Philosophy of beauty and corruption

[Stingray1]

Or just give it a fairly low percentage check pass rate, like a percentage for every point above Charisma 10. So, with a Ch of 11 you'll have a 1% chance of being able to offer peace when 'C'hatting to a hostile. Also let it scale with experience level and danger level of the monster minus experience level of the PC.

Edit - Maybe even with very high Ch you can talk a monster into becoming your companion.

[Iridia]

That'd just lead to grinding, though, wouldn't it? Anybody who wanted to become more lawful would just be talking to every monster to check whether it was willing to surrender before they killed it. It's repetitive extra keystrokes just like sacrificing one coin at a time.

[Stingray1]

Or you can do it by hitting a monster to low HP and wait for it to panic, same difference.

Another idea. Maybe it can influence(passively) your opponents DV/to-hit/damage, you know taunting your opponent. You know, like you see duelists and fencers do in the movies, talking all the time while fighting.

If your Ch is below 10 there is a chance your opponent will become enraged from you pissing it off. The lower the higher the chance.

[gut]

make Ap: more important by pumping the 'shattering mirror' room effect

[michailv]

And please take the following in mind: If we look at beauty from a medieval point of view (and neither a overly sensibilized touchy modern point of view of political correctness or a view inspired by tolkienish stances) medieval people associated evil with ugliness. Warts, scars, humps, ogreish looks, etc. always were associated with cursed or evil people (correctly or not - no need to discuss that).

Er... how is there no need to discuss that when this is the problem everyone has with it? "People used to be even bigger jerks" doesn't seem like a good reason to do it. Nor is "but in medieval times..." because this isn't medieval earth. It obviously bothers people, so this seems really dismissive. (Also that you call it being "politically correct" and "touchy" which, again, super dismissive. Your "someone's just being politically correct" is someone else's "this makes me feel gross playing the game.")

I totally get that you like the mechanics of the change, and the mechanics do sound cool -- I'll be all over a "resist chaos" stat. I'll try to grind up my Ap when the change happens, sure... but I'll feel blah about :/

Okay, okay, but I don't just want to poke at your response, as I really do appreciate the mechanics and the challenging in balancing time/effort here. So wanted to be constructive as well:

Maybe some kind of patch the manual description? Something like...

Appearance is not just physical attractiveness (though it certainly can be), characters with a high Ap draw everyone's attention without saying a word, silence someone with a look or bring happiness with only a smile. They seem somehow more real, larger than life... because they are. Characters with a high appearance are filled with the essence of natural, physical Beauty. It is the natural world resisting the corruption of Chaos. Of course, in these dark days, even Beauty can be bent to serve cHaOs...

This is kind of sneaking in a name change without having to change the stat, but I appreciate why even changing a state name can have ramifications you might not feel like dealing with. With this at least we are saying, okay, Ap resists Chaos, but here's what we _mean_ by Appearance and associate it with a kind of naturalistic ideal of natural Beauty, and posits that Natural Beauty, like Order, is resisting the corruption. You can easily imagine a cat having a high Ap score, or a troll that might not be in any way "pretty" to me being stunning and awe-inspiring in a kind of sublime way.

You're welcome to use any/all of that if you like it, or if you want I could try to write a more complete manual entry. Just seems like maybe a decent amount of frustration could be eased with a quick change to the manual?

[michailv]

Thinking about it more, it might also work to just be more explicit that this isn't an overall world-wide judgement on people with a lack of appearance, but just how Andor Drakon rolls:

For some reason, the forces of Chaos seem to favor those that have a displeasing appearance. It almost seems that when it came to someone's looks, chaos sees the world through the eyes of a human...

or...

For some reason the forces of Chaos seem to target those they see as already disfigured or grotesque even if their appearance has nothing to do with Chaos' corrupting influence. Almost as if someone, or some thing, believes the "ugly" races of the Drakalor Chain must be easier to corrupt.

Which also serves to hint that AD was human once, maybe. Less of an overall philosophy, and more "Andor Drakon thinks Orcs are ugly b/c he's a judgmental human who was kind of a huge jerk"

Or, another random idea...

Corruption and disease have spread through the Drakelor Chain of late. Your Appearance is merely the outward sign of your body's ability to resist this corrupting influence. Characters with a high Appearance give off a sense of healthfulness that is pleasing to everyone around them. Characters with a low Appearance seem sickly and unpleasant to be around... people around them fear they might succumb to the strange diseases of the Chain at any moment.

...kind of positing that in a world where Chaos is literally seeping up from the ground, a person's appearance isn't their hotness level, but how sickly and diseased you look. People are paranoid about it. (And they're not wrong, since a high App does mean you are less likely to be corrupt... though you can be!) Again, I guess it's kind of using the manual to ninja-rename the stat, but maybe it works.

