I read the stoutheart clan plot idea thread and something made me think of this idea.

Typically the council is run by humans (most of the council members are humans).

I know someone is going to tell me to work towards this in-game, but I wanted to see the community feedback on the idea.

What if the council was required to have racial representation. Meaning that the council should be required to have one dwarven, one hin, one gnome, one half-orc and one elf, in addition to the humans, on the council. I was hoping these could be NPC's so they could act like a focal point for each race. Kind of like "Writing your Congressman" sort of thing.

Thoughts?

Not a bad idea. Though Even if a system like that was put in I could never realistically imagine a half-orc representative. For two reasons many people tend to forget:

1) Half orcs are not liked in FR

2) Half-orcs are a SUBRACE of human not a race in their own right

So yeah I do like the idea except for the half-orc bit as otherwise you'd need a councilor for each subrace. Defiantly a positive thing to be working towards.

While election timing may be slightly subjected to OOC opinions in the recent poll, this is something that can entirely be worked towards in game, and should be if characters want to see this change.

There are other sorts of racial leaders in game already, some PC and some NPC. Winston comes to mind. Plus, half orcs for instance would probably not be all that interested in being on the council, inherent to their orcish nature, and even if an exception was found he would likely be shunned by the pretty well non-existant half orc community.

Dwarves tend to do their own thing due to the actions of PC dwarves over the past few years.

Halflings are rarely taken seriously by the PC community because of how they are frequently played- as overly childish and immature. There are some IG efforts going on to change this, and have been over the course of the past few months I think!

Elves have been doing some neat stuff recently, too, although pretty seperatist methinks. Some sort of loose affiliation of drow killers.

I'm sure that if there were leaders who would push for the interests of X race to be considered, they would have a good chance to be elected in the Council.

The reality is that half-orcs, dwarves, gnomes, elves and halflings make a sad minority of Sanctuary's population. A 'fair' representation of all races on the Council certainly wouldn't be a fair representation of the population of Sanctuary.

Maybe this could make sense if the Council was much larger, and a census was regularly taken. You could put seats on the Council which represented the proportion of races in Sanctuary's population.

Either way, I don't think that it's a great idea.

You did answer your own suggestion already, but I'm not fond of this idea at all. The Council is interesting because it is unpredictable and anyone is capable of getting a seat. The moment you take away that factor, it loses its flair significantly.