Hello TigerBarb. To help you out of your confusion, here are a few notes on the Adventure Points (AP) in Demonicon.

The system is designed to provide you as a player a high degree of freedom when it comes to decide how Cairon should develop his skills. As you observed, it is up to you to decide, whether to invest precious AP into an expensive combat skills like Strength or Agility or to build up the ranks of your talents in order to pass as many skillchecks as possible.

The Charactermanagement Menu is divided into 4 parts: Combat skills, Exploration skills, Combat Moves and Gift Spells (from left to right). I am going to explain the first 2 categories, since the last 2 are, as you said, self-explanatory.


COMBAT SKILLS:
The first page of the Charactermanagement is the Combat skill page. It is divided into
- Combat attributes (the four large icons to the left)
- Combat skills (the eight small icons to the right of the combat attributes)
- Derived values (the box containing Vitality, Endurance, Essence and 10 more values)
- Weapon talents (above the box of derived values)

In general, values further to the left influence values further to the right. For instance, increasing ‘Strength’ increases the Damage Bonus and the Base AT value. Damage Bonus is added up to your weapon damage during combat while the Base AT value increases the total AT value (a derived value). A higher total AT value improves any Combat Move performed.

But there are a few exceptions: VI bonus, ED bonus and gift control are not influenced by their attributes Constitution and Courage. You have to skill them individually. In exchange for that, they increase the corresponding derived values in combination with the attributes.

This means: the derived value ‘Vitality’ is (linearly) dependent on Constitution and VI bonus, ‘Endurance’ is (linearly) dependent on Courage and ED bonus, and ‘Essence’ is (quadratically) dependent on Courage and gift control (and also more expensive).

So there is a quite long chain of dependency underlying the combat skills and how should you skill them?

I suggest increasing the less expensive values first, as they become affordable sooner and provide a way to quickly improve your combat performance. These are VI bonus, ED bonus and gift control as well as the weapon AT and PA value in the weapon talent.
These values influence your combat stats rather quickly and make for a good start.

Now, around level 10 of each of these values there is an implicit threshold, where spending the necessary amount of AP to increase them becomes less beneficial compared to increasing the combat attributes on the left (they each increase 2 values at the same time).
At this point you should consider increasing the attributes as well.


EXPLORATION SKILLS:
Now to the Exploration skill page to the right of the Combat skills: There are 4 Exploration attributes associated with 2 Exploration talents each. Again, dependency goes from left to right, so increasing an attribute will increase the rank of its 2 neighboring talents. It won’t increase the actual value of the talents though, only their ranks.

The talents’ RANKS are the important thing here. You increase talents and attributes in order to increase the talent ranks. Every completed rank for a talent provides you with a means to pass any skillcheck of that rank or lower for that specific talent.

So, each 4 points that you increase a talent or its associated attribute gives you 1 rank in that talent. You can combine points of the talent and the attribute as you wish, it is important that it’s 4 points in total.

Why are the attributes important then? At some point you cannot increase the talents any further and in order to be a true master of a talent you need to reach rank 7. For this you will need the added values of the attributes.

Ok, knowing this you should start by investing AP in the talents first as they are way cheaper than their attributes. Only as you progress further into the game (again at around 10 points into a talent), it will become more beneficial to invest into attributes.


BALANCE OF COMBAT AND EXPLORATION:
All right, having said that, what should be the balance between Combat skills and Exploration skills?
Well, this is kind of up to you as a player, but I would suggest seriously raising around 3 talents, while investing the rest of your AP into Combat skills and Combat Moves (don’t forget them, they are expensive, but important!)

But of course, you can also choose to only increase Exploration skills. This will raise the difficulty of the combats, while you qualify for the rewards for passing skillchecks. Although AP seem to be the major incentive for skillchecks, you can get your hands on some fine potions and weaponry by doing so, too!

On the other hand, if you don’t want to pass any skillcheck, you can fully boost up your Combat skills for battle, while accepting that you will have less money to buy equipment that might aid you in combat.

As a last note, please observe that you can influence the amount of Gift Points (GP) received from a battle: the more you use your Gift Spells, the more AP are rewarded as GP instead. So when you cast a lot of spells, not only do you receive more GP, you also receive less AP (to the same amount).

Ok, I hope that helps. If you have any further doubts, don’t hesitate to post them here.

Excellant response. The only issue I had was realizing that GP replaces AP a little late in the game and sometimes you end up short an AP. Say a fight would give you 60 AP but you use your gift a bit and get 6GP, AP should be 54, but I would get 53.

Thanks for the very detailed response. That does help and give some guidance for distributing our AP.

Pinned for great justice.

Happy to help. ^^
Please also take a look at this thread:
http://gtm.you1.cn/app/215630/discussions/0/792924952892489185/

You will find details on the uses of the talents there.

If you don't understand the whole leveling system, don't worry. They took it pretty straight from the P&P 4.1 edition - and hardly anyone understands those rules either.

That was an amazing discription of things giving a solid answer to every question I might have had. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.