While it may not be obvious from the typical fantasy art, ugly people probably still exist in most people's conception of d20 system fantasy worlds.
My question is... Why?
I know the baseline polymorph any object is vulnerable to dispel magic and true seeing, and it's unclear whether your children would still be ugly. Also, 8th-level spell slots are in short supply compared to the sheer volume of the peasantry.
But let's think for a moment.
I'm not sure how many people remember it, but there was a 3.0 campaign setting called Ghostwalk. In it was a spell called Sherem transformation (6th level, sorcerer/wizard, 1,000 gp emerald focus, 150 gp material component) that could grant an unborn child the ability to pick a feat at 1st level that would grant them extra sorcerer spells per day. That's a lot more impressive than "make sure the baby is not ugly."
So, d20 precedent exists for what most would call "positive eugenics" (as opposed to Hitlerian, kill-the-cripples-before-they-spawn "negative eugenics," which is EVIL. Obviously).
And even in Pathfinder core, there is support for items and effects that can cause biological alterations as extreme as complete gender inversion, whose effects are completely indistinguishable from mundane biological processes by even the most powerful magic. Not to mention what effect reading a manual of gainful exercise +5 and manual of bodily health +5 would have on the stereotypical fantasy "portly gentleman mayor."
Now in Golarion various evil entities (Lamashtu in particular) would devote as many resources as they could spare to spoiling this scheme. But other entities such as Shelyn and Calistria (for completely different reasons) would probably support it with equal fervor as long as the wizards weren't being jerks about it.
But in a campaign world where there isn't a god specifically dedicated to making all babies ugly, I find it difficult to believe that fat and ugly people would still exist, at least in a magocracy that's been around for a few centuries.
And on a related note, I find it very strange that fat, ugly, short, or physically unimposing wizards don't just make those problems go away. It wouldn't even need to be about vanity: appearing to possess physical vitality increases their potential power in social situations and makes them more intimidating to their foes.
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I have an answer for this but it's NSFW.
Money. The ugly are probably poor and can't afford to get pretty. It's one of the reasons why the "beautiful farmer's/baker's/miller's daughter" is a common fantasy element
I maintain that there's at least one wizard who hates ugliness with sufficient passion to be willing to do it for free, even if they have to take over a kingdom to do it.
I have an answer for this but it's NSFW.
Please tell.
It'd cost the kingdom a lot of money to make sure that their growing population has these expensive items when they could be spending it on actually important things. It also assumes that there is a high level caster in charge of a country that can craft these things. All of those things are very expensive.
I have an answer for this but it's NSFW.Please tell.
Yes, do. Put it in a spoiler marked NSFW if you must.
It'd cost the kingdom a lot of money to make sure that their growing population has these expensive items when they could be spending it on actually important things. It also assumes that there is a high level caster in charge of a country that can craft these things. All of those things are very expensive.
Well, the thing with a eugenics program is that once you've established a generation or two with the necessary traits, they will breed true. So it's more "Apollo program" expensive, rather than "Medicare expensive."
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Really what it comes down to is....people are weird.
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Here's a safe for work pic that appears to dovetail with what both myself and TarkXT was getting at:
People can look like that without benefit of magic. People will choose to look much weirder, and in much greater numbers if it could just *poof* be magically done (and undone).
Really what it comes down to is....people are weird.
** spoiler omitted **
In case anyone is wondering, it's just a comic strip. Not a shock image or weird RL site or anything. Though the character says things like "@$$nipples? Double your pleasure!" and there is a creature made entirely of male genitals in the last two panels, so yes, NSFW.
Also define beauty.
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This is usually what we see in science fiction. Once it becomes cheap and easy to modify your body, everyone starts doing it.
Once that happens, people may all be beautiful or at least interesting.
However, it also means there is no more selection for appearance. So people wouldn't be born with a base "attractive" appearance for their culture, since who cares?
Of course, in fiction, "Ugliness" only seems to be a component of main characters when it is for a specific reason, otherwise they are all good looking. Like the daily soap director said about Moe, "I meant TV ugly, not ugly ugly"
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In addition to other explanations mentioned, I would say that a lot of beauty is in how you carry yourself. I've seen some obese women who are absolutely stunning and women who closely conform to society's standard of beauty yet who seem repulsive. A person's personality, charisma, and confidence affect their physical attractiveness quite a bit.
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I maintain that there's at least one wizard who hates ugliness with sufficient passion to be willing to do it for free, even if they have to take over a kingdom to do it.
