I like some of the ideas in here somewhat
...
I don't really like the freestyle descriptions for reasons mentioned above - people can for example add scars etc. when they didn't even fight. And a PD checking all these descriptions is too much work and the PD cannot see what happened in the lives of those that are described to be able to judge the quality of the text.
Also changing seems awkward - someone looks don't suddenly change. It would seem unfair if one could become a better criminal simply by changing the looks when changing the name.
It also doesn't quite fit too well with the overal system where everything physical is programmed into the system and everything social is left to the players. Looks are partly social, but partly physical. I like for example the idea of scars, but only when they are the automatic result of animal attacks, not when they are just written into the game by players. Similar with things like dying your hair - a nice feature indeed, but it should require paint which should then be a tradable resource in the game, not just some imaginative writing of the character description.
Finally, we currently have genes in the game. At the moment they only determine the skills of a character, but I would like to see this develop further so that gradually (admittedly *very* gradually) different races or at least typical looks for areas will come into existence. This requires that looks are assigned by the genes, not by the player.
This all said, I do agree that the game would become more interesting if people had a better idea of what other characters look like. I am playing another more graphical game that is slightly similar to Cantr (see thread about other games) and there you do have a visual avater, which greatly adds to the impression you have of a character, independent of their behaviour. I must add, though, that behaviour is also much less interesting than in Cantr, so that you get little of an impression on behaviour only, while you definitely do in Cantr. I would like it a lot of somewhat more information about characters would be visible. This should be based on genes, however, and on specific settings in the game (e.g. eye colour, hair colour, length, weight, etc. - things like that), not on a freestyle description.
Of course, players that have long played a character do not suddenly want to find their character to look completely different than they imagined. Therefor, a good strategy could be that all existing players get 2 weeks time to define manually the looks of their characters and after these two weeks all 'blanks' will be filled in and new characters will get their looks only through genes (hence 'random').
By having it defined in this way, it will also be better possible to have effects in the game due to looks. E.g. more sunburn for whiter people, or fat people behing heavier to drag, or tall people walking slightly faster - whatever. (I'm just making these up right now, they're not 'promises'
...) It also allows for slightly more flexibility if we later change to a more graphical representation of these looks, as these looks can be directly translated by the computer into a graphical avater.
It would be really cool if attacks could lead to scars, or perhaps even handicaps etc. That would be a step further and not necessarily immediately implemented, but it would definitely be an interesting addition.
Of course, as always, a crucial problem is lack of time among the programmers
... But there are still people applying for this dept, so perhaps we can get some things going in the future.
I'd be interested in comments
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(OMG this sounds like phone sex.) Not to mention the annoyance of having to tell every new person you run into "I've got blond hair, blue eyes, and a beer gut."
