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TinyHowie wrote:

You know.... artwork is just that, artwork. When I play my characters, I don't cut my PHB and stick the arts on my character sheets. You can freely describe however you want your character looks like, nobody said your character must look like what the book shows. If that's how your DM rules, find a new one.

No offense but you are not the norm, and were not the demographic I was referring to.

When you take the community as a whole, kids included, I would presume that about 70% (a majority) practice a "beauty is skin deep" approach. They are going to look for pictures of the races, and based off those pictures decide weather or not to play that race. Now, they can get those pictures from where ever they choose but most are not going to continue looking if the official canon pictures represent something they have no interest in playing or something they find repulsive. If the canon pictures make the grade then they will tweak from there.

A clear example of this is the half-orc, look around on the boards it is abound with ignorant posts about how all half-orcs are ugly and dumb despite the fact that they can have stats up to 16 in both Int and Cha which I would bet pennies to the dollar is at least 5 points better then the real life stats of those making the arguement. If they are calling something prettier then them ugly, what does that make them? Now there are several pictures of good-looking half-orcs but not in the rule book, so where are these people getting this impression from?

Some people love bearded dwarven ladies, some people love boob'd reptiles, some people love to dress up in bugs bunny costumes and have inappropriate relations with elmer fudd. To each their own, but in business you have to cater to the majority and let the deviants tweak from there.

fodigg wrote:

Did you know that 93% of all statistics are made up on-the-spot?

I used the % to show a majority, not as a factual number, hence the word presume. :D

akodo wrote:

It seems like every book, even video game manuals, has the basic picture of one specimine of each gender from every race, all lined up together for comparison.

Well, my humans often look much different than the one pictured generic human. And real humans have a huge amount of variability, if the aliens look at the picture of the two humans engraved onto the Voyager prope, and then look at Yau Ming and Vern Troyer, they might conclude that those two specimines are not human but some other related species.

I wish that for every race they had an artist do a picture of muliple species of that race. It could be a picture of a Dwarven Wedding, so you can see grampa and gramma dwarf, hot 20 year old bride dwarf, fat cousin bridesmade dwarf, extramanly strong cousin bridesmade dwarf, momma dwarf and aunt betty dwarf, and similarly 5-6 male dwarves of varying build and age. Do a group-themed picture for every race, show us average and extremes.

While we don't paste PHB pictures on our characters, we do tend to pick hights within the prescribed range, and we do seem to take some picture as a starting point to extrapolate from. Having more examples further from average would IMHO give players a bit of a running start for invisioning something quite different.

I wanna see this picture now. Any fanartists wanna take up this idea, please?