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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samuel Leming" data-source="post: 1834975" data-attributes="member: 16462">Looks like I've been out-voted.  Hope that's the last time that happens today.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Sure, but your regional feats are good for representing the cultural influences on a character and the racial favored class seems geared toward modeling the innate talents of that race.I can see at least four additional ways you can go with this.First:Your regional feat is a standard skills feat with an extra +2 bonus & -2 penalty.  You could just cut off the extras and apply them separately as a sort of cultural mini-template.  This allows you at least two advantages that I can see initially.  The more exotic cultures could have two or three bonus/penalty pairs.  Piling more than one bonus/penalty pair into a feat would get crufty, but it's no problem for a template.  The second advantage is it frees up that starting feat and still allows you to add that cultural flavor.Second:Same as above, but add variety as per my first suggestion in the other post.  Pick one to three from cultural bonus list A and the same number from cultural penalty list B.Third:Take this to it's logical extreme and introduce an advantage/disadvantage system like in some other games.  You can give each merit and penalty a point value for balance purposes.  If you take some combination of advantages that add up to five point you have to match them with some combination of disadvantages worth five points.  This way the number of bonuses and penalties don't have to match, just their values.  You can aggregate these to create cultural packages or kits.  Using the cultural packages you can give the players a one or two point bonus on the merit side and balance it against something like "Known Eversinker." Or give them an extra penalty if being a know Eversinker is a good thing. I'm not that warm on this entire option, since it adds an extra layer that can be handled in other ways.  It's just not D&D, but maybe it's right for some games.Fourth:For NPC's only you can make a special first level cultural character class that packages up the stereotype.  Instead of first level commoners you could have first level Eversinkers. If they need more than one level slap on additional commoner or expert levels since they've already received all their cultural traits at first level. I suspect this is really a degenerate case of the mini-template approach since you could build this by applying the template to an existing NPC class. But maybe not, since you're dealing with NPC's you can go with a slightly non-balanced approach.So now we have at least six (untested) ways to handle applying cultural stereotypes.There's always going to be some min/maxing but in many ways that will further promote stereotypes.  Rangers and barbarians will come from areas that allow survival bonuses, rogues will come from regions that give sneaky bonuses, etc...Of course, none of this really represents how things work in an Eddings Bubbaworld, where the right side has mainly bonuses and the wrong side has mainly penalties.Sam</blockquote>

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