I was fooling around with Story Progression again. Or at least trying to. I was attempting to make a caste, but nothing makes any sense. I have the most up to date version of story progression but the options I have don't match what the documentation says.

I create a new caste. Name it. Click on its name in the list. Then it takes me to a list of what the caste can and cannot do. How to I designate what the caste is and who can be in it?

And while I'm here, Story progression impacts many of the other mods, correct? There is a lot of reference in some of the mod documentation to SP. The way SP is written to work it looks like it is largely focused on inactive sims. But there are some checks with actions that the active family takes. Does story progression hide/show or allow/disallow certain actions that the active household can take?

To add a sim to a caste, click on the sim and select NRaas > SP > Sim Options > Caste: Manual, and add the caste. This only applies to castes that you've set as Manual; if they're Automatic, the sim either meets the criteria or doesn't.

SP does block some actions for active sims, but I find it's not entirely reliable. For example, it can block a sim from gaining a skill, but I've seen the sim appear to increase the skill, notification included, but actually stay at the previous level with a full progress bar; see the sim apparently gain a skill, only to have the skill bar return to what it was when they started the task; and the sim actually gain the next still level. The caveat here is I didn't quit and restart after changing settings, so you may have better results overall. But the only way to know is to test.

For romance, it's not so much that SP blocks an interaction as Woohooer checks SP settings and blocks it. You can toggle this within Woohooer, either setting user-directed actions to be exempt or breaking the link between the two mods entirely. The reason SP's rules can be imposed so thoroughly is because Woohooer replaces the game's default romance manager, so it governs every potential romantic interaction rather than simply adding or altering a handful of options.

There are two basic systems you can think of story progression presiding over- which are the Incentives and the Laws of the simulation. Those aren't the technical terms, but just the words I think give the best example.

The Incentives are everything that SP is controlling about pushing sims to do with their lives (as opposed to what they are doing right now at a given moment, which is in the hands of autonomy). This is everything behind the curtain that makes and breaks relationships, forms pregnancies, assigns careers, or prompts a household to move homes. It's a lot of RNG and it's only for inactives- the active household are not at the mercy of anything like this. They have to act out the interactions in full to make these things happen.

The Laws are the restrictions in place about the context that things are allowed in and the general on/off status of gameplay systems. This is your aging, job performance, what sims can get who pregnant, what ages/species/etc are being affected by something. When your active sims are valid for these settings, either by caste or being relevant in the level (Town/Household/Sim) you made the changes, they will be enforced for them as well.

As far as I know, SP doesn't have any options that can outright obscure a user-directed action from existence. But it can be in control of that interaction's effect- like whether the result of a Try for Baby is valid, or if a skill increase was permitted as in the example above. It's not omnipotent however, there can be a small delay until SP 'notices' and checks whether it is valid.

So, while the exact sims affected by each SP setting isn't documented- familiarising yourself with these two concepts can be really useful for knowing how to clock what it's most likely to concern