A few answers to that ... beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I have a thing for short, dark-haired women. I find the girl from the "What are you wearing, Jake from State Farm" commercial very attractive (she's in a bazillion other commercials too). Some people find Taylor Swift attractive and I don't at all.
Also, in the same vein as "Without evil there could be no good so it must be good to be evil sometimes" line of thought, without ugly, is there beauty? If everyone is beautiful, does that make no one beautiful? (it's the slippery slope that Buddy/Syndrome fell down in The Incredibles)
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If you use magic to change your appearance, nothing says that those changes become hereditary. Just like having plastic surgery doesn't change the genetics of your future babies.
Also, standards of beauty change over time. Look at art from hundreds of years ago - attractive people then would be considered overweight by today's standards.
In the real world "attractiveness" would certainly seem to be a value that is selected for - if it wasn't a moving target, we would have a situation where today's people are orders of magnitude more attractive than, say, ancient Romans.
I also agree with the money argument. People in the modern world can have their appearance modified with plastic surgery - so why doesn't everyone do it? Expense, and a lack of desire to do so. How many plastic surgeons are offering their services for free just to improve the world?
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Also, Shelyn probably WOULDN't go for the 'make all the babies physically pretty scheme' because while she is the Goddess of beauty, she's not the goddess of physical beauty, and her tenants actually make a point of 'it's what's inside that counts.'
In her eyes, the hunch-backed one toothed scraggle haired bag of wrinkles that bakes cookies for orphans and puppies is more beautiful than the flawless skinned golden haired perfect bodied princess that tells people their babies are too ugly.
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I don't believe in objective beauty, but there's something to be said for mad wizards who try anyway. It's a decent explanation why some races exist; what if elves weren't actually an ancient species, but the result of a wizard trying to perfect the human race? Faster, smarter, long-lived, but with some side effects, because it's not that easy to make something perfect.
Another thing: beauty is also a bit about being exceptional. If everyone was being beautiful in the same way, we'd consider that the normal look. Kind of like a bunch of celebrities all adopting the same botoxed look; they're just trying to achieve an aesthetic ideal, but it's not working out entirely that way.
Just to throw fuel on the fire, there was a spell in 2e that did gradual minor permanent physical changes. I don't remember if it was called FLeshsculpting or what. The showcase was a bard using it on this harpy child to over time remove the offensive harpy elements and transform her into a beautiful winged female whose appearance rather reflected her voice.
And with hats of appearance, altering your physical appearance isn't hard. Unless everyone walks around with true seeing and sees thru the illusions, of course.
==Aelryinth
Also isn't beauty not objective and wouldn't the goalposts for beauty move. That is one explanation.
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Also define beauty.
For humans? And in the absence of cosmetics and other obfuscating factors?
(I know we think we have this already, but everybody deviates to some degree. The more deviation, the less attractive you are deemed in sociological studies. I took a photo of my face, cropped it in half, stitched it together with its mirror image in photoshop, and noticed that the bridge of my nose deviated by about three and a half degrees of arc from perpendicularity to the center of my brow. The left corner of my mouth is several millimeters above the right corner. I'm not bothered by this, simply giving concrete numerical examples. Would correcting these make me more attractive? Marginally. I wouldn't say it was worth the effort.)
Note that the desirabilities of certain values for parameters such as skin tone/tan depth, nature of secondary sexual characteristics, hair and eye coloration, presence of epicanthic fold, degree of inherent hair curl, degree of musculature (beyond the minimum to be fully motile), and overall categorization as endo-, ecto-, or mesomorphic are all dependent on culture, so yes, there is a degree of mutability. A very very large degree of mutability.
But let's not pretend that a Medium-size human weighing 700 lbs (without any magical effects) would be considered attractive by the majority of the population.
Money. The ugly are probably poor and can't afford to get pretty. It's one of the reasons why the "beautiful farmer's/baker's/miller's daughter" is a common fantasy elementI maintain that there's at least one wizard who hates ugliness with sufficient passion to be willing to do it for free, even if they have to take over a kingdom to do it.
sounds like a campaign to me
Also define beauty.For humans? And in the absence of cosmetics and other obfuscating factors?
Perfect bilateral symmetry (excluding things like hairstyle) (I know we think we have this already, but everybody deviates to some degree. The more deviation, the less attractive you are deemed in sociological studies. I took a photo of my face, cropped it in half, stitched it together with its mirror image in photoshop, and noticed that the bridge of my nose deviated by about three and a half degrees of arc from perpendicularity to the center of my brow. The left corner of my mouth is several millimeters above the right corner. I'm not bothered by this, simply giving concrete numerical examples. Would correcting these make me more attractive? Marginally. I wouldn't say it was worth the effort.)
