[Rq-rules] Re: Farewell to CON and thoughts on APP

[Tom Cantine]

On 14-Jan-07, at 5:01 AM, Simon Phipp wrote:

> Paul Cardwell:
> > I agree about APP.  As Gygax pointed out (and was
> > immediately misinterpreted by game-bashers), some of
> >the most charismatic individuals, good and bad, were
> >hardly physically attractive.
> Yes, so it would be better to have separate APP and CHA 
> characteristics, one to denote pure physical attractiveness and one to 
> denote magnetism and charisma.

I think I may have briefly mentioned this idea on this list before, but 
just last week I was thinking about it some more, and since it seems to 
be topical, I'm going to do it again.

I've always been troubled a bit by traits like APP, which are in real 
life pretty darned subjective, notwithstanding that there's also a 
large degree of consensus within a community as to who's attractive and 
who isn't. So the approach I would like to take is to break up the 3d6 
of APP into separate components, a racial (species), cultural and 
individual component. Each character would record on their sheet only 
the first two; the individual component is subjective, "in the eye of 
the beholder", and rolled up for each viewer. The reaction of each 
viewer would always be determined by the sum of all three values, but 
certain values can be limited by the viewer's unfamiliarity with the 
species or cultural norms.

The racial or species component would be available to anyone familiar 
enough with the species in question to make an informed judgment as to 
the "objective" beauty of the individual specimen. It represents 
general physical beauty, and would normally range from 1 - 6, possibly 
modified by CON or STR.

The cultural component represents generally accepted conventions of 
beauty within the character's own culture: hairstyles, makeup, norms of 
body language, posture, gesture and voice mannerisms, etc. Again, only 
one familiar with these cultural norms would be able to appreciate the 
character's poise.

Finally there would be 1d6 rolled by each subject character upon 
meeting the object character. This is always available, but if it's the 
only one available the reaction is likely to be unimpressive. See, I 
don't know much about orcs, so to me, they tend to range in APP from 
1-6. But an orc who was raised by humans and learned to dress well and 
comb its hair might range from 2-12 in APP (1d6 for subjective, 1d6 for 
"poise", but it's still pretty ugly in terms of a facial structure and 
skin tone I haven't learned to appreciate.)

The thing I noticed last week while thinking about this was that if ol' 
Cormac meets someone and rolls a 6 on his subjective evaluation of her 
beauty, ultimately she will range from 8-18, which is the same "normal" 
range for human SIZ and INT. So, as a guide, an effective APP of 8 
might be the practical minimum for interest, and 13 the average rating 
of those one would be interested in. But note that ANYONE can have an 
effective APP of 8, and will in fact for at least 1 in six of the 
population. The ugliest, person, as lacking in poise as possible, will 
have a racial+cultural score of 2, and in practice will range from 3-8, 
while the most technically perfect supermodel (12 in racial+cultural 
values) will in practice range from 13-18. "Yeah, she's pretty, but 
only in an average, conventional kinda way. She has no CHARACTER, no 
distinctness, no je-ne-sais-quoi, you know?"  "Are you KIDDING? She's 
totally hot!!"

This is obviously way too much math and book keeping, but I thought it 
was an interesting model nonetheless. And it also allows a somewhat 
more tightly defined possibility for training: the cultural component 
can be trained relatively easily, but only so far. The species 
component could only be altered with surgery or magic (or maybe 
indirectly by working on CON or STR), while the subjective one could 
possibly be affected by specific kinds of interaction (Seduce skill, 
for example, or again magic), possibly even beyond 6.

(Maybe the unnatural beauty of certain beings could be simulated by 
rolling their subjective reaction score on something more than 1d6? A 
dryad is supposed to have APP of 2d6+12; this is the equivalent of 
saying that they naturally max out the racial and cultural values 
appropriate to the viewer, whoever they encounter, which makes sense, 
and then they get a subjective value of 2d6.) 
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