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[nanomage]

Hi friends!

I would like to suggest that every race had certain standards for physical beauty - body proportions, facial features and tissue layer thickness proportions, which are considered the best, and every individual of the race was assigned a "beauty" score based on how close his or her body is to the perceived ideal. Perhaps perception could vary among the members of the race in a way similar to how individual values can vary from racial values now.
Beauty score could have effects resulting in particularly handsome dwarf be universally desired as a friend and lover by the other sex, or in ugly dwarves provoking grudge relationships more easily, or maybe for now it could just be there for us to see and know that this moderately fat and wide dwarf with fused earlobes and widely-set thin brass-colored eyes is seen as beeing extraordinarily beautiful by the standards of her race.

[Dirst]

This is actually simpler than it sounds.

Large-sample surveys find that features close to the population average will rank highest on appearance, although there's no predicting what a particular person will find attractive.

So a very simple mechanic would be to calculate a deviation score measuring how far off from population-average one's attributes are using the sum of all ((attribute - average)^2 * APP_MOD_APPEARANCE) scores and scaling it to something reasonable.  If you showed pictures of these people to a large group, the average rating for attractiveness would be highest for the picture with the lowest deviation score.

Fortunately, the specific bodyparts for which individual tastes vary the most are abstracted away in DF.

Note that cross-species attractiveness would be based on the population average of the viewer.

[GavJ]

Beauty score could have effects resulting in particularly handsome dwarf be universally desired as a friend and lover by the other sex

I was with you until you implied that ONLY looks be used for desire as a friend and lover.

Notsomuch. We already have personality traits coded into dwarves, you know... But this would be a good contributing factor.

[nanomage]

umh yeah sure i meant to be but one of contributing factors, though a major one. sorry if I was unclear. I'm no native speaker so subtleties of your language often elude me!

[GavJ]

Sounds great then!

[Deboche]

Note that cross-species attractiveness would be based on the population average of the viewer.

Yes, some dwarves or elves would be not so attractive to their own kind but atractive to humans because they resemble humans more, for example. And an elf that looks attractive to a dwarf or vice-versa would be a rare thing.

[Lukeinator]

The standards should be definable in ENTITY.txt

[GoblinCookie]

This is really not very profitable until the general love/marriage system is revamped. 

There appears to be a civilization average person so it should not be hard to track how much a person deviates from the average person or vice versa.  The problem comes from immigrants from other civilizations, how are they tracked.  How do we work with races that do not have the same attributes as humans? 

Especially things like animal people?

[Dirst]

This is really not very profitable until the general love/marriage system is revamped. 

There appears to be a civilization average person so it should not be hard to track how much a person deviates from the average person or vice versa.  The problem comes from immigrants from other civilizations, how are they tracked.  How do we work with races that do not have the same attributes as humans? 

Especially things like animal people?

That's a tough one, since assuming "average" for all missing attributes will make them more attractive than the members of one's own race.  "Well, yes, Sven is handsome but did you get a load of that Sponge Man over there?!"

The simplest thing would be to reduce the weight of attractiveness in social situations in proportion to how many attributes are missing.  Maybe even overweight the missing ones so that very different races can't be too pretty or ugly to one another, instead relying more heavily on ethics and values and such.

[GoblinCookie]

That's a tough one, since assuming "average" for all missing attributes will make them more attractive than the members of one's own race.  "Well, yes, Sven is handsome but did you get a load of that Sponge Man over there?!"

The simplest thing would be to reduce the weight of attractiveness in social situations in proportion to how many attributes are missing.  Maybe even overweight the missing ones so that very different races can't be too pretty or ugly to one another, instead relying more heavily on ethics and values and such.

The other issue is when the opposite to the average is attractive, which is that the exotic is attractive (up to a point).

An elf, dwarf or goblin might be considered more attractive to a human than an average human but Sponge Man is likely to be found attractive.

What we could do is subtract attractiveness for missing attributes but add attractiveness for attributes that are alien to the culture. 

[MDFification]

[ATTRACTIVENESS:BEARD:100]

[Dirst]

[ATTRACTIVENESS:BEARD:100]

We already have the APP_MOD_APPEARANCE numbers that weight how obvious a trait is, and remember it is the viewer's APP_MOD_APPEARANCE numbers that count here.

Rather than come up with convoluted rules for dealing with missing modifiers, it might be easier just to have a draconian default behavior and just add all of the modifiers to every civilized race.

[GoblinCookie]

We already have the APP_MOD_APPEARANCE numbers that weight how obvious a trait is, and remember it is the viewer's APP_MOD_APPEARANCE numbers that count here.

Rather than come up with convoluted rules for dealing with missing modifiers, it might be easier just to have a draconian default behavior and just add all of the modifiers to every civilized race.

It would have to be every race not every civilized race, since animal man outcasts can become part of human towns. 

As I understand then we give each civilization an ideal amount of every trait in existance that clusters around that civilization's golden mean for people of it's own race (race in the non-fantasy sense).  If the trait is not present in their own race but found in another fantasy-race, then they prefer those who are simply the absolute golden mean. 

So non-goblin civs consider the absolute medium green skin as the base for randomization.  Goblin civs on the other hand take their own average skin-tone as the base.

Another idea to add is the possibility that only some traits would actually count.  Some traits would be ignored, while others would be valued on the basis of exotic rather than average beauty perhaps. 

[Chevaleresse]

Attraction/repulsion based on traits further from the mean could be controlled via personality traits, too. "Urist almost exclusively prefers/strongly prefers/cares little about/has a distaste for/is repulsed by exotic features."

[nanomage]

I would like to throw in the idea that seems to have been overlooked in this discussion:
beauty scores should be reasonably biased to favor young and young-looking individuals. Stuff like solid and bright hair color, smooth skin and slender body should be valued more because they indicate youth and youth is intuitively associated with health and fertility. This way, we can introduce stuff like pretty girls being,well, pretty, and more exotic features like humans liking elves because elves look like adolescent humans.