(Having thought about it for a while to write these, I have come on board that there are cool lore reasons for doing this, and it just has an imperfect name. I'll probably keep believing it's some mix of these options even if the manual doesn't change, heh! Actually, you could even have a manual entry that doesn't so much say "this is why" as posit that "Ap seems to do this... maybe it's because Beauty, or maybe Healthfulness, or maybe Andor Drakon just judges people based on their looks.)

[Iridia]

Consider where beauty comes from IRL. Back when we were still learning how to make fire, it made sense to choose only mates that were healthy enough that you could have children and raise them successfully. Beauty is partly a judgment of health, at the core. It says, "This person will survive long enough that we can make babies." And possibly, "This person is less likely to have a disease I could catch." So beauty is essentially a proxy for Toughness, which is harder to read.

That's changed since then, somewhat. Add culture, and you get unhealthy thin models or steroid-abusing bodybuilders (both more likely to be infertile), so the idea of beauty is certainly flexible enough even to run contrary to its original usefulness. However, the Drakalor Chain isn't like the modern world or even the medieval world. Disease isn't the biggest threat despite the rampant cannibalism. It's chaos that's the big threat to survival. If you're going to choose a mate in the Drakalor Chain, your judgment for beauty is going to be, "This person is resistant enough to Chaos that we'll be able to have and raise children without turning into writhing purple j's first."

I don't know if this is valid, because I have no idea whether the world of Adom even uses evolutionary biology. Selection pressure, sure, but when "mutation" means "growing extra eyes" rather than "random genetic changes that usually aren't beneficial, but very occasionally are," maybe things are different. Or maybe it's the same principle, only it happens much faster.

Still--if Appearance is essentially physical ChAoS resistance, and if people have existed in an uneasy equilibrium with ChAoS until the events of the game, it makes sense that people whose physical beings are particularly orderly would also be particularly resistant to ChAoS and seen as beautiful (that is, desirable mates) by the people around them.

I agree with the people who are saying that having Good=Beautiful has some unfortunate implications that I really prefer not to see in a game. I like the idea of Appearance as ChAoS resistance, but it's got to be treated as very similar to Toughness being treated as damage/sickness resistance: You can be beautiful and very ChAoS-resistant as a result, but be evil to the core. Or you could be butt-ugly and get corrupted if you so much look at a chaos rat, but be a very good person. If Appearance is revamped as ChAoS-resistance, then it needs to be divorced from morality, because ChAoS-resistance itself is not the same thing as morality. Even considering that Chaotic (alignment) characters become corrupted more quickly, it's not good logic. It's like saying, "Being old makes you more vulnerable to heart disease. A poor diet also makes you vulnerable to heart disease. Therefore, old people must have poor diets." Saying "ugly people are Chaotic" creates a logical link where there's no reason there should be one.

To make sense, a game mechanic like this has to have the causal links pointing the right way, or you're going to run smack into those unfortunate implications. Having a low Appearance is a handicap much like having a low Strength, but it really oughtn't to have anything to do with whether you're good or not.

[michailv]

Can't stop thinking of things, heh. Could take the suggested mechanics for Appearance and switch that to Charisma -- you become so confident in yourself, that you literally resist Chaos trying to change you.

Then, for Appearance, you could do some or all of this:

- combined with Charisma, higher App makes it possible to calm sentient creatures through conversation, or generate them as calm. Bonus if they match race, alignment, or class. This is great for everyone b/c you might get out of hard fights. Chaotics could use it to lure creatures into calmness in order to backstab.

- without influence of Ch, App could help you calm animals, which would be extra-helpful for the damn cat quest. Animals can't understand you, so it's all about how you carry yourself and how you look and smell to them.

- at high levels of App, creatures are sometimes distracted or mesmerized by you (I think someone may have suggested this already?)

- at high levels of App, when you take a step towards a hostile creature, there is a chance they will become afraid of you (imagine someone who is super intimidating physically, not necessarily because of huge muscles, but just because of they way they carry themselves)

Really, a lot of these could just as easily apply to Ch., but Ch. feels better to me for the Chaos Resistance, and the two can be combined for some. I imagine Ch is force of personality, and App is force of physical presence.

[Stingray1]

Remember, this is a fantasy game it must make as little sense as possible and be as unrealistic as possible.

[LFk]

make Ap: more important by pumping the 'shattering mirror' room effect

Yes. I say the shattering mirrors instakills you if your Ap is too low. That'll teach you for being ugly.

Ap becomes potentially game-changing stat? Check.

Done.