The Ugliness Of Comeliness

From Dragon Magazine, issue #67:

Frank Mentzer and Francois Marcela-Froideval are already hard at work, and I am being flooded with suggestions and ideas from these Good Gentlemen. Francois uses a "Beauty" attribute for his characters, and I have come to the conclusion that you might also like to use such a rating. Here are my thoughts...

E. Gary Gygax, November 1982

Oh, man...my urge to say something snarky regarding "the French" is nearly overwhelming.  However, Monsieur Marcela-Froideval was an important figure in introducing Dungeons & Dragons...and the general role-playing hobby...to French speakers through the Casus Belli magazine (reviews and translations of which can be found over on Prince of Nothing's blog), and that alone is worthy of my respect.  But, yeah, trust a Frenchman to come to the conclusion that a "beauty" attribute was needed in his fantasy game.

Gygax, though, should've known better.

Instead, his "thoughts" on the a beauty attribute led to the creation of a new, seventh ability score called comeliness, made official with the advent of the Unearthed Arcana. Comeliness appeared in the UA pretty much exactly as presented in Dragon, save that the effect of high level magical scores provided an effect similar to the new 2nd level illusionist spell fascinate (in the original Dragon article, Gygax lists the effect as similar to charm person). For those who've never heard of this new ability score, I'll note that it never appears in any other edition of D&D...the shelf life of this 'wonderful addition' lasted all of  four years in "officialdom."

To understand why I am so sour on comeliness, I need to first explain why I rather LOVE the charisma ability score. Charisma, while an abstract attribute, is still an excellent way to measure an very real trait possessed by real life humans.  We see examples of people with (and without) "charisma" all the time: it is that "likeability" factor, that je ne sais quoi, that "star power" that some people possess...and that others don't. It is one of those "intangibles" that coaches of pro-sports teams talk about particular players having...or lacking. It is not dependent on good looks...it is not dependent on talent. It is something else that some people have in greater measure than others...though it is impossible to measure.

The D&D game provides the mechanics needed to measure it with the charisma attribute. Mechanically, it impacts reaction rolls, loyalty, and morale of one's followers...all things that you want and need to measure in a fantasy adventure game. Remember that D&D did not come out of the tradition of the lone, cinematic hero-guy/gal, taking on the army of baddies single-handedly.  It was a game created by and for war gamers who had grown up reading adventure fiction that dealt with leaders of men and methods of outfitting and leading others into unknown dangers. Bob Howard's stories are filled with these forceful personalities (Conan is always at the head of some group of pirates or barbarians or mercenaries...and neither Belit nor Sonya of Rogatino are shown as slouches in the leadership department), and the Lord of the Rings books...an obvious inspiration for fantasy war-gaming...have plenty of "charisma" examples from Aragorn who is portrayed as "fair though appearing foul."

The charisma ability is plenty efficient in providing for the mechanical needs of the game, i.e. how one interacts with (potentially) friendly NPCs, and how one attracts (and retains) followers and henchmen. A character can have whatever appearance the player wants them to have...the handsome assassin with the charisma of 7 is still going to be off-putting and nasty, while the grizzled paladin has that "air about him" that puts folks at ease and makes them want to fight by his side.

*sigh* I could (and someday should) wax on about charisma, and how it impacts the game by the character classes that have high charismas...whether due to minimum requirements (druids, paladins, and bards) or for those choosing NOT to use the ability as a "dump stat" (say, fighters, magic-users, and thieves).  But enough digression...this post is about lambasting comeliness, not lauding comeliness.

In the campaigns of my youth, we of course used comeliness. My long-run PC had a comeliness stat even before I'd laid eyes on the Unearthed Arcana. I'll relate the anecdote from my personal history for the sake of posterity:  my best friend and co-DM, Jocelyn, called me up one afternoon in the summer of 1985; I was in my kitchen, my parents (probably) both at work.  She told me (excitedly): hey, I need you to roll a D20. What for? I said. I'll tell you afterwards, said she. So I ran to my room (because my telephone was on a cord, naturally...this was '85), and returned to the kitchen, diligently rolling the D20 on the kitchen counter, with zero idea the reason.

The die roll came up a "1." Since this was possibly some sort of saving throw, I re-rolled rather than tell my DM the result (sue me...I was 12 years old at the time), and the die came up a 20. "20," I said (figuring this was a great number). No, that won't work, she said...you have to re-roll. Now I was wondering if I should have gone with the "1."  But I rolled again, as instructed, and the die roll came up an 18. "18," I said. Okay, you have a comeliness score of 18, she told me. "What the heck is that?"

