Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reprisal" data-source="post: 1249828" data-attributes="member: 1161">Long, Long ReplyI'm not familiar with this Book of Erotic Fantasy beyond what people have been saying about it here and on "those other boards." So, I'm not up on how they treat appearance as an additional Ability Score, but here's my off-the-cuff take on it...If we assume that Appearance is heavily-weighted in the subjective direction even though there will be some objective commonalities between various definitions of beauty like healthiness, fitness and symmetry, then what we need to do is quantify the subjective aspects until it meshes well enough with the rules.I suggest we start with keying Appearance to a specific race: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, orc, and what-have-you. At that point, we can then set up some arbitrary rules that make some sort of sense. At this point, I figure we should take a look at the NPC attitude stuff on pg. 72 of the PHB v3.5 and try to have Appearance have some effect on starting NPC attitudes.As an example, take a human female with an Appearance score of 13. We'll say that her player has keyed her Appearance to the default for her race, humans. Now, when she encounters human NPCs who are attracted to human females, she'll benefit from an automatic upgrade in the Initial Attitude of that NPC.If the NPC would normally be Indifferent, he is now Friendly. The rule would be that for every point of modifier, the Initial Attitude of an NPC is upgraded or downgraded accordingly -- or just upgraded if you're more into that. If this human female were to venture into the forest and start interacting with elves, then her appearance would have to be more exceptional to affect most elven men, who are likely to have keyed their desires to elven females. As a result, this PC would need to have an Appearance of 14 or 15 (+2 modifier) to have the same effect she would have on human males. The same would hold true for dwarves, orcs, or whatever. This means, of course, that every character in the world will need two new characteristics: (1) what race's sense of beauty they try to emulate, and (2) what they find attractive themselves. These two things are generally the same, a human female would key her sense of beauty to the human ideal and would likewise be attracted to other humans -- regardless of gender preference, that's just another complexity added in later.What's flawed with this system? It's inherently limited to racial ideals of beauty and it doesn't cover enough ground to allow for a universal or relativist definition of beauty.It's simple, however. The idea that each race has its own definition of beauty allows for quicker mechanics. Elves tend to favour elves, humans favour humans, and so-on and so-forth... But being able to key a character's Appearance to a particular racial ideal should help forge a degree of diversity. If a half-elven girl is raised among elves, she may key her aesthetic efforts and personal preference to the elven ideal of beauty rather than the human ideal.I guess you could give Appearance two-related values: Personal Sense and Social Sense or inner and outer senses of beauty. As an NPC, Calder would react well to female characters who try to personally emulate the elven aesthetic. For him, every positive point of Appearance's modifier would upgrade his Initial Attitude toward any given elven female, or human female trying to emulate an elven female. A human, gnome or dwarf would have to be more exceptional to affect him in the same way.Apperance could be used with skills if they're modified to use "Either Charisma or Appearance" for certain applications -- think Bluff for Seduction, Gather Information (Chatting someone up at the bar for the secret codes to the nuclear Golem) or even just Diplomacy.In the end, I think quantifying Appearance is important for how NPCs initially react to any given character. The problem is that if we make it an Ability Score, it needs to be at least as useful as Charisma. I think, now that I've gone through the casually analytical  motions, that it would be best to determine Appearance like a statistic, but not one that has any mechanical CharGen costs or benefits.You could, instead, include questions like these in a character questionaire:"If we were using Comeliness or Appearance as a seventh Ability Score, what would it be?""If we think of each race having their own distinct ideals of beauty, then what racial ideal would your character attempt to emulate for himself or herself? For his or her prospective mate?"And that would say a lot about any given character, at least when ideas of aesthetics come into play.*shrug*With the semester coming to a close, I find that I have enough time to devote actual thought to these sorts of things, <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> - Rep.</blockquote>

Verification