Thankyou both for your replies, they’re helpful. Digging around on wikis risks uncovering spoilers.
[quote=Estelle Knoht]Okay.
Clarification.
"A Person of Some Little Consequence" is the storyline that eventually allows you to achieve "A Person of Some Importance".
Being a Person of Some Importance gives you new opportunities, but make the bazaar cures slightly less effective. You also lose the ability to receive invitation to Dante’s Grill. These two disadvantages are not of particular trouble.
Being a Person of Some Little Consequence doesn’t unlock OR lock you out of anything.
[/quote]
I know that now, but absolutely didn’t when the Barrister cards first came up, hence my initial caution.
As there are four slightly differently-named Barrister cards, I supposed that there might conceivably be four development branches, one for each major skill, that diverge early. And as the Barrister’s invitation can’t be accepted twice, I was wary as to which one to go for. I now know that there is only one development line.
But unless I checked ahead, which I try to avoid doing (but eventually cracked), it was somewhat mysterious what the Barrister was trying to get me to achieve, apart from balanced levelling in the four major skills.
I didn’t read through all the steps beyond the levelling very thoroughly, as I’d rather not know some things in advance. All I really wanted to find out from the wiki is what, if any, decisions in the POSLC/POSI development sequence implemented irreversible locks - it turns out that there is only the specialization, it’s at the end, and at the moment it doesn’t have a large number of knock-on effects apart from on patron/protege.
So I thought the list of clothing, property requirements and whatnot might all at some stage be required by the Barrister, and would thus take an age to progress. It’s a relief that I won’t have to invest in a largely-useless wardrobe of fine clothes.