Appearances are Everything

"I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one."



Hi today I'm going to bitch about an old alternate rule in D&D as a gateway to discussing the broader concept that inspired it. This one goes out to all the Nosferatu out there. Ready? Count me down, Joey.

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Comeliness is the seventh stat, much like Ophiuchus is the pointless 13th zodiac. It's the appearance stat, in most cases split off from Charisma governing anything related to beauty and physical appearance. It first shows up in 3rd party supplements, but Gygax eventually legitimizes it in Unearthed Arcana, a collection of alternate rules and helpful advice. It had a whole host of really stupid effects, probably because Charisma already basically did fuckall in first edition. Skills weren't the same in 1e and 2e, and because of it, rolling to seduce people or convince others happened a lot less. 1e wasn't the same kind of game as we play now, and Charisma's primary use was just what people thought of you when they met you, called Reaction Check.

It survived into 2e thanks to magazines and it did even less. An adjustment to those reaction checks. Whoopy, now we can twink out reaction bonus for virtually no benefit except annoying the GM. Finally, it crawls its slimy hide into 3e thanks to the Book of Erotic Fantasy.


Cripes, this book. If you're into alcohol, go pour yourself a little drink before we continue.


Full disclosure, I own this book. It was purchased by a friend's overzealous Significant Other and, when they broke up, it got left here. That's the truth, it's here by virtue of nobody else wanting it. I think everyone knows me well enough. I wouldn't pass up this chance for a self depreciating joke, if nothing else. This book is the better of the two 3.X "sex" books I've seen, which should have you recoiling in horror wondering what the other one has in it. Look up Spoony's videos on these books if you have a strong stomach, but here's a sampler: A CR20 giant purple dinosaur in a Hawaiian shirt called Colossal Gay Al, and...fluid...oozes. Like the kind of...fluid...that you'd see in a brothel.

Ahem. Let's get back to the subject. Book of Erotic Fantasy includes new rules for an Appearance stat, and splits its duty down the middle with Charisma, with Disguise going whole-cloth toward Appearance and other social skills getting a wimpy, milquetoast "roll whichever stat is appropriate" rule.

First off, no. Disguising yourself has nothing to do with how pretty you look. There's no way to spin that to make any sense at all. Second, Charisma in D20 games is notoriously thin, to the point of often being a dump stat. It usually requires certain classes(Noble, Sorcerer, Charismatic Hero) to be useful, or the large host of social-positive feats Pathfinder included. Otherwise, it's just not something you put points into. It's not something more than one, maybe two people in the group need to worry about.

The book also adds a class, a spellcaster named Imagist. It's...fine. It's not very special. It's definitely one of those times where if they had made something really cheesy or weird, I'd have less of a problem. It's pretty bland as it is, aside from being tied to Appearance as its prime requisite. Sorcerer being tied to Charisma is already kind of silly, and anyone gaining spellcasting power from being totes cute is too absurd for me to consider. It makes the relatively down-to-earth explanation and class fantasy stick out like a sore thumb.

So this rule takes the thinnest, least useful stat and carves it in two. What's the point? Well, some people want their fantasies validated by a number. I can definitely understand that. You want to be a big strong dude, and it feels good that the system validates that with your 30 Strength. You want to be a powerful wizard, and you're validated again thanks to your INT bonus as well as your levels and feat choices.

Physical appearance is another really common fantasy, so if I were to guess? That must be where this incredibly misguided house rule came from. I am the fair maiden, my 26 Appearance says so. I have a pretty big problem with putting a number to appearance, though. Yes, that means tying it to Charisma as well. As a small aside, this is another one of those places I say the book is just plain wrong. Several books mention Charisma is partly your appearance, often just being a single word added to the description and nothing else. If I were you, I'd forget that it ever did that. That goes doubly true for if you ever had an argument over this.

Anyway, I have quite a few problems with "Appearance" being quantified inside a system. Simple merits like "Good Looking and Knows It" are okay, but I still frown at those pretty hard, if I'm being honest. Let's go over why, saving the biggest part for last.


Stats in a game should be a thing you're able to accomplish or perform. Often, they're something that's genuinely measurable. You're X strong because you can lift Y weight over your head, and so on. This isn't always true(measuring Intelligence and Wisdom is pretty hard), but it's all things you're able to accomplish. To Do. Try as you might, you can't do a pretty at someone.

I hear you arguing over there. That it could be your ability to present yourself instead of a value of your raw appearance. I would say that's what you already do with Charisma. In fact, it's so close that it makes it seem even dumber to split the two stats down the middle.


