It would be so nice

if somebody created a stat points system for whenever a person begins a new game. For example, instead of having eights nines and tens all around, I would like to spend base stat points in specific skills, but I would also like mid-game stats to raise normally. It would add spice to be able to play as a summoner or a warrior instead of having dabbles of each stat. I understand this is possible in wizard mode, but having it integrated in a variant or just an add-on script would be cooler. I'm not sure if it's possible, but I would love for somebody to try to make something of the sort

I think it would then be difficult to balance, since there's more to consider than just starting statistics - IVAN also randomizes each stat's proggresing/learning rate... Now, picking THAT would make things easier in a long-term measure (as I understand You'd like to see starting stats allocation, but normal progressing over the game).

But then again, would this be IVAN if we had such a powerful choice? I am also annoyed, however, by the stats and reroll a character tens of times before playing - I suggest an option to start with straight 10's would be sufficient.

I don't think this is even possible in Wiz mode, since you raise or lower ALL of your stats but can't choose 1 or 2.

It is kind of possible in wizard mode, by creating stat-raising stuff, which is done by CMing stuff into ommel materials. (You cannot affect limb stats separately, but you could try to do this by detaching limbs and reattaching them later...)

I like what Dungeon Crawl does with starting stats: they are randomized, but the total seems to be constant, or approximately constant (I have never verified whether it is constant, but I don't remember any character who had all stats high or all stats low). At level up you can choose which stat you want to increase, so even if you don't like your starting mix, this should even it up (unless some stat is really useless to you (and your starting level in that stat is too high), but this is not likely). I think that's a good mixture of randomness and non-randomness: you don't do any boring stuff like manually specifying your starting stats, or quitting new character right away because they have bad stats.

Summoner vs. warrior is stupid anyway given the way the game is designed. There's no mana, which means there can't be any player mages; the closest you can get is an evoker/priest and everybody gets the same power out of it no matter how much you use that wand of striking or pray to Legifer. There's only two ways to 'summon' monsters: you can pray to gods and if they like you enough maybe they'll send an angel down but there are no godly guarantees (except maybe Silva, and she's the only one whose main gifts are animals, and you only get that once every three hours), and there are scrolls of golem creation which IME are practically nonexistent. The only reason to even bother training your mind at all generally speaking are the scrolls of harden material and scrolls of change material; if it were possible to buy equivalent services I certainly wouldn't bother trying to train it.

I mean, I can understand thinking like this if you came from, say, Triangle Wizard, but that game is designed to be played multiple ways through and through, what with everybody having at least a little mana and the library of spells being huge and all. This game? You have no spells, you have no mana, you only have what the dungeon gives you and you have to work to get your stats to raise even if it's easily trained for your character. This game railroads characters into striving to be the exact same one 'cause otherwise you're dead, which means that if you could choose your stats at the beginning that there'd be just as little variation (generally speaking).

In short, I'm pretty sure the full-blown thing would be stupid and widely not used as imagined. An option to set straight 10s and average growth in every stat would be fair, though.

Woops- i have no idea why i said summoner. I was thinking more of polymorph... not sure what that's called. But yeah, the main reason i said this is because i've had a bad luck streak of sevens in my stats lately.

Pretty much eveything there is to say.

I personally am annoyed by the fact that average stat growth (from 10 to 11 Agi at 14:30 , from 12 to 13 Agi at 13:13, running etc) makes getting 20 Agi early considerably harder- which leads us to a point that playing IVAN is "personal", and therefore there is no universal easy-way-out.