Hallu there.
Having digested the playtest document and made a few attempts at converting my homebrew races to points, thus far with little luck I must admit.
Except for the idea that all races must be equal (no reason beating that horse here), the basic system seems solid for creating variations of the races we all know and ... well mostly like. And that's great! Now we can have racial variants of thiflings, aasimar, oread and all the other strange half-races. But where's my new stuff?
Is this playtest assumed to satisfy all my racebuilding needs? Or is it merely the top of the iceberg?
I was expecting more stuff along the lines of the spell-designing chapter from UM, with guidelines of how to gauge the powerlevel of various homebrew abilities.
Right now, this system isn't very useful for what it wants to do - making new races, since none of the options are actually new and the system has absolutely nothing on how to make up new stuff yourself. It almost seems like the developers doesn't want to give us free reign over their system.
Well guys. It's time to kill your darlings. If you want to make a guide to racebuilding, you should abandon all minor concerns and just kick off. Most of us aren't looking for more limits and regulations, we're looking for creative options as well as balancing guidelines.
I like the basic idea as written. Points needs to be redone and the whole concept of equality between the core races needs to be abandoned.
But even if that happens, I can't use this system as is; it brings nothing new to the table, nothing at all :(