It also (thankfully) left Paizo's game as of Pathfinder 2:After 13 pages of arguments I still have a gut reaction to tying Charisma to appearance... It's just gross and unnecessary. I'm glad it left the game in 4e and I don't ever want it back.
It's almost as if designers removed this ugly aspect of charisma from the description on purpose.
More evidence that objections here have very little to do with practical reality and measurable behavior, and much more to do with wishful thinking and changing social mores. Verisimilitude be darned!
potentially tied to appearance, if the player wants it to be. We know that's a thing in real life, so no number of counter-examples will disprove it.
Let's look for more evidence that Charisma should be tied to appearance... Let's see, Night Hags have 16 Charisma:
View attachment 274735
Ah yes, famous beauties.
Charisma = appearance makes as much sense as a chainmail bikini, and belongs in the same trash bin. Nothing said in this thread so far has changed my mind. You can blame "social mores" if you want, but personally I blame "cutting out dumb stuff" as the game changes over editions.
Let's look for more evidence that Charisma should be tied to appearance...
XP for effort. But here's the thing: ability scores are objective. Beauty isn't. And the last bullet point here reinforces that; all theseThere you go. Charisma should include beauty. It's just a beauty we have a hard time wrapping our head around.
- D&D, being a different universe, must have created a different norm for beauty. I mean, if you have elephant people, turtle people, cat people, dragon people, merfolk people, silver skinned people, orange skinned people, green skinned people, robot people, demon people, devil people, bearded women, etc. AND, all these people manage to live together, side by side, with nary a remark about how ugly the others are, then it stands to reason that they have a universal definition of beauty. One that translates across species. Of all the adventure paths and NPCs created by WotC, there is never a character that spouts stuff like: "Those dwarven women are hideous. Kissin' a scratchy beard - gross!" Never a disparaging remark about tails, horns, scales, or cloven feet. So they must have a universal view of beauty. Which, in my opinion, sounds kind of nice.
That sounds complicated.