A complete lack of pimples, reddened pores, and other evidence of viral and bacterial infection. Relative proportions adhering precisely to the geometric ratios established by Renaissance artists and anatomists such as da Vinci. For women, a ratio of waist-to-hip circumference of precisely 0.7, a number that seems biologically programmed into the brains of both genders and backed up by decades of research. For men, there is a similar numerical ratio of pectoral-to-waist circumference, but I can't recall the exact number off the top of my head. Sufficient body fat to conceal the majority of their skeletal structure. For examples of what doesn't meet this standard, the most obvious are severe cases of anorexia. Also, there is an upper limit to the amount of upper arm and neck fat that a human can possess and still be considered attractive. Note that the desirabilities of certain values for parameters such as skin tone/tan depth, nature of secondary sexual characteristics, hair and eye coloration, presence of epicanthic fold, degree of inherent hair curl, degree of musculature (beyond the minimum to be fully motile), and overall categorization...
If you're going to approach this from the standpoint that beauty is objective, well, this isn't going to go very far. Plenty of people (myself included) simply do not like one or more of the traits you've presented above. There's a reason that the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" was coined. (For a non-sexual example, I find spiders beautiful, but many do not.)
Back on your original topic: There is the possibility that there is simply no interest in doing so--or even interest in keeping the status quo. After all, if everyone is beautiful, beauty has no value. There are people who have nothing of value to offer society/no way to persuade others to do what they want other than their good looks. What good would that be if literally everyone looked just as stunning?
Nearly all transformative effects do not have an instantaneous or permanent duration. Ones that do are 5th level spells or higher. Even remove disease is a 3rd level spell. Most common folk will not have the money to pay for permanent cosmetic effects. Even if they did, there's no gaurantee they will find a wizard/cleric that knows of the spell and can cast it.
Because what is ugly and what is beautiful always changes.
Take this picture of Cleopatra from a coin. would we say she is beautiful today?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070215-cleopatra.html
Yet her beauty was legendary in the ancient world.
Even in recent time what is and is not beautiful changes. Back in the forty's through the sixties a woman was beautiful if she was a tall blonde with a full figure and big breast.But a recent poll here in Los Angeles( And yes, I know these polls are sexist and even a little racist)
showed now Asian women ( Who tend to be petite, slim and have small breast and have black hair) ranked on top. And who knows what we will consider beautiful in 60 years.
money
Money. The ugly are probably poor and can't afford to get pretty. It's one of the reasons why the "beautiful farmer's/baker's/miller's daughter" is a common fantasy element
They are also probably dirty, which means that the beauteous spellcaster master race charge them extra for even being in their presence.
But yeah, most people could only afford the occasional 1st level spell at best. Even a cure light wounds would probably cost as much as a trip to the emergency room if the local temple was less Sarenrae and more Abadar/Asmodeus.
Simply put, the number of starving people and characters missing limbs in things like adventure paths, despite the presence of magic that could solve those problems, tell me that there are bigger problems to worry about usually.
Oh, and there is actually a eugenics program in setting with the island nation of Hermea run by the gold dragon Mengkare, who calls the program the 'Glorious Endeavor'. While it has a certain amount of wealth and power.... most religions do not take kindly to it. In fact, Shelyn is explicitly listed as one of the ones that are against it, along with Desna, Erastil, and Sarenrae.
Well this is a interesting topic.
The thing is though there would be people who could be termed 'ugly' that just accept themselves for who there are.
What is beautiful would vary between cultures, race(especially in a fantasy world), and time periods(though if there was a easy magical fix to your physical appearance I am pretty sure people would just keep up to date).
But I see cost and people who just accept how they appear and the fact beauty and ugliness is subjective being why there are still 'ugly' in these types of world. Pretty much it is the same reason why not everyone goes out and gets plastic surgery in our world.
Having said that though in my campaigns people who have the money often, if they need to, use illusion magic or polymorph effects to make themselves more attractive.
Well this is a interesting topic.
The thing is though there would be people who could be termed 'ugly' that just accept themselves for who there are.
Yes, the dwarves pity us for being so accepting for our horrid appearances. Such gangly, long limbs, our anorexic waists, and horribly hairless faces. Its like looking at a shaved cat. They are honestly kind of surprised we can even stand.
And don't even get a dwarf started on the elves!
