Beauty in D&D

[Varianor Abroad]

PCs get to choose their appearance. Charisma has no bearing on it. I think the female sibeccai in her heavy plate is the best looking of my party (two giants, a litorian and a sibeccai). The female giant mageblade is the "face" of the party though.

See, all stereotypes knocked to the ground.

(Oh, and for the record, in 24 years of DMing, I've never had a PC choose a chainmail biking. Fifty percent of my players have been female in that time.)

 

[thundershot]

I've been very tempted to add comiliness to my players attributes, along with Luck (from Green Ronin's wonderful Advanced Player's Manual), but trying to judge which skills would use which attribute could be a pain. The higher the charisma, generally the better looking the character is (and we often joke that on females, the higher charisma means a bigger bust... "Wow, look at the Charisma on her...")

As for character pics, Manny Vega (who used to do Everknights) did some of my own NPC characters.

Hey, even the DM is allowed to have fully in-depth NPCs with actual histories (and have been in play for years as allies).


Chris

 

[Hodgie]

I like tying charisma directly to appearence. I am actually confused why anyone wouldn't at least _link_ the two together. Considering all of the threads about how Charisma needs to be made more important and considering how vane most people are about how their character looks... tying Cha to physical looks seems like a good first step.

 

[Micah]

I don't think we've talked a whole lot about what the PC's look like in our game. I have two character portraits and our new cleric is beautiful, although the thing that hit me most wasn't so much the good looks, but the haunted look in her face which I thought was very accurate to the backstory.

We do have a very pretty NPC bard that the party's wizard tried to hit on. Funny thing is that their relationship seems to cause more feedback on our storyhour than the combat and adventure parts of the story.

Overall I would think that the party's looks are as average as you are going to get when you have a warforged, changeling, half-giant, pirate, monk, and female barbarian in your party.

As to the chainmail bikini - I'm relatively sure that our female barbarian wouldn't touch one with a ten foot pole - besides they all have to wear the uniform of the ship they are on. OK except the wizard entertainer who wears glammerweave. . . .



As for characters I've played. . . . Meepo didn't even qualify for "cute" and when the 57 year old rogue I play diassapeared into a mirror sans clothing, the party mentioned it would be scary when we found her.

 

[Evilhalfling]

Beauty is linked to charisma, but not absolutly so. The middle charisma ranger (female player) iis described as well built and athletic, but has seveal unhealed facial scars.
The high charisma sorcerer (teenage player) is considered handsome by all women of appropriate race (halfling) and has two moping after him, while human women think he is darling. But the player is too selfconcious to take advantage of any of it. As a newbie he uses his charaisma only for spells.

Beauty pagents? pfft. not in my game.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

I let PCs choose. Generally, if they want to be teh sexay! they take a high Cha.


Micah, I'm in awe of your .sig. Severely sweet.

 

[Selenim]

Hmmm well I'm running a solo game for a low charisma gnoll ranger so I guess he's out. I have the occasional mind flayer sorcerer player (with a hat of disguise) that could try to sneak in though.

 

[boredgremlin]

I like tying charisma directly to appearence. I am actually confused why anyone wouldn't at least _link_ the two together. Considering all of the threads about how Charisma needs to be made more important and considering how vane most people are about how their character looks... tying Cha to physical looks seems like a good first step.

I had a game once where we used appearance. I have heard it used as an attribute number plus your charisma bonus. We did it a little different. Charisma was actaully the number modified by your appearance bonus. We figured this made sense because good looking peaple naturrally get more positive reactions at first.

 

[S'mon]

IMC players choose what their PCs' physical appearance is, GM chooses NPC's physical appearance. A high-CHA character may appear more attractive due to their forceful personality but this isn't related to looks. There are plenty of good-looking low-CHA people (IRL, most supermodels) and ugly high-CHA people (IRL, many military leaders).

As for chainmail bikini - light armour with base AC +0, no armour check penalty (if padded!), masterwork chainmail bikinis can be enchanted. No arcane spell failure chance, so handy for the adventuring Sorceress... Most warrior-women IMC wear at least a nice chain shirt or studded leather jerkin, though.

 

[Darth K'Trava]

IMO, Charisma is a combination of looks and personality. Which is greater depends on the player's version of their character...