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Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 2884287" data-attributes="member: 29746">I've been doing this in my homebrew for years now- I discovered the problem when I was considering what an NPC would prefer to Polymorph herself into, and realized that by the RAW she could gain racial traits of an alternate race if she turned herself into a member of that race.My solution was to carefully check the granted Extraordinary abilities of each race, and decide whether they were essentially "genetic" or cultural. And I made up a new category of ability, the "Cultural" category (abbreviated as "Cu"). (Cu) abilities are defined as Extraordinary for all purposes except two: first, a creature using a Polymorph effect to turn into the race doesn't get them, and second, a character/creature from one race raised in an alternate culture doesn't get its own racial (Cu) abilities and instead gets those for the culture it was raised in. For example, a Human raised by Elves won't get the bonus feat that Humans raised in their own culture get, nor will he get the extra skill point at each level; instead, he gets the elves' proficiency in swords and bows. A human raised by Dwarves would instead get Stonecunning, Weapon Familiarity, and the bonuses to Craft and Appraise checks.It's worked well for me as a system, though only one player has so far used the system for a PC- he played an orc of one subrace raised by a different subrace (there are several different subraces of orc in my game, and all are allowed as PCs if the background meshes with the party okay). But then, I heavily house-ruled the core races anyway due to the way my world is set up, so YMMV.I haven't read Iron Heroes, but it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that professional game designers grappled with the same issues. It's a fringe problem, but it can become a big one once it rears its head.</blockquote>

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