If someone has had a different experience please let me know! Minor, VERY minor, spoilers about the town only.

I have started 3 stories, 1 with my wife, 1 with 2 other friends, and since neither of those have proceeded, I have started a solo campaign. What I feel is backwards logic, is the fact that I decided to be a spiritual mage, so naturally where I would want to go is to the shrine in town. When I went there, (spoiler) it gave me a plus 1 in spiritual meditation which would allow me to gain skills that I already have. This seems really backwards to me, considering, yes maybe I would want to gain skills I hadn't already unlocked, but if I was a character drawn to that area naturally, wouldn't I want to go there? To find out this wouldn't benefit my character at all, I haven't gone back.

Now, it could be that on a different day at a different time I may be able to have some kind of random encounter that does give me a benefit, but I don't want to keep wasting time there to find out.

I feel like this kind of expansion of characters really leads to making characters that are jacks of all trades rather than focused in one area. I have a mage that never wants to seek spiritual enlightenment because he wants to go get physical training so he can be a dueling brawler. Since he's proficient (somewhat) with runes, the next step naturally is, to learn deception and archery.

I hope that in future versions that they actually allow the reader to indulge the idea of playing a character that isn't trying to master everything, they are trying to fit a type. Why create a backstory for your character, and motives, if in the end their only goal is to learn as many skills as possible in as many areas as possible?

Now, I'm only into day 4, so maybe this changes. Maybe there are new unrevealed skills that become available if I focus my character, but it just doesn't seem like I'm trying to do anything specifically, I'm just trying to get my hero GED.

I agree, and had a similar issue. I spent time, risk, and coins in order to try and get a magic rune item...only for it to give me benefits I already had! Quite disappointing, since anyone who didn't have those abilities wouldn't really be interested in doing the quests necessary to obtain the item in the first place.

I suspect this aspect is intended to help smooth out the abilities in multi-player games. That is, to make it less likely that the group won't be able to do something just because the character/player with that needed ability was exhausted.

Rather backward though, I agree. But since the mechanics of the game are so binary, there isn't really any other way to give one a feeling of progression.