That's not what realism means. "Simulationists" oppose PoE's attributes on the grounds that their effects model physical reality in too imperfect a way, not on the grounds that they have absolutely no correlation with in-world "real" qualities. A high Might score that increases both melee damage and ranged damage might not make sense, but it nevertheless indicates a character who is physically strong (ie, he'll be described as strong in dialogues, will be able to pass dialogue stat checks for lifting heavy things, etc).
Lol, that's like listening to a literature teacher who makes up reasons for why a writer wrote something that way, which the writer himself wouldn't understand.
I must warn you, a day will come when a hair will drop from Josh's head and you won't be able to catch it in mid-air.
My guess is that the stance "we don't care about realism" came post-factum, and Josh made a slip. Even he thought of the attributes in realistic terms. "Because roleplay". But in the name of balance, I agree with him that what they settled with is better.
Anyway, I understand Josh's goal with the attribute scores system and I agree it's a legitimate goal - to increase the set of possible builds which will not make a player hate the game, [and, "by the way", will guarantee,
with minimum amount of QA, that the crit path can be beaten with any configuration of NPCs] . He had to balance between multiple pairs of tradeoffs. The first two I can think of are "a multitude of viable builds and weak impact of ability scores" vs "stronger impact of ability scores and a smaller set of viable builds", and "clear and intuitive connection between an attribute and secondary stats, but certain stats being prone to becoming dump stats" vs "more abstract base stats, less of a connection between stat name and controlled secondary stats, but prioritizing that there won't be dump or super stats".
Of course this decision has a major drawback - like someone pointed out above, if every build is viable, no build is particularly outstanding, and many people
want their build to be outstanding. Finding the outstanding build is a minigame for them. I'm among them, and I would have liked to have more impact of base attributes, even if not as much as strenght has in the IE games' AD&D. I wish there was some golden mean that Josh had found.
I think he decided right, including based on my own experience with the IE games, where I don't see the situation to be much better than in PoE - instead of a multitude of builds which allow for the same playing style, you have The One True Build, I don't see that as much more exciting.
I think the problem with old fart players is that they themselves tend to make their games boring. I'm playing IWD and if I show you how unoptimized my party is, attribute score-wise you'll probably deem it unacceptable. I distributed the scores the way Josh distributed Pallegina's scores - I thought about the character and tried to distribute scores realistically. As a result my game is pretty tough on Core Rules. The alternative was to compose a party like the one in Sensuki's LP of IWD. Is this way of playing supposed to be the "fun" that Josh "hates"?
Another reason for Josh's approach being better from a game designer perspective - it's more in line with the times:
Just one example because I wrote a wall of text again - I have a
friend, (I won't mention sex, because some people here are touchy) playing BGII for the first time ever, playing completely blind, and was very annoyed that his party sucked while trying to clear the tomb for Korgan not long after having entered the city. I advised that they get the Liliacor for Minsc before going to that tomb, and then it suddenly became a cakewalk. If I hadn't given that advise though, my friend would have probably dropped the game in frustration. My point is, a more 'old school', punitive system is suitable for a more patient and pedantic player than what we have today. The average PoE player's reaction to a similar situation would have been to go shitpost on the Obsidian forums of PoE being "bugged", and reach for another game in his steam library where he has a long backlog anyway. And that's not what Josh as a game designer wants.
BTW, overall my opinion of Josh improves the more I hear of him, which is more than I can say about most other devs.