You see, Jocelyn was often the first one of our group to pick up the new book or adventure module...she had a lot of ready spending cash (care of her family), and easy access to a nearby (large) bookstore. So she had picked up the new Unearthed Arcana (before any of the other members of our group had even heard it existed) and was making sure all our regular characters had the new comeliness score duly recorded. Rather than clue us in to what we were rolling (by having us roll 3d6) she was having us roll D20s and only taking numbers that fell between 3 and 18 (us kids having little concept of "bell curves" at the time, having skipped over that boring section of the DMG).

So, for most of my 1E career in my youth, I was playing a half-elf bard with an 18 charisma and a 21 comeliness, a character who could easily fascinate any female character he met unless they possessed a wisdom score of 15+. One can imagine how that went. 

[we had far more "urban" adventures than dungeon]

But without going into the sordid details (which, one could argue, detracted from the overall gameplay), I will point out that plenty of other PCs in the game had outrageously high scores, and not just from "mystery D20 rolls." It wasn't long before ALL of us regular players (Jocelyn, Scott, Matt, and I) had our own copies of the UA, and we all incorporated comeliness as part of our standard chargen process. And being adolescents, comeliness scores became very important. 

To the point that we stopped seeing certain types of characters. Gone were dwarves, gnomes, and half-orcs. Halflings only appeared as NPC henchfolk (or the occasional thief-acrobat) and were generally considered "comic relief." Most characters were in the high teens for their COM score...a lot of elves and half-elves. My character didn't even have the highest score...one PC had a 22 comeliness. And these weren't even results from fudging dice rolls (though I would not be surprised if some were...); rather, characters with low comeliness scores would be deemed as unplayable.  No teenage kid wanted to play a character that was "plain to average" in looks...let alone "homely" or "simply ugly." Regardless of the player's own self-esteem, the teasing was merciless.

And consider that we were playing D&D as it was originally meant to be played. That is, we were not doing the "new school" thing of portraying some "character" with their tragic backstory of needing to overcome being the Ugly Duckling or whatever. For us, we were exploring the D&D game world and the character was only our vehicle...so if the character was ugly then WE were ugly.  Why would anyone want to embody that?  We were playing escapist fantasy not because we wanted to pretend to be something we were not...we were playing escapist fantasy because we wanted to do things we couldn't do in real life: Cast spells. Fight monsters with swords. Climb sheer cliffs. Etc.  No one wanted to be judged (negatively) on their looks. Shit...we could get that in our normal, daily life!

Using comeliness in-play...and especially high comeliness with its mechanical effects...led to the game becoming different. No longer was Charisma a wonderful stat for modeling "leaders of men" and "commanding presence." Instead, when interacting with NPCs (and with other PCs!) we were more concerned with that O So Important first impression...and just how much mileage one could get out of manipulating someone before the comeliness effect wore off.  It became, in fact, a method of PVP for the players at the table, a weapon to be wielded both directly and indirectly (through the ability to influence NPCs)...a method of 'one-upping' other players, promoting rivalries, creating resentments, grudges, and hurt feelings.

Comeliness contributed to the decline and eventual death of our campaign.

Yeah, that probably sounds overly dramatic...and probably is (I am writing of events that occurred some 30+ years ago). Definitely it was more than just "comeliness" that led to the breakdown of that first, long-running game of AD&D between me and the friends of my youth. However, let me add one more anecdote from my history:  after my gaming group broke up (shortly after we'd all entered high schools), I got the urge to play D&D again...probably around my sophomore or junior year of high school. And I started a new 1E campaign, running a game for my brother and a couple of his friends.  It lasted a few months...long enough for the PCs to get up to level 12 or thereabouts (we were doing the Giants-series when we all lost interest or got too busy to continue). But we didn't use comeliness in that game at all. In fact, I'm not sure I allowed ANY of the UA rules for that campaign...though I might be misremembering.

Anyway.

Regardless of what I may or may not incorporate from the rest of the Unearthed Arcana, I have long since determined that comeliness is NOT an ability score I want in my game. If I want a handsome prince or beautiful princess in my game, I'll put them in without any such score. If I want a more "fairytale feel" to the campaign, I'll link their outward beauty to their inherent Charisma; if I want something more "true to life," I won't. But I really don't see any benefit to including an objective measurable stat for how pleasant or unpleasant a person appears.

This is a funny illo, though.

Besides...isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? Just because Gimli has a thing for ancient elf queens, doesn't mean most dwarves wouldn't prefer dwarvish women, right? Wouldn't a halfling be a bit off-put by the sheer size of a human? Why one stat, one scale, for all species? That's not how the biology of species works...a cat doesn't eye-up a good-looking dog. Jeez.

Comeliness...out.