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[ZeroGravitas]

There are three stats: Toughness, Strength, and Agility. They do pretty much what you expect them to do. Among other things, toughness lets characters take more damage, strength increases damage and carrying capacity, and agility increases speed and dodging.  Characters get higher attributes by leveling up various skills.  You gain experience in a skill by performing that skill.

Here's the problem: a character with more agility will perform all actions more quickly: moving, combat, any trade skill, et cetera. It's not because his agility is necessarily more useful for those actions, it's more like an agile character simply lives in a different space-time continuum. Everything is faster for him.

Thus, a character with even a minor agility advantage will eventually catch up to and surpass any other character at any skill.  Dwarves only have a finite amount of actual time between sleeping, eating, drinking, and going on break. A more agile dwarf will always perform more actions, and thus gain more experience, in that finite time frame.  This will in turn increase his attributes more (including agility) which will increase his ability to perform mroe actions even further.

At this point, one might think "So what? That's the whole point of stats."  My point is that the difference agility makes overpowers all other considerations: the difference is TOO big; agility is TOO good.  In particular, consider a task like sparring.  Dwarves will only spar for a finite amount of actual time. The sparring activity itself is  not what grants experience in combat, but rather the number of attacks/actions performed determines experience.  For example, each sword swing or wrestling move with grant more experience.  A dwarf with a high agility will swing his sword many more times while sparring, and thus level up much than a less agile dwarf.

Thus, you run in to scenarios where a dwarf who has trained as a Record Keeper for a single season can then begin training as a Swordsdwarf, and that dwarf will quickly become a far better Swordsdwarf than dwarves who spent the first season training with swords.  I don't see this as a problem with Record Keeping: any skill that levels agility will do the same thing.  The problem is that agility itself is overpowered because it increases the speed at which the dwarf LIVES. It's like a permanent hit of dwarven crystal meth,  and dwarves don't care about the resulting bad teeth.

(This is all true for adventure mode, as well, although the applications are more limited there.)

[Shades]

Also with regards to combat, as well as learning faster as you mentioned, a high agility dwarf will get into combat sooner strike more often while in combat and so be more effective than a similarly leveled none high agility dwarf.

But Toady is reworking a lot of the skill things so I'm sure this will change

[Aqizzar]

Indeed, this is exactly why the huge mondo upcoming release has traits broken into like 5/6 physical ones and around a dozen mental ones.  You'll get your wish soon enough.

[Pilsu]

Stats work a bit differently in the next version, should be less luck based which one you build up


Personally I dislike the movement speed boost. It's one thing to move faster when you run from groundhogs or sprint to the assigned station but you don't really do a whole lot of that in the daily civilian life. However, dwarves always run and curiously, never get winded or over-exerted because of it. Short people running as fast as humans _{(didn't actually test that, take it as the hot air it is)} by default and being able to gain more than twice the movement speed with a little unrelated practice is silly. Do olympic runners walk twice as fast as everyone else? Not likely

Even if they did get tired, stats quickly grow to literally superhuman levels with a bit of carpentry so it'd quickly be rendered moot by toughness

[Vengeful Donut]

Agility does not give the absolute advantage you seem to think it does.

A dwarf with strength will preform actions that require hauling of heavy objects faster than a dwarf with agility.

A dwarf with toughness does not get exhausted as fast. When they are exhausted, they will stop working and go on break. This puts an absolute cap on how many actions they will do within a span of time- regaurdless of how agile they are. It also affects how often they quit working to sleep, eat, drink, etc.

So..
For pump operating, the bottleneck is when the dwarf gets tired, so the best attribute is toughness. If toughness is high enough that the dwarf never exhausted, then agi is better.

For stone (metal, furniture) hauling, the main issue is how much of a speed penalty the dwarf gets from the heavy object. Strength isn't completely superior, but +1 str is better than +1 agi as long as str and agi are on the same level and there is still some weight penalty. Who hauls heavy objects? Masons, metalsmiths, carpenters, haulers, architects.

For most other tasks agi is usually better, but once you get into the exhaustion cap on tasks performed, more agi isn't helpful and you need str. When you encounter even slightly heavy objects and you have high agi, strength will generally help your speed more than additional agi.

[kefkakrazy]

I guess it hails from the game's roguelike roots. Take ADOM. You can train up pretty much any stat, but if I remember correctly, there's really nothing in the game you can do as far as stat building that is more effective than eating hordes of quickling corpses to hyperaccelerate yourself.

[Ezuku]

Are you sure Olympic runners don't/can't sprint everywhere?

You've just shattered the reason I've been exercising