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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2223905" data-attributes="member: 27012">It's understandable in the sense that it's rampant in the fantasy source material (using movies as an example, take a look at Legend or even the Lord of the Rings trilogy).  The idea is that Evil is an inward ugliness and that inward ugliness get's reflected as an outward ugliness.  And while the movie Shrek was designed to buck this stereotype, one shouldn't fail to notice that Shrek really isn't all that ugly looking or menacing and you can't smell him in the movie theater.  Had he been depicted like the CGI Golum from Lord of the Rings, audience reactions may have been different.The real world implications of this are often troubling but it's difficult to argue that people shouldn't prefer being with people who are pleasant company to people who are unpleasant company and the responses that most people have to looks and demeanor is more viceral than intellectual.  Since most games want the PCs to choose Good over Evil, it makes some sense to make Good pleasant and Evil unpleasant to simplify the moral and emotional landscape.  It gives people a positive viceral reaction to Good and a negative viceral reaction to Evil.  It's very similar dehumanizing the bad guys in action movies by hiding their faces behind helmets, face masks, or sun glasses so the audience doesn't feel empathy for them and vicerally react with revulsion when they are casually killed by the dozens by the hero of the movie.  That's troubling in a lot of ways, too.  But like the looks it, it does work.In my game, the tieflings that the party has run into have been charismatic and hid their true nature well.  One, in fact, was a very charismatic Bard.  They've also run into some succubi, an attractive erinyes, a charismatic Glabrezu that the players thought was pretty likable, and some reasonably attractive Evil clerics.  While there is the "ugly inside == ugly outside" school of thought, there is also the idea of Evil as temptation which leads to "beautiful and seductive outside but ugly inside" and I tend to play with that quite a bit, too.  I've also had quite a bit of successfully both the players by confronting them with Evil characters that offer to help the party in exchange for various things.  The stereotype that I'm really trying to fight at the moment is the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" idea that all powerful people, good and bad, are either very attractive and charismatic or a bit odd looking and strange.  I'm trying to make sure that I sprinkle a mix of fairly plain and unexecptional looking people into my setting, too.I think that the danger of playing with the idea that you can't judge a book by its cover is that it's easy to turn that into a cliche, too, or to get too preachy.  That's not to say that you shouldn't challenge stereotypes like this or that I don't.  I do.  But I think there needs to be more to it than a moral lesson for the players, otherwise the results are often as artificial as the stereotype that's being attacked.  And to its credit, even Shrek, a movie that's all about playing with the idea of judging books by their cover, still played to the fact that the preference for attractive people doesn't necessarily disappear even when people know better in the sequel.</blockquote>

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