[jfrazierjr]

Originally Posted by CapedCrusader

The main reason the Races definitions aren't in the standard interface because players aren't normally allowed to edit them. Those are GM-only, so they are just available in the Editor.

Sorry, perhaps I am being dense here, but I really don't follow here. I am not quite sure what you mean about players able to edit and how it would relate.

To(hopefully) illustrate my point, I have two examples. The first is straight out of the Fantasy Companion.

Heritage: Some half-elves retain the grace
of their elven parent. Others gain the
adaptability of their human ancestry. A
half-elf may either start with a free Edge of
his choice (as a human), or a d6 in Agility
instead of a d4.

The way this is currently implemented as two copies of the race each with different bootstraps for the choice chosen.

Now, I will grant that this is probably FAR easier for the simple case and more importantly for a simple use would require no extra coding, though if you want the actual race name to be a singular for both, you would have to add

field[livename].text = "Half-Elven"

as an eval script.



The second example is from Shaintar:

Human
Arguably the rising race of Shaintar, the balanced physical and mental traits of humans, combined with
their inherent diversity and adaptability, has helped them weather the worst apocalyptic storms and come
out stronger in the long run. They have an average lifespan of one hundred years.

Although ubiquitous and well-known by any standards, it is worth pointing out that there are many
“variants” of humans:
• The massive, powerful, and aggressive Kalinesh
• The dark and beautiful sea-going Nazatirans
• The proud and stalwart Olarans
• The exotic and swarthy Youlin-Aradi
• The angular and lithe Camoners
• The sturdy, diverse “average” folk of the rest of the Southern Kingdoms

Even with these general tendencies, though, there is a great deal of diversity within each cultural group — frail, bookwormish Kal and massive, giant-esque Nazatirans, for example. It is also important to note that, especially within the Southern Kingdoms, it is highly possible to come across human bloodlines with noticeably fae influences.

Starting Racial Package
Adaptable: Human Heroes begin with one free
starting Edge (though they must meet its prerequisites).
Diverse: Humans begin with one free d6 in one skill

So how would you code up the above, in detail? So to be clear, the use case is:

I want to pick a human and a sub-race of human. In THIS case, the sub-race does make a difference because access to some human only edges is limited to the sub-race also. For example, the "Desert Born" Edge is limited to Humans of the Youlin-Aradi "sub-race".

Desert-Born
Requirements: Background, Human, Agility d6+,
Vigor d8+, Strength d6+, Special
The character must be from the Eternal Desert, one
of the Youlin Aradi. One who is Desert-Born gains a +2 to
resist heat effects and a +1 to Survival checks in desert
regions. They also gain one of the following (ignore any
requirements): Alertness, Danger Sense, Fleet Footed,
or Quick.

Then there is the pesky business of a of x free skills at d6. Yes, you could just give extra skill points, but what if(for the sake of argument here), WHICH skill is chosen is important, perhaps for some future edge pre-requisites. Now this may be a way out there case, but until recently, so was a character with more than one Arcane Background.


In the later case(Shaintar Human), what I would expect based upon the way other game systems in HeroLab are configured, would be a Race tab with a drop down with the various races. Then, if a race has a sub-race, the sub-race field would become visible and allow choosing of the sub-race. Likewise, if the race or sub-race requires a choice such as which skill is my free d6 skill, a list of all skills would be presented and the user would pick the skill to be granted. Of course the would have to be code behind all of these choices, but I imagine the UI would be cleaner.

Note that I am not implementing Shaintar and it's human sub-races, but that's really beside the point as it's meant to show the concept of child "things" which are part of the Race and why I believe having it's own tab makes sense in some circumstances as well as the option to have multiple child chooser fields available for data authors or even just simple at home GM's to utilize as they see fit. There could even be a UI checkbox on the load screen JUST LIKE the "Multiple races" to allow the current method of a single popup box OR a dedicated tab for the more complex cases(in theory, I have no idea how much control one has once you get to the source options checkbox popup window).

I also realize that changing a UI is a decent sized task and I understand it's not something that would be implemented in just a few days of work and released. All I am asking is for it to be put into the queue for future consideration to be worked on.