As has been commented, I see lots of ideas for penalize low stats more in this thread, less on how to make high stats attractive. But I agree with the folks saying it’s really the high stat benefits that need help.
For dexterity I like the melee combat ideas that have been suggested. Some ideas:
Dodge: Dexterity benefit for dodge should be additive and significant, in a way that skill training doesn’t eventually make it meaningless. And per someone’s suggestion here if there is a limit to number of dodges/blocks/parries this should increase with dexterity.
Silence: High dexterity should reduce the noise you make, certainly for movement (notch it down every three or so like perception improves night vision), ideally for melee attacks, breaking and crowbaring windows and doors, smashing things, etc as well.
Critical Hits: The current code has very poor benefits to critical hit chance from Dexterity and Perception. This should be improved significantly. (Careful looking at the code, there’s a comment example given there for how it works that is wrong.)
For perception I like the overmap visibility idea suggested, and the ability to avoid flaming eye stares. Some additional thoughts:
Critical Hits: As mentioned for dexterity. Perception bonus should continue to be twice as much as Dexterity bonus.
Demolitions: You have a much better sense for structural weak points. High perception can reduce the cap on breaking down walls and such. My idea is that a high perception regular strength character with an appropriate tool be able to take down barriers that a high strength regular perception character can’t.
Evasion (including scent management): Perception should allow a character to avoid detection even by enemies very close by, something pretty much nothing (?) does at the moment. Uber high perception walks by two squares away unnoticed, if not seen and silent, and low scent. I imagine this having two parts. A) better scent management, higher perception reduces scent emissions due to better awareness and management. B) something extra added to the enemy AI code allowing high perception character to sneak by closer.
Acute Awareness: At high perception characters should start to gain awareness of non-visible enemies within a certain distance, whether they be underground, cloaked, behind a wall, whatever. The distance should increase with perception. (Perception is more than just vision.)
And for fun, and I think a nice fit into the setting, Strange Sense: Player gains a strange sensitivity to certain unnatural locations and objects, allowing them to home in on them from far away. Basicly the idea is to allow something that makes it very easy for high Perception characters to find artifacts and perhaps a few other things.
And here’s one for Intelligence:
Bionic Affinity: Assuming the limits on bionic space get fully implemented at some point, increase the effective space for bionics with increased (base value only) intelligence.
How do these sound?
