Hey, thanks for writing such a thought-out comment!
About the Trials that present two different Attribute choices: you're just supposed to pick one Attribute, and you only need to roll once (if you succeed). We'll tweak the text to make it clearer on our next update!
And yes, you can simply choose to use your highest stat whenever you want - if that's what your character would do (and how you want to play)! What we realized during our playtesting was that even if you were using the Legendary Gear on your highest stat AND had picked up the Relic, things could still snowball out of control if you drew a Dungeon with a ton of high-value cards and rolled poorly on a couple of the toughest Trials.
We toyed a lot with the damage levels (and the interactions with Fear) during development to try to balance out the difficulty of the game, and this is what we felt comfortable with! We're pretty okay with having a high chance of beating the Bosses - that's actually how we intended the gameplay loop to go in each Dungeon: get stronger, defeat things easier with the powers you've won.
It is indeed possible to cheese the game if that's how anyone wants to play it - and we want you to be able to do that if that's what you feel like doing!
At the end of the day, this is still a game of exploration - and hopefully you'll still be able to use the prompts to lead you through a cool story, even if your Hero didn't find the challenges particularly difficult :)
We really appreciate the insight, and we'll consider these statistics for a possible Hard Mode in our next update!
Hey, so long as that's what you want in the system. I really dig this book. I have no plans to cheese it. Feels like I'd rob myself of drama and immersion. Just like to find combos and things and present them to devs in case it happens to be something unexpected.
I'm really going to get a lot of mileage out of this. Might play some Hyrule games, but for poops and giggles I also want to play one set in the Mushroom Kingdom, and one set in Fantasia/Fantastica, from The Neverending Story.
Oh god. A Murshroom Kingdom campaign. Brb, we're gonna play as plumbers RIGHT NOW.
Glad you're enjoying the book - and once again, thank you for your insights! We've been discussing the statistics you mentioned and workshopping some options for our planned big update! One of the ideas we're toying with is having 3 Difficulty Settings: Standard, which is the way the book is written currently; Hard Mode, which would set the minimum Fear Rating to 3 instead of 1; and Nightmare Mode, which would set the minimum Fear Rating to 5!
We will be discussing more options, but your reply did give us a lot to consider! :)