Whispers of a New Module

What about a quest where you have to use your beauty and charm to influence a rich Elf who is only interested in beautiful girls or men to get important inside information (like Mata Hari)? Or a beauty contest where you could win an important magic item?

 

I feel that Beauty represents only physical attractiveness and that effecting trustworthiness is more of a feat of Charisma.

Arthgon has some good, quest-specific suggestions, but I think that Beauty could have a constant, realistic, and passive effect on the entire game. One's Beauty could impact whether or not an NPC will talk to the character at all. Just as IRL, the average person might be inclined to dismiss or ignore an unattractive person if there is no gain in talking to him. In terms of game mechanics, I would also suggest that an NPC of high Wisdom would be able to look beyond a low Beauty and would thus have a lower Beauty threshold for characters with whom he is willing to converse. Shopkeepers might be exempt of the Beauty threshold rule because it is bad business to ignore ugly customers.

 

Davis, that's certainly one approach, but I'm iffy about implementing it that way. Having played through Arcanum as a stupid character (which was a great and hilarious playthrough apart from this one problem), I feel it's kind of frustrating to have certain conversations and quests locked off entirely because of having too low a stat... for a few quests, I could see it, but having a beauty threshold for people to even -talk- to you seems a bit harsh.

Arthgon, my issue with having a handful of beauty-related quests is the opposite - noone has any reason to take beauty -at all- except for that handful of quests. It's still a dump stat if you don't care about those quests, or a raise-to-this-minimum if you do. I'm hoping to find an approach that will elevate it out of dump stat to the position of generally useful, but there doesn't seem to be a good way - except for Davis' approach, which almost seems too restrictive.

Although we -could- make it so most people have a relatively low Beauty threshold, and others are just more shallow... and perhaps have higher thresholds in populated cities than in rural areas... hrrrm. Davis, your idea may be what I was looking for after all, depending on how we balance peoples' shallowness.

 

Thinking a bit more on this, any stat can become a dump stat, depending upon play style. For example, Strength became my dump stat because my character pursued Intelligence, Dexterity, and Charisma. I did occasionally increase my Strength to wield a new weapon. Because I didn't care about wielding the heaviest weapon, this wasn't a big deal to me. If I want to experience everything the game has to offer, it's going to require another playthrough in which Strength might be my character's focus.
Likewise, if you don't want to talk to everybody in the game in a particular palythrough, Beauty can be your dump stat. Perhaps your next character can play the quests one only acquires by attending the high society ball.

 

Makes perfect sense to me, Davis ^_^ I'm just trying to find a way to set it up so Beauty isn't everyone's dump stat, after all.

 

I find it ironic that both "beauty" and "dump" are being used in the same sentence.