Yeah I thought about having stats affect the effictiveness of gear but the problem I saw with that is that a player could essentially have end-game gear at the start of the game - which throws off any small amount of balancing that I can achieve on my own unless the stat weighting makes the gear negligible.
could have a level requirement where the weapon has full effectiveness, and anything below that is a sharp dropoff. just make sure that's obvious to players so they aren't frustrated or confused. it's pretty important to be able to control what kind of tools the player will have at any given moment. if you want to allow players to use whatever weapons they find, you have to have another way of making sure you can still control the pace of the game.
you can also just design the game so it's not possible (or maybe just convoluted) for a player to have endgame gear early on. also remember that there's a lot more to progression than just numbers. games are iterative, and you'll probably find that players get bored if they're just using the same strategies and tools over and over again. if it's a combat-heavy game, make sure your enemies change with the player. you gotta keep them on their feet.
The difference is that Strength opposes Wisdom and Cunning opposes Faith. So, assuming every stat starts at 10, upgrading Strength to 11 will drop Wisdom to 9. This means that players who want to be the absolute Warrior type and wear gear at Strength 20 will have 0 ability with magic. However, they still have Faith vs Cunning available to them so they could end up being a Paladin-type Warrior with Faith or more of an experienced Ranger type with a Cunning boost. Or end up anywhere between.
i think this might be something that doesn't work as well in practice. if you already have finite resources, you have to make a decision on where to use them. if you spend all your time making everything equal, you'll probably fall behind because you can't do every combat style at once. i think players will naturally make the decision to specialize their stats based on the gameplay type they prefer, or the one that's the most practical for them. it would probably be better to focus on this idea because it promotes experimentation and allows players to shift their focus based on their immediate necessities.
that levelling system would also be incredibly punishing if a player decides they want to try out the opposing gameplay style later on. this would be particularly frustrating because it would force them to undo their previous progress, which would probably be enough to stop players from experimenting entirely.
Level and experience I'm going to change to be rank. Since I want gameplay to be more skill-based, the rank number of your character is essentially a cosmetic that you can show off - though later I could add rank-gated content if there is a need for it.
i think it might be better to think of levelling as a progression tool, rather than as an active gameplay element. if your gameplay is focused entirely on skill, you're setting yourself up to focus nearly entirely on progression through differences in
kinds of challenges, which may certainly seem more engaging, but it's a massive development burden. levels can help you offset this so that you can also have progression through differences in
scale of challenges. this is also a way to compensate for players who fall above or below the expected skill progression curve. players that are highly skilled can't just blow through the game without worrying about their stats, and players who aren't as skilled can get help by buffing up when they need to. definitely consider keeping something similar to levels, because i think it's a lot more important than you might first think