Sorry for the delayed response. I've been quite sick.
To address your questions: I do know how large the team will be, but I'm keeping that under-wraps until it's time. I don't currently plan to add more stats. The social stats are generally used to gate dialogue options and story paths. However, having a high academics giving you a boost to research is an interesting idea. I'll play around with it!
Viewing post in Thread: A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College comments
No problem. I hope you feel better.
Yeah it seems that when I studied a few times the game talked about how Luc found the subject tough but studying helped. This has me thinking that we'd have to balance social/guardian duties with keeping our grades up in school.
Since researching monsters and learning new magic takes multiple time slots I was thinking that higher academics could reduce the number of time slots needed to learn them. Like investing in academics early will make learning these skills much easier later on.