All of my (adult) female characters are at least moderately attractive. All of my male characters are grizzled, rogue looking types—unless they're meant to be weak or immoral, in which case they're pretty boys. These aren't rules for me, it's just how things usually end up.

Personality is what is attractive to me. So yes, wholeheartedly.

But if I have to find a faceclaim for a chara with an attractive personality, then I'll pick one that's attractive.

(Not conventionally attractive, though. They're all offbeat and angular and probably androgynous.)

Really depends on the character, usually I don't play supermodels, If my character is attractive it will be due to either magic or technology and even then it usually wont be the kind of attractive most people think of.

I like to give my characters one weird "defining trait". They usually end up attractive, though.

But hey, there are times when the GM only allows you to use anime drawings as face claim and then every single anime drawing you see on the internet depicts somebody who is either awfully cute or smoking hot.

And then you swear to yourself, "Dammit, he was supposed to have some wrinkles!".

I usually go with the cute pictures, though. Who wouldn't? :3

The above is why I dislike anime-based character images for characters, simply because of the lack of anything that isn't pretty... like, no, sometimes you get old, not-so-beautiful people in the world >.>

...Especially when I like to play characters to counter the massive quantity of semi-perfects and attractive individuals. >.>

Well, my dracon characters (draconic humanoids) are fairly attractive for their species, but this is due to their role as an artificial race in-universe. They were made with the features that most nearly conform to the biological basis for beauty: strong males and fertile females. Like it or not, those two visible qualities are what most directly drive our sense of beauty, especially for females. This is why things like the body parts which indicate the ability to bear and feed children are so attractive for humans, as well as visible indications that a woman is not currently pregnant. Call it old-fashioned, but that's how and why it works. Natural selection and all that. Even if a species was artificially created, it would have been made at some point by a species which emerged naturally and evolved expectations of beauty driven by its biology.

Simple question, but one I've been mulling for a bit now. How important is the attractiveness of your characters to you? When looking for pictures of them do you look for ones that are attractive looking? Do you go digging for male or female models? Or do you just find one that fits the setting rather than how they look?

I try to fit the setting. When I do go for sexy face claims, it's usually for evil characters. Sexy is dangerous yo.

What about when writing out a description of their appearance, do you describe them with attractive features or even write out that'd they'd be considered 'good looking'?

For me, it's more about standing out than looking hot/ugly. I joined a post apocalyptic space RP with a girl that wanted to be a movie star. She was of course a hot blond who wore extremely loud outfits. In that setting, there was no one even close to that character. In an epic medieval setting, I had a young woman with a scar on her face surrounded by a bunch of handsome older men. I never said she was beautiful, but one of the other player characters tried to draw a picture of her naked. But the character in question was a cave hermit, so he might have just been desperate.

Attractiveness is slippery. I'd probably say all my characters are attractive, but none of them are specifically mentioned as such, or really described in enough detail to fit or elude the conventional standards of beauty.

I've only come back to human (-ish) characters recently and I've tried to keep them all mixed up. There's a muscular ginger tomboy, a chubby black teenager, an ungainly-tall Indonesian lady, and from earlier games I have a heavily-scarred indigenous Australian girl and a nondescript Japanese-Slavic kid.

Despite all that though I think I've tended away from describing features at all. Hair/skin colour, body type, any unusual features (tattoos, scars, implants), and beyond that it's just clothes and how they carry themselves.

Honestly, very rarely. I don't really like the romance genre or subplots in my writing, so the beautiful people don't have much a place. :I

And I sort of have most good looking people to be evil/assholes. Oh no, I'm part of a the problem. D: (though I just write psychopaths more often than not anyway.)

I don't pick characters on if they are attractive or not, it is if they feel right. You can look through my CS's and see many attractive people but I did not do it on a conscious level.

^

In some genres/media of RP it's kind of necessary, too, I'll add.

If you play females in anime/manga-tagged games then I defy you to find an ugly one, or even a plain one. Unless you're playing a cartoonishly gross character like the Witch of the Wastes, you basically can't. There is a middle-ground between "drop-dead gorgeous" and "a hopelessly hideous hag," but it's slim as fuck, and even then, in all of these cases their ugliness is a defining aspect of their characters, so it's not like they're ever ugly incidentally.

I have a lot of difficulty making a character without an image to use for their appearance. Besides the concept, finding a suitable image will be one of the first things I do. The problem with this is that I'm extremely particular with what the image must be, but at the same time not sure what it is until I see it. This results in large amounts of time spent looking for that one image. Simply because there are more images of attractive people on the internet, it is more likely that a given character of mine will be attractive than unattractive.

Different people have different ideas on what is "attractive." When I use text descriptions, I totally don't mention if they're attractive at all, since it's p dumb to do so.

Different people have different ideas on what is "attractive." When I use text descriptions, I totally don't mention if they're attractive at all, since it's p dumb to do so.

This. My characters are attractive to me, sure, but that doesn't mean they're attractive to other players/characters.

Hmm. Not really, but they always seem to be coded as attractive by the other RPers I'm writing with? Maybe they based off the personality, or the way people react to that person. Regarding physicality... I do know someone whose every female OC was a big-breasted, gorgeous bombshell (YES, the redundancy is deliberate) so that's his preference.

I haven't ever used RL pics for my RPs, so when I do tend to scour for art I try to find drawings that are vague so I have room to describe my characters. (I pick a pic then build off from there until they're barely the same people lmao; though only through writing descriptions- art coloring/tampering is bad, people!!!)

Right now, one of my ladies has that type of picture, but for me she's average. IRL I grew up around physically subpar or average people, and I've seen how certain attitudes/quirks can make them shine so much more... So yeah, I don't place much value on attractiveness in an OC, since you can give them a presence that comes from a source other than their face or abs.

...though only through writing descriptions- art coloring/tampering is bad, people!!!

This is not the first time I've seen a comment like this, But I still don't understand it. I know some artists would frown upon someone taking their work and editing it. But those same artists are usually rather adamant about having their work posted anywhere by someone that isn't them. I'm genuinely curious where the extra harm comes from.

@BrokenPromise I'd hate to derail the topic but, that was a sentiment one of my artist friends made when I asked her about the ethics of recoloring. As for me, I usually source from Pinterest (which is widely regarded as an a-ok place and it's safe to assume works have been posted with consent) or link out instead of re-uploading. I guess it's a case of "don't add more sins to the ones you've already made"? At least that's how I see it. Sorry for typos, on mobile atm.

<Snipped quote by Orpheus>

This is not the first time I've seen a comment like this, But I still don't understand it. I know some artists would frown upon someone taking their work and editing it. But those same artists are usually rather adamant about having their work posted anywhere by someone that isn't them. I'm genuinely curious where the extra harm comes from.

So I used to help out on a graphics forum and occasionally we would have the odd person that would use an image where the original artist would show up and complain about the edits. After all this time — talking like 7 or 8 years of seeing images being tampered with — I have yet to see anyone cop any serious consequences. The images aren't being sold and they are only being used as character inspirations for a hobby writing site.

But really, if anyone did show up here claiming their artwork was stolen then they really don't have much to do in their life. They're not going to honestly get money out of the user, moderators can't exactly edit posts to remove the images, and if they start harassing users we'll refer them to the rules. It's their choice to put the image up on the web without watermarks and imagery locks (see deviantART, Shutterstock, and iStock), so until they do that people will keep on editing images for their make-believe characters 'til the end of time.

I once made my character's faceclaim papa franku so I'm afraid that yes, my characters are very, very sexy.