Right -- exactly right, on the motivations for players. It's one of my ongoing goals with games to have the interface be as transparent as possible, and instead to have players make the equivalent choices through gameplay. In a lot of RPG games I have played, you can "re roll" for your character stats, and in a number of them you can also allocate points directly to various stats. But all of that takes place in this lengthy menu system, which is boring to a lot of folks (including myself). And I find that always going back to FRUA in the mid-90s, I tend to always choose the same sort of stats for every character I play. Well, one of three sets of stats: the paladin, the evil mage, or the neutral warrior/thief. There's a lot more variety than that in many games, but I tend not to see it.
In AVWW, you can "re roll" by going to meet different NPCs if you don't like the ones you know, but at the same time it's not something where you're clicking a button in an interface to just cycle through things until you find what you like. Frankly, in AVWW the biggest determinant of how you play is your equipment, anyway, so it's less of a big deal than in a lot of games in any case. So it's a rather safe thing to try out, because it's not like you can't use magic or weapons if you've got one set of stats versus another. Instead, it just makes your magic that much more effective, or gives you extra health, or whatever -- the baseline of proficiency 1 is still pretty substantial for each character, and going up to proficiency 10 in a stat only makes it even moreso.
Anyway, hopefully it should prove enjoyable, but we'll see how people react during the beta and adjust if we need to. I think people will be pleased.
