When is the player no longer the player? After much research, I'm still not sure.

There are two naive assumptions one could make: That edits to the player actor base record

• would only apply to new characters
  
• would apply to all characters, new and old

Neither one seems to be the case.

Let me explain a bit. I've been attempting to remove the flames and healing spells from the player, so that they don't start with them, and must learn them on their own from a spell book if they want them. Seems simple enough, right? The player really isn't all that different from the NPCs, mechanically -- they're represented by an actor, and there are game processes that occur to give the player control of that actor, apply the player's character creation choices to that actor, and they're treated a bit differently by the rules (skills and levels are increased by different mechanisms, and a number of things only consider the player, and not all actors, for efficiency reasons).

So it's easy enough to find the player actor in the CK, and make some changes. Since plugins can take effect on existing save games (you don't need to start a new character for plugins to work, generally, though that's not to say they'll always be without conflicts or other issues), it's easy to make naive assumption #1.

But it didn't work, at least not on an existing character. Works just fine for new characters. So I go and find that several other people have made pretty much the same mod, and see the occasional comment that of course it only works for new characters.

Except, as testing shows, it's perfectly possible to make a character without the plugin enabled, save, exit the game, enable the plugin, and have it work for that character. I generally do a quick console, "coc unownedcell" from the main menu to test stuff, and did repeated tests of creating new characters that way (with the plugin disabled), modifying them in various ways, either directly through the console, or by summoning stuff to interact with, also through the console, then saving, and reloading the game and that character with the plugin enabled. I tried modifying the player in a number of ways, to get it to dereference from the player actor in the plugin, but nothing I did there would prevent the plugin from removing those two spells, contrary to my experiences with my other, older existing characters.

So I figured that maybe it was something in the introductory quest, maybe where you get to choose your race, rename the player, that sort of thing. I created a new character the normal way this time, and did the whole Helgen introduction, saving periodically so that I could try with the plugin enabled later. And yet, still, the plugin worked, suggesting to me that changes to the player actor base record should affect all characters, and not just new ones.

But it still doesn't work for my older characters. I'm beginning to think the 1.4 patch has something to do with it, since all the characters it doesn't work for were created before the patch, and any character I create afterwards the plugin works just fine, no matter when the plugin is enabled.

Anyone able to shed some light on this? Suggest a workaround? I'm currently trying to dig through my save files, trying to understand the problem, and find a solution, but it feels like I'm spinning my wheels.