a tad bit of a jump for what amounts to 2 points spent overall.
So what I would be proposing instead would be that if I take the computer hacker profession, I start at 4 computers there, add one point and I move up to 5. And then if I wanted to take advantage of the discount, I would put in another point to move up to 6, instead of 2 points, then an additional point would cost 2 skill points from there and so on. But if I instead wanted to take my electronics up to 2, that would still only cost 1 point. (Since my electronics would normally start at 0).
It would make professions like the blackbelt, less broken because for 11 points you can currently have 10 melee, 10 dodging, and 10 unarmed with a free martial arts style, for the cost of bad temper, glass jar, and your 6 default starting points (also no starting knife, but you can beat one out of a zombie probably). With my proposed change, the same setup would cost an extra 3 points, so to make that work nicely, you need to either take a more difficult start, at least or make a real sacrifice.
