Fun fact. Monsters can kill NPCs with their indirect attacks. Something to watch out for.
That seems like something that either there should be a simple way to disable it. Or monsters should be able to kill NPCs with melee for completeness. I wouldn't mind investing time into having monsters hunt targets other than the player if that's pretty straightforward to do. I've always thought monsters should be more interested in each other than the player.
I wouldn't do a total overhaul of SOM's AI at this stage. But it can probably be easily tricked into thinking another NPC is the player on a per AI basis.
To be honest I'm more interested in blurring the line between NPC and enemy. It might make sense for authors to just setup their damage formulas to not harm individuals. On the other hand, do_not_harm_defenseless_characters would be easy enough to setup.
Another thing that's always bothered me is the player being the most powerful thing in the game. It seems like many things in most games should just be beyond the player's ability to vanquish period. In other words, you're just wasting your time to even try.
Anyway. I've also been thinking about the Void model. It's tricky, but I think it's a superior model. One thing I think it needs is a stat for the weapons and armor that just shows the raw power. Which is possible in the void model. And that would be a big help just comparing equipment side by side for class I think. It is going to take some rearranging of the menus. It won't be in the next release. Or probably even in the one after that.
Another thought I've had is instead of letting the player master a weapon. I reckon we might as well take that to the logical extreme and let them master individual ways of swinging individual weapons, since every swing is a different movement. This can be represented in equipment stats too if instead of showing percentiles you showed grades as Verdite has been asking for. One thing that makes me lean towards grades SABCDEF is I am not convinced a % will look so nice in the menus, and F for 50% or less would be a lot more compact, especially if you do C-A to demonstrate a maximum and minimum range of all swings available. To see a breakdown on the basis of individual swings you'd have to access a large table of some kind. Probably best to do that with a virtual manual that would not factor in mastery and durability.
EDITED: According to the void model the affinities of each type must add up to 100% so that AAA on all physical should not be possible to do. Since you are directing a portion of the weapons raw power in different ways. But I suppose through mastery you could go over 100% since it would just represent a scaling of the effectiveness. Another need for a raw power rating is the Void model hides stats in the empty spaces after the Stab and Holy affinities. So without a Raw total if all of the power was in a void slot the weapon would appear to be powerless, which is not right if you ask me.
For the physical affinities using grades it would still appear powerless. No Slash/Smash/Stab or whatever, but the Raw power would be the sum of the magical or material affinities, so you could conclude that the power does not take the form of one of the physical affinities, which would actually be the case. In other words it would be a "vorpal" sword of some kind, or more likely a magic spell...
Although I'm not sure how you could represent mastery of spells or such a weapon for that matter. Even grades in the physical affinities really would not make sense for spells. Oh well. You can't see stats for sword magic either. And you could always reveal the Void slots if you have too. But I still think the not knowing is fun. Probably the best way to show off spell mastery would be more impressive special effects. Wizards often don't realize that they are rusty until their spell is less impressive than expected. Such is the nature of magic.
