I don’t feel that physical characters have teh advantage at all. Mental characters have a whole slew of options available to them that physical characters do not. The weakest characters are by far the ones that are the most physical for a few reasons:
1) It is much easier to invoke a mental mastery on someone in public than it is to shoot or stab someone.
2) Mental skills have much more use than physical skills.
3) Mental masteries tend to be more powerful than physical ones.
Mental characters have multiple advantages over others. If you want to stack yourself with combat skills, you just made not only an uninteresting character, but one that could be covnerted to a new religion, convinced of anything, or layed out from across the room via skills and masteries.
I understand the need for balance, and ask anyone I’ve always strived for it, but at the same time I think you should look into the real use and roleplay value of mental skills… even the eventual combat value via masteries and put those into the equation. What I see happening here is that a character with mental abilities will end up having as much combat worth as a physical character, plus all those nifty “mess you up” masteries, plus more out-of-combat use.
I really hate to bring this up, since it may sound bad even though it is not intended to cast any negative light on any other game, but this is *not* Black Bayou or Crossroads. Plain and Simple.
Let’s address your first point:
1) It is much easier to invoke a mental mastery on someone in public than it is to shoot or stab someone.
Though it hasnt been 100% clarified as of yet since I have only been working on these rules for a little over three weeks now, but any mastery that has a YES listed with Breed ID has physical elements and are quite easy to percieve. So does the casting or activation of that mastery (see requirements under casting and focus). So if you see someone yelling incantations and then someone falls over dead. Well… I won’t hold it against someone to suspect they are behind it.
Your Second Point:
2) Mental skills have much more use than physical skills.
Our rules may have similarities, this is only to provide the players with a comfortable frame of reference. You might notice how skills have changed as far as how they work. None of them are Skill+Stat any longer, they are all Skill+Modifier. There are no strictly Body, Mind, Soul skills any longer, all skills use a modifier for success. Most of them use Body+Either Mind or Soul, so how can Body skills be less useful? Secondly if you look at the damages, melee weapons do 3-5 Body damage, and for every 5 points you score over their dodge roll you gain a +1 to the damage.
And your Third Point:
3) Mental masteries tend to be more powerful than physical ones.
If you think Mental Masteries are more powerful than Physical ones, I should point you to Phenom, Adrenaline, the Ambidextrous Advantage, and Improved Ambidextrous. You could conceivably kill a character with one hit, even IF they have a high body with this alone. How is that any less powerful than Rend Soul or Psionic Blast?
Last but not least, we have only shown the players one breed, Mortals. You have not seen the others, nor will the players for a while, so for you to say that mental masteries are more powerful is still based on what? Every breed is being re-written in full. So don’t expect that because you know how the breeds are in other games, you will know anything about them here. You will be surprised, greatly.