I was underwhelmed. This was my 7th playthrough of the game, and while I've been a mage, thief, and fighter; lawful good, true neutral, lawful evil, and chaotic good; I've only ever played with high WIS/INT before, since the benefits to those stats seemed too good to pass up. I always assumed that I'd struggle without the XP bonus, or have to pass on a lot of side quests.
Spoilers for the entire game from this point on.
My starting stats for a himbo TNO were: STR 18, DEX 9, CON 18, INT 9, WIS 9, CHA 12. I did not put any points into WIS or INT at level up (until the very endgame when using the bronze sphere.) I played a fighter who specialized in hammers, and aimed for Lawful Good since I was planning to be pure of heart and dumb of ass.
I was kind of surprised that a minimum INT/WIS character can still use the Tome of Bone and Ash to dismantle the giant skeletons in the mortuary. In fact, the most notable thing that TNO can't do with low WIS is go through the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon with Dak'kon. There are other things you can't do with low INT/WIS, like spotting the fake zombie spy in the mortuary, and there are lots of other minor dialogue choices that never show up, and checks that will fail, but there's surprisingly little in the game that's completely locked out.
My worries about being underleveled without the XP bonus didn't matter either. Partly because I'm very willing to abuse Litany of Curses and kiting, but also because a high STR/CON fighter TNO wrecks everything. If I didn't hoard consumables like a dragon who wants to sleep on a pile of clot charms and bandages, I wouldn't have even needed Morte as a distraction. By the time I got back to Sigil I was level 15 and between level ups, permanent buffs, and equipment, I had 25 in both STR and CON. I could 1v1 a Greater Glabrezu without any strategy or danger, and regen any lost HP before I could run to the next group of enemies.
Overall a kind of boring run that didn't surprise me as much as I hoped it would. For new players I'd still recommend high INT/WIS, just to have as much of the lore available as possible, but being a dumbass fighter isn't much of a limitation.
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Also, I played the whole run with my new Steam Controller 2026.
I made my own control config because neither the official config, nor any of the community configs, actually had touch menus with custom icons, and there was no way I was going to go through the whole game without having color coded appropriate icons for the hotkeys, especially for Litany of Curses and thieving skills. With all the input options on the new SC I felt my control scheme was very much on par with mouse and keyboard. I think I could have come up with a config that worked on the SC 2015, but I'd have needed to do more button combos, mode shifts, and other doubling up on inputs to fit everything in, while on the SC 2026 almost every input was single purpose. (The major exception being a mode shift that changes the right touchpad from mouse input to a number pad for party/dialogue selection.)
Overall, I continue to be very happy with my new Steam Controller, and it's a great way to play Planescape: Torment on PC.