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.