@monzua: I don't know what "Act" means. It did not exist in DOS1. Regarding your other questions, again with the disclaimer that this comes from a doc about DOS1:
* Vitality is calculated automatically for your character, using his level and CON score. However, if you want to cheat, you can modify this value by filling in a percentage here. This is a percentage value. The vitality in game will be calculated value times this percentage.
InGameVitality = (CalculatedVitality * Vitality) / 100
I.e. if you want to give the character half of what he should have, fill in 50. If you want him to have double, fill in 200.
If you want to make a character tougher, do not merely double his vitality. It is often bad practice to just give more vitality to a character to make it tougher. In combination with interesting tactics and skills, this is okay.
* Act strength
Act strength is modifier on the level of a character. This actively changes calculated values of a character, but the player will still see the level as it is filled in in Act part.
For instance, if you make a level 8 character and fill in 1 in Act strength, the character will appear to be level 8, but it will be much tougher in the game because its stats will be calculated as if it were level 9.
However, in Original Sin we never used Act strength as such, as we could always make characters tougher or easier by changing stats instead of act strength. Only use Act strength if all else fails.
@DecalMan: when the editor starts up, it loads the current data from Stats for use when you enter game mode. Changes you make to the stats do not get applied until you Reload Stats (or, alternatively, restart the editor -- but that obviously takes a lot longer).
The reason stats don't get reloaded automatically is probably because until fairly recently, there was no Stats Editor and all changes had to be made directly to the external text files. So there was no other option than telling the Editor that the stats had been changed and that it had to reload them. Now that the Stats Editor is internal, this should probably happen automatically whenever you save the changed stats.
