With all due respect, that's just down to what paradigm you're used to. PoE isn't any more or less arbitrary.
Your thought is well justified! Actually I've asked myself if I just didn't like the PoE ruleset because I was used to D20 systems and have problems to adjust.
But that's not the case. As I've tried to point out my biggest problem was that I didn't feel that the choices I made in character progression actually had an impact.
For another comparison in D:OS 1/2 I felt the decisions had more of an impact. And that's also not D20.
You're trying to equate the PoE "might" with the D&D "strength" and they're simply not the same thing.
Not really. I tried to understand what the the attribute Might actually means. An example with 2 character archetypes:
- human warrior, big and muscular, fights offensively with brute force with a battle axe; a bit dumb, no sense for science or magic
- human wizard, thin/frail/squichy, highly intelligent, specialized in destructive fire magic to cause maximum damage
In PoE both character would have an extraordinary high Might value.
But what do these characters actually have in common as human beings that justifies having the same value in an attribute?
My answer to this question is: nothing
The attribute Might is just an abstract construct that defines how much damage is dealt.
That again leads to other problems. Might also gives a bonus to Fortitude which "represents a character's endurance to body system attacks such as poison or disease". Why should my frail wizard get a bonus here?
So my problem is not that Might is different from Strength, but that I fail to understand what Might actually is (apart from the effects on game mechanics).
edit: Ah, yes, basically what @Arhu; said. (I should really read the whole thread before answering.)
A sorceror in D&D uses charisma as their spellcasting attribute because, as per the rulebook, "your magic reliies on your ability to project your will into the world." You could as easily ask the same kind of queston about sorcerors, as in are they physically attractive outside of combat? Are they persuasive speakers? Charisma is a catch-all attribute that can mean several different things depending on what character/class you're talking about.
Yep, as JDR already said you have a point here.
And I also think that Charisma is not physical attractiveness.
The difference is, that I can imagine what a human with high Charisma is.
If it makes sense that this high Charisma improves his spell-casting is another question.
Charisma can sometimes mean physical beauty, sometimes it can mean persuasiveness
Not really, that's what the Persuasion skill is for. Charisma only gives a bonus (in DnD 3/4).
So it is possible to have a persuasive character with low charisma and vice versa.