A good example of this is my assassin's initial attempt at the third boatmen mission. My character was under-skilled (in sneak) and paid the penalty in failure within the choice nodes I'd made. Thus, I simply went back to a previous save and went elsewhere to progress more in other quests and came back and had success. Admittedly I'm not far into the game, so I don't know how flexible this system will remain as it progresses.
I'm enjoying it a good deal so far - I like having to re-evaluate tactical options upon failure and the ability to experiment when combat does happen.
With all due respect, points in a skill are not tactical options. the use of both words are incorrect for the situation, it is neither tactical nor do you have options, it's just numbers in exactly the right place or it's a wall.
Maybe these two bits of info were badly framed and you meant you liked the stat walling for the story but liked the various options for the combat aspect, which is a different topic as combat will always have variety, even if it's just a choice between a crossbow or a sword.
I understand bad wording, I also didn't make myself fully clear about what I meant by rogue-like when I said
more rogue-like. What I meant by that wasn't the random aspect of rogue-likes, but the design intention to have a relatively short game where the design intention is also for you to start new characters over and over in order to experience something new, as oppose to a traditional cRPG which is about having a large epic adventure which you can experience in accordance with the playstyle of your chosen characters which leaves enough variety for a slightly different experience the next time you fire it up or, if you never replay games even once, simply leaves you with the impression that your choices made a difference or suited your characters while you played it.
For example, some examples of choices and consequences in a traditional cRPG:
You encounter an NPC...
1) Talk to them, you get positive responses, possibly a quest or possibly an item or just cool lore or perhaps end a quest-line etc etc etc.
2) Talk to them, you get negative responses and they just go silent.
3) Talk to them, you enrage them, a fight ensues.
4) Ignore them and/or all the undesigned possibilities that the devs didn't plan for.
This offers a huge array of choices which matter to the player and can involve skill checks but it's never going to be a wall to progression. The only wall to progression would be if you failed the combat if you chose the combat path or a failure to amass enough XP or loot to progress in later combat because you made too many NPCs go silent on you or you ignored too many of them.
The story aspect of a cRPG, IMO, shouldn't be a fail-state. Only the combat should be a fail-state. If you make the story give fail-states then you end up with scenarios like:
NPC tells you to go into a room and wait for him, to which you go in and get skewered by a trap which instantly kills you, with zero avoidability - because you either didn't have enough skill-check in perception or because the developer is just a bit of a dick and wanted to appeal to people who like dick-gameplay.
In a Choose Your Own Adventure book, this would be just a matter of going back to the last page you were at. It takes a few seconds and doesn't even feel dicky, it feels almost natural, but in a computer game it could take anything between 5 minutes and a few hours to go back to a previous point in the story. Which then encourages constant saving over multiple save states, so simply saving the game becomes a 'tactic'.
In a traditional cRPG, having to reload a two hour old save because you had a total party wipe in combat doesn't feel that bad as a player, because you've failed at something you consider fair to fail at, like being caught by a ghost in Pacman. But reloading a two hour old save because you lack a perception skill or because the game glitches or because you feel the dev is being a dick produces a different emotion, one more likely to rage-quit, because it just doesn't feel 'natural'. Going back two-hours in a traditional cRPG just gives you greater enthusiasm to get back to the important fight again (which wont take two hours because this time you know what's coming and rush there). Rushing back to a skill check or dialogue option just doesn't have that same emotional impetus.
Having content gated by skill checks is not much different to having content gated by level-of-monster, such as games like Dragon Age, but at least with level-of-monster gating you can at least try with various unexpected options and tactics, with story-based gating you have no additional options or choices.
