Thank you so much for taking the time to go through and write this up! I really appreciate people taking the time to analyze my work, it makes it feel real and meaningful to me.
I definitely wanted inter-cat relationships to be THE most powerful tool in this game, but in hindsight I think you're right on the dice refresh being a bit busted. Battles were originally configured that way to make sure the player with the highest stats didn't win outright every time by way of having more die to spend- this is definitely the area I'm most interested in tweaking as play reports come in, either with rebalances or some new Life Paths to introduce specific fighting styles. For the Sore condition, the intention was a Downtime Chapter, so I'll clarify that in the next update. I hadn't considered play by post when writing, but you're totally right about the xp! There was already a plan in place to beef up the Chapter system in future updates so I'll keep that in mind as I move forward. 💖