NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8036047" data-attributes="member: 18">Do you think fan art represents a specific section of the player base, or a general slice through? Because I'm going to tell you, it's the former. The sort of people who pay to have to have their characters drawn (which is most of what you're calling fan art) and the sort of people who are artists and draw their characters well enough that they feel comfortable putting them on the internet, are not representative of "most players".They're representative of a subset of players, who tend to be particularly interested in RP, particularly interested in romantic RP. You see the same thing in MMOs and so on. The sort of people who do fan art, and get fan art done, are absolutely not representative of most people playing the game. They'll have characters with elaborate backstories, sexy escapades, know their RP-walk button is, and so on.On top of all that, few will pay an artist, or puts in hours and hours of work, to represent a just fairly boring-looking character. And some artists, especially the more anime/Disney-type artists, can't even draw boring-looking characters. They can draw ugly, or strange, but normal, average, okay? Nope. It's either attractive or strange/ugly, that's your choice. So you have multiple factors here and you're wrong if you're suggesting this means most players want desperately sexy characters, but you're right to suggest most "fan art" depicts such.Most players, in my experience, if you ask them to describe their character, rarely go to the extremes of attractiveness or hideousness unless there's mechanical element (as there is in some RPGs - White Wolf ones typically have some mechanics there, but it also costs points, so it's still rare). But then you get this subset of players who do want attractive characters. And guess what? I'm one of them. I'm out myself right now. I'm the only player in my group who is keen on drawing their characters, and I'm the only one who consistently has notably attractive characters (or at least ones with extremely distinctive appearances - though I did make an exception last time I played, but being forgettable was part of my whole deal).Another issue here, with some races is that there's a bit of an unfortunate tendency in most fantasy art to, rather inexplicably given biology, see "male" as the "default" state of being, and female as the "exception". So instead of coming with an appearance for a race that makes sense as a race that has mothers, and sisters, and so on, they come up with an appearance is that is basically masculine, and then go "Oh I guess I should make a female version!" (this just seems totally nuts to me - it's like DMs who have no idea where anyone poops in their dungeon, or don't understand thermodynamics), much, much later. And that female version will range from anything to "just put lipstick on it" to "What if I just drew a slim burlesque dancer and put some vaguely monstrous features on her even though the male looks like King Kong on steroids?" or the dreaded "Just put boobs on it!".Why not start with the female? Y'know? Why not look at animals and how they do or don't have sexual dimorphism? Everything that reproduces sexually has a mother (but not necessarily a father - parthenogenesis is a thing). I guess there's elves - they do tend to be androgynous in D&D and even lean a bit feminine in typical appearances. But I really hope we don't see more "Michelangelo"-style "I took the male and stuck on big boobs on it, now it's a chick!"-type stuff.</blockquote>

Verification