I think that if simple game mechanics were introduced to help you do stuff such as qeusts or grind up levels or even a crafting system to allow you to craft better gear adventuring would be improved greatly! also a skill that allows you to disable traps or destroy stone (word of power anyone?) would make adventuring much more playable because as it is now it's just getting lucky an then brute forcing your way through the training room with your 20 handicap adventurer the only thing you have to worry about then is invisible creatures one hitting you an the keeper who (if he's actually trained) is quite a well balanced challenge as you can't simply run in there an hack him to bits unless he forgets that he's the most powerfull mage on the map. (random spell casting always seemed odd to me I think the AI should be taught to use them semi intelligently but not to the point they understand exactly how to exploit invisibility because that would make the game even less playable) TLDR? MAIN POINT –> perhaps in leu of a simple handicap system you can do a point system like cataclysm dda has done where your adventurer is afforded a large amount of points an they allow you to effect the adventurers starting stats aswell as give the adventurer better gear an special skills an beyond ambush (I've played a hefty amount on adventuring but only used this once) the trade off to creating a really OP adventurer is the score would be lower much lower when you've the game completed the game thus challenging players to push them selves harder to get higher on the leader boards they would do this by leaving points behind or taking negative atributes an debuffs IE character is a poor ranged combatant -10 accuracy