Race Rules (at long last)

So what does this mean for a high elf scholar CLERIC!? Cleric isnt on the high elf profession list.. crap. Is this going to suck to be me? I never realized that before 

I could swear it says this in the first couple pages, but not one seems to notice it, so maybe I'm crazy. But the answer to Skimmel's question is that if a profession doesn't appear as a Starting profession, but is not Penalized or Prohibited, you can acquire it as a secondary (tertiary, whatever) profession for the normal cost of 10 build.

Matt White answered this question on the first page of this thread.

Much earlier in this thread, I asked a fairly legitimate question which hasn't been addressed.  What happens to the familial curses on all the Gypsies?  Do they just vanish?

Liz,
The online rulebook race section is not updated properly yet.  You have to go by what is in the download.  I've started updating the pages but this always causes errors to appear, which I then have to go back and fix.  When I have updated everything affected by the rule update and eliminated any errors, I say so in the rule update thread as well as the online rulebook thread in the rules question forum. This is how it always goes and if you notice the first page shows the last update to the online rulebook as being back in feb.   I'm usually pretty fast at getting rules updates integrated, but this is a big one that affects *a lot* of pages.  Cut me some slack

Zach,
I dont know how plot wants to handle that.  For existing gypsies, I woud say it is optional to keep if you want, but you may remove it if you like. All new ones will not have the curses.

Andy,
Role-play requirements are required and anyone not playing them could face a rules violation.  So yea, role-play requirements were always problematic and there was no specific way to enforce them.  By identifying the two most crucial RP points for each race, now there is a way.  Everyone should RP the race according to the paragraphs describing the races, but those two role-play requirements are set in stone per say.  It was never intended to have people play a race and then completely ignore the racial role-play associated with it as has been done for far too long now.

If a player wants to play a character and role-play it without restrictions, they should play a human. Thats one of the biggest strengths of being a plan old human.

I wonder what high elf you are talking about...

Two general points about these rules:

1. As Roy discussed to some extent previously, the intent behind the two RP requirements is that they will now be the things strictly enforced. The rest of the details should be role-played as well, but there's some latitude with them. The reason for doing it this way is two-fold. One, as Roy said, the sheer number of requirements that existed before made enforcement nearly impossible. Two, the distribution of requirements wasn't balanced, which left some races significantly weaker than others based on their need to role-play more potentially self-destructive or problematic traits than other races. Now everyone has two of them, and if you're going to breach one you'll get an RV first and a chance to make your case to the Character Officer later.

2. The penalized and prohibited professions concept is now the primary balancing factor between the races. Some of the old, classic statistical detriments were kept, but in general we switched to a system where access to professions is the big dividing line.

To create some rhyme and reason to the process, I put together a spreadsheet which I used to tally the build value of a race's benefits and a percentage value of the skill list (since you still have to pay build for them, they aren't a straight build gift for your PC). I also factored in discounted skills, such as the cheap Strength +1 that appears on some lists. I then started with a default selection of twelve starting professions, and for some races scored them with a significant detriment value for having only six. Next I valued the statistical detriments we were keeping, such as reduced BP or Weakness vs. Poison. Finally I took whatever balance of build remained and began assigning professions to the penalized and prohibited categories. Professions were recognized as being major (e.g., Mage) or minor (e.g., Scholar), with majors being worth more if you had penalized or no access to them. Then with some final tweaking here and there, we reached a point of relative balance between the races.

The most important thing, I guess, to understand about the starting, penalized, and prohibited professions lists is that they're serving a balancing purpose, and therefore not all likely or even plausible combinations are allowed or ruled out - it depends on what we needed to do to balance that race to a zero sum benefit. As with most profession lists, where you could always make the case the list should have additional skills 'because they makes sense', or argue that other skills aren't a perfect match, at some point you just say that it's close enough, because the desire to balance things in terms of fair rules and the desire to balance things aesthetically are competing agendas.

That's not to suggest that what is here is perfect just as it is, but that we have to accept that it will never be perfect in everyone's eyes, and probably not even in our own. As always, if some things reveal themselves to be terrible ideas in the near future, we can tweak the system as needed.