Stabby makes some great points. In general, you want to pick a single Civil Ability on a character and max it out. Here are some strong recommendations for Civil Abilities, pick either Ifan or Loshe and max Battering. This is due to the human Battering bonus. The other can max Lucky Charm. Fane can max Thievery. Red Prince as a bonus 1 in Persuasion as a lizard. Three Civil Ability points in Persuasion with the lizard bonus and an amulet with Persuasion bonus gets you to level 5 Persuasion. Take the "All Skilled Up" talent on Red Prince to get an extra Civil Ability point. Dump these into Loremaster. Keep an amulet handy with a Loremaster bonus and Red Prince can cover both Persuasion and Loremaster. Elves get a Loremaster bonus, so you can do a similar Persuasion/Loremaster double build with them. That just leaves Telekinesis and Sneaking, which is a waste. If you really need Sneaking you the mask to transform into a dwarf. Keep one set of boots and belt with Sneaking on them. That will get you to Sneaking 3, which is just short of the max of 5. To be fair, you can go over the max of 5 on Sneaking, but 6 Sneaking doesn't given any more bonus than 5, at least not any time I have tested it. That means no wasted points in Sneaking leaving only Telekinesis. If you aren't doing a TK build, just keep an amulet and a belt with Telekinesis on them and they will do what you need.
As for splitting ability points, again Stabby makes great points. Splitting stats nerfs your damage output. It you are playing below Tactician difficulty, you can get away with it. However, it is recommended to push your main stat up to the max of 40 as quick as you can as each point will add 5% of base damage to your damage. This leads to killing quicker and dead opponents don't hit back. It is ok to put a few points into other off stats to balance gear a bit for survivability as well as Memory to get more skills. The only other thing would be getting one character to have Wits of 16 or 17 to spot all the hidden locations. Beyond that, the only time I put points into Constitution is if it is needed for gear, like a shield.
As for damage, Summoning and Bows are the only two types of damage that can be freely adjusted to between physical or magical damage and still do great damage. With Summoning is depends on the surface you summon the incarnate. For bows, you can keep a supply of magical arrows when you need to do magical damage.
Other types damage will be mainly physical or magical with strength and finesse being for your melee physical damage dealers and intelligence being for magical damage. Your melee physical damage users can use grenades to do magical damage when needed. It isn't good damage, but when a target has 2k physical armor and only 200 magical armor, punching through the magical side is far easier. It is ok to give your physical damage dealers an element secondary skill to do some magical damage when needed. However, depending on the target, they may be highly resistant or even immune to this secondary skill and you will have to fall back on grenades. Oppositely, intelligence based builds will deal mainly magical damage. However, a couple points in Necromancy and they can do some physical damage as well. Mosquito Swarm and Infect have short cool downs and are great when your mage style has to do physical damage. If you are doing a battlemage style where you intelligence character is on the front line, then Cleric combo of Decaying Touch followed by Restoration works well if physical armor has already been removed. If you want to do more physical damage you use the Necro summons. However, these come without magical armor, so be careful on how and when you use them. Also, keep in mind each character can only have one summon at a time. So, if your mage type is a Summoner, don't bother with Necro summons. There are also physical damage grenades you can store on your elemental dealers.
Another option is to follow a recommendation from the Fextralife web site and make your entire group either physical or magical dealers. It doesn't matter how much physical armor something has if your have 4 characters that are going to pummel it physically, it will go down pretty quick. The same can be said for a full magical party.
