So my only beef with Planescape: Torment was that if you didn't play as a Mage with high Wisdom, you can miss about 20%-30% of story content in the game. I only realized this about a decade after playing the game when I read a walkthrough, since even though I've played PS:T and KoToR a hundred times, I still don't know shit about D&D mechanics.

Does this game suffer from the same problem or is it more streamlined? Do you need to play in a very specific way in order to get much more from the story? I greatly dislike D&D rules but I happily suck it up if the content is good.

It's more streamlined. There are only 3 attributes, might, speed and intellect, all of which do about what you'd expect. Just like in PS: T, conversation is more important than combat (in fact, you can do a complete pacifist run of this game), so intellect is probably the most important stat for the story, followed by speed, with might checks few and far between.

That being said, you can get tons of bonus stats, and you can use party members for most checks, so if you build a decent party, you'll be able to pass all checks pretty easily. It's not like PS: T where if you didn't put most stat points into wisdom, intelligence or charisma at character creation, you were pretty much screwed story-wise.

Cheers thanks for the reply, I'm glad to hear that it's not using those exact D&D rules. I'll definitely pick it up once sometime passes and I'll see some more in depth reviews.

One thing I'm not certain of is if the mc's (but not party member's) attributes/skills determine what choices you even see in convos/interactions. My reading of the perception skill, for example, makes it seem like if your mc does not have the skill, then you won't see some things in conversation. This has nothing to do with the effort system.

Hmm so it's not like Shadowrun for example, where you can see the skill required for certain choices and they're just grayed out if you don't have enough attribute points?
I thought it was a great design choice since it implies how to build a character for a 2nd run and see choices you missed.

All extra points in most skills do is give you a 15% bonus chance to succeed on checks. A few skills like Perception and Concentration do additional stuff on top of that, but I don't think they're necessary.
I had max points on perception for most of the game, and I don't remember it outright unlocking some extra options in dialogue. Then again, my PC was a mage type who could read minds, so maybe that ability overlapped with perception.

Overall, character progression is much more open and forgiving than in PS: T.

If you pass a certain check for extra options, you will often be notified in the text but not told exactly which options it unlocks. That is, you'll see (for example) "[Perception] blah blah blah" when you look at something, and this sometimes causes a new action/conversation option to appear, but there's nothing on that option that suggests that it was unlocked by perception.

Catching out someone lying to you sometimes requires your character passing a perception check or reading their mind, but there are often other ways to catch them out (e.g. by gathering information from somewhere else and challenging them with it).

AFAIK mind reading and perception overlap often with respect to conversations, but not so for most objects (unless they have a "mind" of sorts to read).

Other checks I've noticed that cause extra text and/or options to appear include the various Lore types (mystical, mechanical, natural), concentration, and amanuensis.

Also AFAIK your character alone can unlock these options, although sometimes one of your characters can unlock extra options as well - however, other characters tend to unlock them based on who they are, rather than what skills they have.

Yeah, and is more the case where you can use your party skills instead that your own stats (Ok. Sidquest cases, in the main quest you need to save the pools a little).

Also, a mid game, is so easy for your nano to have same strength pool size than your NPC glaive without affecting your primary pool. Example: My nano has 10 str, 12 speed, 19 int. So, it is relative trivial to have those 19 in str and 10 for int.

So, in conclusion: be the character that you want.

Alright, cheers for your points. Was waiting for some reviews to come out and it seems to be what I was hoping for. Will defintely pick it up later on.