I was thinking about the idea of character appearance and how attributes factor into that, and was wondering if anyone had any ideas for generating stats based on appearance, as opposed to using the attributes to figure out character appearance. Basically I'm wondering if it might be possible to create tables similar to (I'm sorry, but with my book stolen, I can't reference the exact page/table number) the optional ones for using your physical attributes for determining hieght, weight and build. That way, if a player has an image in his mind of what his character looks like, his Seneschal could let him use to the table to figure out likely attribute ranges. This is only likely to work for temporal attributes, but could be a help to people (like me) who have difficulty going from the image in their head to placing the attributes to a priority. And it may serve to reinforce the idea of character concept over numbers.

I would only encourage this idea as an optional system, but I do think some would enjoy it.

On a completely different note, have any fans of The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind tried creating such characters in TROS? That series has a great deal of the feel that I associate with TROS--passion, conscience, destiny, free will, and the hard choices that ensue when when these come into conflict with each other. But it also has some nice action scenes!

Be well all
Lucien

do it by lookin at stats...you have a social attribute....so add like str+ health+toughness+social

and like divide by 3 or 4....
just an idea

i would definately make it a derived attribute though

I think what Lucien means is basically a reverse engineering of the tables in the book (I'm at school, and don't have my book with me either). Something like:

Player: I want my character to be about 6' tall, but thin, maybe weighing about 150 lbs.

Seneschal: (consults table) Hm. He'd likely have a ST/TO/EN/Etc. in the range of....

Player: Cool. (proceeds to make the character match the mental image)

Wolfen, that's exactly what I mean. Sorry all if I wasn't very clear (it was late when I posted).

Lucien

oh.. i figured you just wanted another stat...lol