Set Discrepancy

1) Nope. Love the randomness. It really does make for an interesting experience.

2) Agreeing with kentona. Even if your final action before exploding from massive internal hemorrhaging is to spit in the face of drone hosing you down with .40 cal rounds, there's still a sense of validation that comes from that. And it's only one turn to fast-forward through, either way.

1) I thought, for reasons I can now only conclude were due to me finding false patterns in my various playthroughs of the releases, that the specializations were based on some crazy forumlaic combination of dialogue choices immediately preceding recruitment of a new party member (iirc there's always some conversation choices just before somebody joins you, the first however many times I played I always chose the same dialogue options when meeting Derichard and always got the same specialization for him, in my latest playthrough I chose differently and he had a different one) + your party's current specializations. Considering this is not the case, I would suggest that as an alternative to randomness instead of letting people choose for themselves (at least the taking into account of existing specializations).

I'd imagine something like.

All Specializations.
+
Inversely weight their chances of being chosen at random against already taken Specs to varying degrees (perhaps if there is a "most complimentary/synergistic" spec. then it gets the most weight in the... weighting, and then descending from there down until you reach "a spec. that is already owned" at the bottom with the least chance of being randomly chosen) .
+
Use dialogue choices immediately preceding randomly generated spec. for a new charcacter to apply something like "mutipliers" to the values assigned to the possible outcomes of the random spec. (hypothetical but... say, if the player chose a "cocky" response, you decrease the influence of the previous weighting of the RNG in their favor, perhaps even invert it a little, if they seem "meek" then you could increase the influence of the weighting factor on the RNG)
=
Sort-of-random-but-not Sepcialization.

You can probably come up with something better than that, but it has some potential to be used in stats too!


2) You could always give some indication that you are, in fact, officially dead as soon as you finish that turn. Seeing as you could theoretically get out of the shit if you do have sufficient aptitude and healing items; you could double this prompt up as a "Severely critical condition" indicator, although in many cases it will just serve as a "you're about to die" prompt.

Dawdle dawdle dawdle.
It's the daddies and the mums.
Dawdling with their orange juice,
Dawdling with their crumbs.

There is one more object to build (it's a secret) and then it will be time to create the chapter events. I'm not good at coming up with ETAs, so ... later.