I've never been a very "efficient" person.
When I played games in the past, I'd often go for one build type or another at the beginning of a game, and by the middle realized ehhh I wanted to play differently, and then at the end switch to yet another play style. While playing Elder Circle I had a mess of a build that wasn't particularly good at anything.
Keeping that in mind while looking at the stats, I also had to think about what this even meant. I'd made a character that I now was, and now I had to choose stats for myself, but would increasing "intelligence" actually make me any smarter? Would increasing charisma make me a smoother talker? Also there was the question of would these stats take effect immediately. I couldn't really test strength or speed in the void I was in right now. And that wasn't even to ask what a single point increase in any attribute would even amount to. Would I even be able to tell. Also how the hell would luck work? I know how all these mechanics would've worked in my game, but if I'm gonna be living it, how does that translate?
You know what, I'm overthinking it. Let's just go through one by one with what I know and might be able to assume.
Okay, Dexterity. Pretty straight forward. Your movement speed, hand eye coordination, reaction speed. In the game it figured into your character's movement speed, dodge chance, attack speed and passing checks to evade things like traps. Not the worst one to upgrade.
Strength. Real life obviously being lifting things, how much force you can put behind something. In the game, it was related to carrying capacity, attack power, and passing certain checks to break things down like doors. Good ole reliable.
Intelligence. Self explanatory in real life, how much you know, and how easy it is for you to learn more. In the game though it related primarily to your ability to use more advanced attacks and skills. It was particularly useful for the blood magic builds.
Constitution. Something I've never had much of. How easily you fend of disease and sickness in general. How weak or strong your body is in the face of damage as well. In the game it was a pretty crucial stat and greatly impacted a lot of the mechanics. The adrenaline and limb sacrificing skill paths greatly depended on you having high constitution so you could recover from their high impact skills. Knowing how important this stat is I decided to immediately pump one skill point into it.
Charisma. Probably the least useful of the stats in the game as far as it went. I intended to make a complex and interconnected negotiation and social system for the game. I made that system for the first couple towns. After that, well I'd placed the npcs in other areas, but I hadn't thought ahead, and adding them to the social system ended up an exponentially more difficult task. I at most added two connections to the later NPCs as opposed to 15 or more with the beginning NPCs. Not to mention I didn't provide as many charisma check opportunities for them. I honestly just never got around to it. There were so many other primary gameplay systems to focus on, that fleshing out the npcs felt like a secondary concern. Sadly that went a bit literally as well. Even for the npcs in the beginning, although most I had incorporated full backstories and their own purposes, for some they merely had two or three lines of dialogue and didn't really contribute to the world at all. I wanted each character in the game to to have depth and something for a player to latch onto. I even went to so far as for some of the main NPCs to work with AI language models, allowing them to improvise and change based on the players actions and the world's events. I'll be honest it didn't work well. For the NPCs with large backstories to consider it worked decently, but if the NPC lacked enough backstory or connections to others, they just sorta broke apart and went back to rote line repetition. Anyways, bemoaning my lack of skill and effort aside, charisma was supposed to be a very important skill, but most areas except the beginning few don't really incorporate it. Still, beginning advantages can snowball you, so it's gotta be a consideration.
Wisdom.
This was always more focused on defense than anything else, the higher your wisdom the less impactful enemy magical attacks were. Highly useful for late game stages where there would be more magic enemies, less so for the beginning where most fights were more strictly just physical. Whether there would be any benefit upon my actual wisdom now that I seemed to exist as a character, I'm not really sure.
Finally Luck. I've never been the luckiest person in real life, but I wanted luck to be decently powerful in the game. Luck was related to not only item rarity and discover rate, but also critical hit chance. One of the potential builds I messed around with was a purely luck based one, getting the best items, and hoping that I could critical hit my way out of most fights. In the bit of testing I did it worked decently, but the first couple fights were always the riskiest. After that I got some items and upgraded my general stats just a little bit, made it a lot more survivable. Regardless, considering I had no clue if respawning was something I'd be able to do, I'd rather not bet it all on luck. But a couple points might help...
10 minutes of debating later I finally came to a begrudging acceptance of the stats I chose.
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Stat Selection:
Available Points: 0
Dexterity: 12 [ - ] | [ + ]
Strength: 11 [ - ] | [ + ]
Intelligence: 12 [ - ] | [ + ]
Constitution: 13 [ - ] | [ + ]
Charisma: 10 [ - ] | [ + ]
Wisdom: 10 [ - ] | [ + ]
Luck: 12 [ - ] | [ + ]
[Continue]
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What can I say I like to keep my options open. I'm more so focused on Dex and Int in terms of stats used for my attacks. I'd rather do the magic path, the other ones seemed a bit too prime for grizzly painful injuries. Exploding myself or my limbs not being on the top of my To Do list. Luck felt like a good place to dump some points, as honestly, I feel like I'm due some luck in my life. Besides, there's nothing more satisfying than a chunky crit hit. Charisma and Wisdom would be great if I'm not living it. I can always up those later if it seems pertinent, survival comes first.
With that, I pressed the "Continue" button.