SouthLab: race possibilities.
I was tinkering with the numbers and considering characteristics of old and new races to try to balance everything out, and I've ended up tentatively settling on gnomes and ogres. I couldn't make halflings work out satisfactorily, and orcs ended up being just an inferior version of dwarves with no upside. I discarded the idea of drakos because they would get not only a breath weapon (probably acid spit) but they also have wings, which I wouldn't conveniently ignore; I have no intention of adding flight to SouthLab, and without those extra-mechanical advantages they're not that different from dwarves. I was going to put trolls in, but two classic characteristics of trolls are their claws (and general preference for unarmed combat/ineptness with weapons) and most importantly their accelerated healing rate, which is fine in the Soulthieves context but not in SouthLab; I really don't want the mechanics of this game to accommodate that. Ogres might become a replacement race in Soulthieves anyway (for hill giants, assuming I don't just delete them altogether), so I guess it's not such a big deal to include ogres here.
I added a new column to my table to list the total attribute modifiers received by each race (and class); just for comparison, humans get a total of 0, and lawyers also get a total of 0, as their attribute medians are not modified at all. (By "median", I mean (or mode) that the actual value of the attribute at character generation is randomized within a range; obviously the median anchors that range.)
As it stands, elves and gnomes receive net bonuses, while dwarves and ogres receive net penalties. This isn't actually very unfair, though; with higher Strength and Constitution and a greater ability to rely on hand-to-hand combat, it's easier for dwarves and ogres to survive the early game. Another consideration is that physicists turn out to be the only class that get net bonuses (and they come with the challenge of maintaining a stock of ammunition), so in general the race/class combos should mostly balance out sufficiently. There's time yet to tweak things, anyway.
Constitution was the hardest attribute to deal with. The problem there is that originally, basing my numbers on the numbers from Soulthieves, elves were the only race receiving a negative Constitution modifier; gnomes are actually fairly tough. But because of the limitations I'm placing on modifiers in SouthLab, gnomes were actually rating as tough as dwarves and just a notch below ogres, which was wrong too. I thought about discarding gnomes' bonus and giving them a penalty instead, but aside from being rather ad hoc it would also wipe out their net bonus. Ultimately I did tone down their Constitution just slightly, making them only as tough as humans. That's not really satisfactory, but it's the best I can do with the stock races and the original Soulthieves races without getting too wacky.
I added a new column to my table to list the total attribute modifiers received by each race (and class); just for comparison, humans get a total of 0, and lawyers also get a total of 0, as their attribute medians are not modified at all. (By "median", I mean (or mode) that the actual value of the attribute at character generation is randomized within a range; obviously the median anchors that range.)
As it stands, elves and gnomes receive net bonuses, while dwarves and ogres receive net penalties. This isn't actually very unfair, though; with higher Strength and Constitution and a greater ability to rely on hand-to-hand combat, it's easier for dwarves and ogres to survive the early game. Another consideration is that physicists turn out to be the only class that get net bonuses (and they come with the challenge of maintaining a stock of ammunition), so in general the race/class combos should mostly balance out sufficiently. There's time yet to tweak things, anyway.
Constitution was the hardest attribute to deal with. The problem there is that originally, basing my numbers on the numbers from Soulthieves, elves were the only race receiving a negative Constitution modifier; gnomes are actually fairly tough. But because of the limitations I'm placing on modifiers in SouthLab, gnomes were actually rating as tough as dwarves and just a notch below ogres, which was wrong too. I thought about discarding gnomes' bonus and giving them a penalty instead, but aside from being rather ad hoc it would also wipe out their net bonus. Ultimately I did tone down their Constitution just slightly, making them only as tough as humans. That's not really satisfactory, but it's the best I can do with the stock races and the original Soulthieves races without getting too wacky.