That leads into my next point. Something like Strength or even Intelligence is objectively true. I'm this strong, my mind is this fast, I know these things. There are qualities such as symmetry that humans find objectively pleasing, but the nature of attraction and appearance is too subjective to put a number on. At some point, even your high-appearance character is going to turn someone off. You're going to describe them and someone will make a face: they'll have too much or too little muscle, they'll be too tall or too short, too many tattoos or hell, not enough. To say that these moments are because you "failed a roll" are ludicrous. Most checks allow you to retry at some point, so what happened to that person's opinion once you succeed later? Imagine telling someone that no, my pretty says it's a 30 so you have to be attracted.

And if you're trying to tell me again that Appearance is how you carry yourself, that just sounds like Charisma with extra steps again.


Having a 7th stat throws everything off, too. Assuming it's not something baked into the system already(like Storyteller) you have to alter character generation rules to fit it in. Most people these days don't feel that a fully random set of stats is a good idea, and that means opening up a can of worms. It would mean you're giving out a disproportionate amount of free stat points by providing a second dump stat. It's already bad enough that Charisma isn't very useful and Appearance would make it worse. I promise you that you will meet a TON of people who don't care if their character is ugly, or will even prefer that.

You'll move the goalposts and have the Nosferatu Intimidate Argument. In Storyteller, as in the Pen and Paper game, a Nosferatu can't win any appearance tests. They can still roll Charisma or Manipulation, so the horrifyingly ugly Nosferatu can still intimidate or scare people as much as they want. Great. In the LARP system, Mind's Eye Theater, there are only three stats. Their ugliness is represented by traits the people they're testing against can "call out" to make a test harder on the Nosferatu in question.

So what happens is that "horrifying" now means you also look stupid, foolish, and not intimidating or dangerous in the slightest. There's no way to justify this, but people tried. I promise you that the day you include Appearance in your game, you'll have that Barbarian in your party rocking a 6 in Charisma and a 6 in Appearance. You'll want to justify it being a bad stat. Maybe you won't remember this discussion we had here and start a stupid argument about what exactly a low Appearance means. It won't be solved because it's a bad idea for a stat with no quantifiable value.


Listen. Appearance is really subjective. Some people are picky about what their character looks like. Not everyone is. At the end of the day, it's just not a good idea to encroach upon someone else's idea and tell them what to do. I've seen this before in loads of different ways, and you know what? It never ends well. Forcing your ideas onto someone else's character will always end in someone being upset, especially if it's something as personal as what their character looks like.

People want to look cool. They might even want to look hot. People want what they don't have in real life. It's not a GM's place to "Bring them back down to reality", because this isn't reality. It's the GM's job to tell a story and make sure everyone is having a good time. Try as I might, I can't imagine a story that's going to be enriched by the GM acting like the Hotness Police, and that's aside from all the other problems we discussed. What someone looks like just plain isn't likely to come up and matter enough to justify a stat. All those years playing Vampire and I can probably count the number of times on one hand.

Can it come up? Sure. Anything can come up, that's the beauty of all this flavor we build into our characters. Not everything is dice rolls, feats and class abilities. Someone being pretty(or ugly or exotic) could absolutely come up. But so could them being the child of a famous painter, or the odd tattoo they don't remember getting. Or the beautiful pocketwatch they stole, or the monastery they're from.

That's gaming. That's what we do. We weave scenes around anything that sounds interesting or might make for a really cool story. Not everything has to be numbers and stats, and something as personal as what their character looks like is a prime example of something that definitely shouldn't.

DM Screens

"You won't die.

But you'll wish you could."

There are a lot of physical items related to our hobby. Like, sure there's dice, pencils and mountain dew, but a lot of people go the extra mile. Charts and maps on the wall, minis for combat, dice towers for fair rolling, and I've even seen people put a felt tray in the middle of the table so there's absolutely no cheating. Kind of a yikes from me, but it's not my group. 

There's also GM screens. Huge privacy screens either preprinted by the game company and filled with charts, or hand crafted with info pinned to them. Man, those wood ones are nice, it almost makes me not hate the whole concept. Almost. Today we're gonna talk about why I can't stand DM screens.

So the primary use of DM screens is providing secrecy. When you're behind the screen, you have plenty of space for notes and even dice rolls that nobody can peek at. You can have your module book open to the right page, you can have your notebook full of plans open, and you can keep all of your dice rolls a secret.

As an aside, I do want to note that there is some merit in secret dice rolls. I don't always make it a big deal, since it speeds up the game to just tell people DCs they're rolling against constantly. Analysis of information is definitely part of the game though, and secret dice rolls make the group rely on your verbal descriptions and their skill checks. Just make sure those verbal descriptions are good. There's also the undeniable fact that you might have to fudge the dice. I think you should steer clear of doing so to make a fight more challenging, but either way, it just needs to happen sometimes.

