One of my friends said that there was something in game for optional traits that allows the main character to gain extra experience for kills/hits and what not. I thought that this would be a cool idea if it is in the game. There was something like this in Divinity 1 called wisdom where you gain extra experience based on everything you do. Its a cool idea.

Yes, it's called Nietzsche's Poster Child. It allows 10% more experience, but your critical miss rate is increased.

Considering you have very high change without high skill and training to begin with, that is very likely to be fatal. I remember killing or otherwise harming myself more often than my enemies did early on so I always gave my character few points in melee no matter what build I eventually aimed for.

On that note, I believe the only thing difficulty actually effects is crit hit chance for enemies and crit miss chance for you. So... yeah.

i feel the need to mention this, its impossible to hurt yourself with a crit-miss on a bow or a throw, for a throw whatever your throwing will fail to leave your space, so like a grenade will just drop to the floor. a chakrem will just not leave your hand.
for a bow i think you spend the arrow but it doesn't come out. so ideally if you take the poster child trait you should go with a ranged play though. then proceed to break the game with your fast learning curve