basic PC description?

[Sorrowful Sonata]

If you really care what they look like when they have no description, just blatantly walk up to them and say "What do you look like?"

[Jayde Moon]

Chances are, if you're ugly, you're speaking with a lot of abbreviations and saying feck at every opportunity, and if you're pretty you're well spoken. Rule 1 of roleplaying looks-to-talks-ratio.

Pretty one dimensional view of the Charisma stat.

Once upon a time, they had it split into two scores, Charisma and Comeliness (Attractiveness).  So you could have an 18 Cha and a 5 Comeliness or vice verrsa.

This could represent grizzled and scarred, gruff and blunt war veterans who had the ability to inspire bravery and lead troops to victory or supermodels who were uber snooty and came off as airheads.

Now we just have Cha, which a lot of people focus on mostly what it means for their 'looks'.

However, Cha is supposed to be an amalgamation of looks and personality.  It is te OVERALL score of your 'impression'.  I submit that you can have a 12 Cha and decide your PC is beautiful (15 Cha equivalent), but tactless and uncaring of others around them to the point where everyone no one really likes them, aside from the physical attractiveness (9 Cha acquivalent 'friendliness'/'leadership').  All balances out.

Point is that well mannered doesn't equal attractive and uncouth doesn't equal ugly.

When you throw in that a lot of people base how they speak on their intelligence scores as opposed to their charisma scores, this makes it more so.

If you really care what they look like when they have no description, just blatantly walk up to them and say "What do you look like?"

That's ridiculously OOC.  How often do you need to walk up to anyone you pass by on the street to ask them what they look like?

I suppose you could send them a PM.  And you know what, if it REALLY matters, you probably would.  But it would only really matter if you were RPing with them and wanted to get things straight.

But if you don't have a reason to really want to know, then you probably aren't going to look any harder than clicking examine on them.

If they don't have a description that stands out and my PC doesn't have another reason to speak with them, then no RP will happen.

Back to square one.

[Thomas_Not_very_wise]

This is still going on?

Wow.

[MrGrendel]

If I thought it were worth the DMs time, I'd suggest altering the deity-setting script to a convo that pops up before you enter EfUA from the new character area, that gives you a little newbie-oriented heads up on RP servers, and maybe lets you choose a few things such as eye color, height, body type, age if you haven't actually set a description yet.
 
Edit: I mean, some RPers do pay attention to these details, and the more interaction with RPers we can get a new player, the more likely they'll enjoy themselves and stick around, right?

[LackofCertainty]

Just to throw it out there, I personally have gotten a lot of rp with my new character, just from writing  -one- sentence about my character's physical appearance, and -one- sentence  ( it's a long one, I'll admit ;))about a pendant she carries.

Granted, I could probably get the same effect if I just went everywhere emoting, *Pauses, taking a moment to shake her hair about in the wind and generally look smexy* or *One -again- pulls out her two sided pendant which features a golden heart on one side and the face of a beautiful red head on the other*  But personally, I'd rather just toss that in my description instead of emoting it -every- -freaking- time.  On the other hand, a person only needs to read/be told what you look like once generally, and then after that they have a mental image.

If you want people to get a nice little overview of what you look like, throw it in your description.  If not, or if you're uncomfortable with writing, don't.  I've never decided not to roleplay with someone over something as frivolous as a description, but on the other hand it provides a nice jumping in point.

[MrGrendel]

Yeah LoC. It can make a great "conversation starter" if you have something unique in there. That's definitely better than just "brown eyes, fat," too, though I'm of the opinion that something is still better than nothing. :)

[Mort]

What we could do is add a fork that checks if the PC has a description and probe a question -- "Your PC has the default or your PC has a blank description, most players in this gameworld use the description information as a mean to understand what your character looks like. Blank descriptions could lead to mean mean elitists ignoring your character."

The last sentence aside, maybe this could be useful, but the deity check is there and there are still a lot of people walking around faithless or with a blank in their deity field.

Most of the time, these players are new and making a PC that they didn't put a lot of effort in just to learn the gameworld and see if it interests them. Talk about receiving a bad impression if everyone ignores you. I hope some players are talking to these PCs and trying to involve them still :(