The other thing GM screens are for is information. While the outside is usually covered in art, the inside will have a ton of charts or other helpful reminders, like having the grapple flowchart from back when grapple was confusing. Maybe some rules on Attack of Opportunity, for back when we were stupid and thought those were confusing. Generally thinks which will be useful to have on hand.

Except...

There's a difference between what we think we need and what's actually useful to know. A lot of people who play World of Warcraft, or any other MMO, will have their user interface customized and cluttered with information. It seems like the more difficult the content is, the more crap they slap onto their interface. Wordup is one of WoW's theorycrafters and guide-writers. A while ago I saw him say that most people overload themselves with information and track a lot of stuff that's ultimately not very useful to know. At worst, they'll distract themselves. It got me looking at UIs with more than just a sickened expression and kind of inspired this post.

You can probably see where I'm going with this.

I can probably think of a few charts in any pen and paper game I've played that you need to look at constantly. The Time and Value Progression Chart in Mutants and Masterminds. Condition modifiers in Pathfinder, if you're anything like me and forget what the difference is constantly. I definitely can't think of more than a few of them for a single game. Probably not more than five, and definitely not enough to fill a giant fold-out screen. If "All those charts" is why you like GM screens then I'm sorry but you're misguided.

I guarantee you've gone dozens of sessions not using any of those precious charts jammed onto the screen, and frankly they're only there to create a perceived sense of value so you don't feel bad paying ten fucking dollars for printed cardboard. Even if I was completely wrong, it doesn't justify the screen's existence, let alone its position propped up in front of you. You probably have plenty of space on a table, a side table, or a wall for some helpful charts.

Speaking of its position in front of you, I did go a little backwards on purpose. My main issue with these things is what they do to how you interact with your group. If someone really, really wanted those charts and just kept the thing stapled to his wall or in his lap, fine. I think it's a waste of money in a world where we have free photoshop programs, but fine. It wouldn't be that bad.

If you've been here with me since the beginning you know I don't like the idea that the GM is the Lord and Master. It's an inherently combative and antagonistic outlook that will eventually harm the shit out of your game. It's not even true: The only true metric of success we have in this hobby is if everyone had fun or not. Acting like a King, pushing people around and being overly strict with your rules is only fun for you: and if you really, seriously only care about your own fun...get another hobby. We'll all be happier.

Ahem. Not that DM screens do all that on their own. They're more like a tool the toxic GM uses which sometimes falls into the hands of regular, well meaning GMs. Putting something in front of yourself which virtually prevents two average height people from clearly seeing each other creates a psychological divide. Everyone will start thinking in different terms whether they want to or not. The GM and the players might even start "Othering" each other.

That's a lot of doom and gloom, but it does affect you. Maybe not that bad, but it will. In addition to that, it's a physical nuisance. It'll get knocked over. It'll get in the way. It'll make it harder for you to see the map, assuming you're using one. It might even get in the way when you're moving minis around or trying to plan monster actions.

You probably don't need that privacy as much as you think you do. It can be useful, but there's other ways to get it. Most people can shield a die roll with their hands if the other players are super close. Especially nosy people should be talked to regardless of your privacy solution, or else they're going to do something childish like try to peek your notes while you're in the bathroom. A really clever solution I've seen was to set the screen up on a side table and put your notes behind that. I still think screens are waste of money, but that's clever nonetheless.

If you're married to the idea, I want you follow the example of Matt Mercer. Look up footage of Critical Role of google what their table setup looks like. Matt is never obscured by his screen, and at all times the other players can easily see most of his body. His custom screen is positively tiny compared to traditional ones and never feels like a barrier. Ironically, I don't think he even really needs a GM screen due to his position when filming...but the cool wooden one he's got is at least a little bit of branding. A custom screen, one with clips on the inside, can be used in conjunction with note cards for keeping info like initiative or short-form monster stats visible. This is basically the only reasonable use for one of these things. I still think they're pointless, but Matt's custom screen is at least clearly inoffensive.


I feel like I've made my point. Don't feel called out, but every time I've seen a GM trot one of these out, I've gotten the distinct impression that they just liked feeling like King Dungeon Master and the screen was their badge of office. It's a deliberate effort to "Other" your group, and that's not a good idea. My groups are all older now, though. We're less disruptive. More cohesive and trusting. And nobody's brought up a GM screen in years. Maybe that's a coincidence. But I don't think so.