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There's obviously the money problem--and even if you did find a handful of mages willing to use for free what they worked years to get (and probably spent alot of gold to get the education to do) just to make people more pretty, there's only so many people they can get around to every day. Many of the patients (for lack of better words) that come to them are going to be people who, by all accounts, already look perfectly fine--think how many Hollywood stars go in for plastic surgery.
I occasionally get players ask me why NPCs charge you for spells that don't have a material component, and even in the most benevolent of temples (i.e. one of Sarenrae or Shelyn) it comes down to very basic kind of supply and demand. If it were free, then every overbearing parent would be knocking down your door for healing every time little Timmy fell down and scraped his knee--if you blow all your magic for the day helping with tiny, unnecessary things like this (and everyone will argue what constitutes "unnecessary") what happens when someone comes staggering in at death's door, bleeding all over the place from a freak accident at work? In my games any good-aligned temple will waive the fee if it's literally a matter of life or death, but if it's "My cat scratched my cheek and prom is tomorrow night" they're most certainly going to charge you full price for that--maybe even extra.
To connect this, someone who has made it their personal goal to rid the world of ugliness might be willing to do a free magical procedure (assuming they've invented one) to "cure" someone of a horrible deformity, but they'll get a bit burned out after the hundredth teenager comes up begging him to get rid of their pimples.
Of course, you can say in your campaign world this has somehow happened on a national or even global scale--ugliness as we would define it has been somehow obliterated. As about half of the other posters have said, everyone will still have preferences, and some people will still culturally be considered ugly (for us: Hollywood Homely ) simply because they look average or a bit pretty in our society but they live in a world made of supermodels. People will try to rid the world of these peoples' ugliness too, and it will eventually get to the point where everyone has the nymphs' Blinding Beauty, and still people will be able to find others unattractive. The best you'll ever be able to say is that "everyone in this campaign world looks attractive...to my standards."
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This topic is SO ripe for plot hooks I can't stand it. There's the villains going about the "beautiful" people making them ugly; there's the oppressive government weeding through the undesirables who become resistant to the anti-ugly magics; there's cosmetic merchants selling "beauty in a bottle" and ending up with BBEGs modeled on Batman villains like Clayface, Joker, Killer Croc or Poison Ivy.
Seriously there are a million different ways this could break bad. Comic books have sustained themselves for decades on this simple premise: what if we eradicated ugliness. It's been covered from Judge Dread to X-Men and more.
In the end it all comes down to this (for me anyway): individualism. If everyone were beautiful, then no one would be. Couple this with the ever-enduring desire for sentient beings to at times feel unique and special and I don't think you could possibly achieve what the OP was suggesting.
Incidentally I had a plotline kind of along this tack in a previous campaign. A fey Eldest banished from the First World was imprisoned in a mirror when she tried to cheat at a "fairest of them all" competition. Even though she was the most beautiful her cheating got her bounced.
Her only escape from her prison was to possess a mortal shell. She had mortal servants steal her away to the Prime, then commandeered a handsome lord with a comely wife. From these and other pretty servants on the lord's lands a breeding program began. 7 generations later the PCs came along and the town was holding it's annual "Fairest of them All" contest. Oh yeah, and the fey queen's minions were hags and ugly witches. Good times...
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Also, don't forget the opportunity cost. Even if a kingdom/town/etc had the millions of gp needed to do something like beautifying it's population, it could also spend that money on military and magic to conquer it's neighbors, on engineering and magic to eradicate disease, poverty, crime, etc., make 100' tall statues and monuments to it's ruler's vanity, etc. No matter what your views are, there's almost always something you could spend that cash on instead.
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1000 gp is 4 years of labor for a normal person. It's a bit hard to see when you play adventurers but it does contribute a lot to what most normal people can't afford magical services to be "beautiful".
If beauty is tied to charisma the way you increase it is to increase your Charisma score. Wish level magic. Anything else is just an illusion (ex:disguise self).
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Here's my theory: a world with magic would have way more ugly people.
Why? because magic is a crutch that can fix all. Why workout, bother to eat well, etc. when you can just drink a potion or flick a wand and look good, or put a sustenance ring on and avoid all that cooking and cleaning? Plus, all the spellcasters who look ugly would contribute to the gene pool by using disguise self or alter self to look like studs or hot mamas THEN proceeding to breed, whereas real world wizards (geeks) who are fat and ugly but smart must wait until they are stupid rich before they can mate successfully.
:P
Just because the world has magic, doesn't mean everyone has access to it or the knowledge of how to use it.
There are still people living in tribal, nomadic groups living in our current, "Information Age" modern world, as a f'rinstance.
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This topic is SO ripe for plot hooks I can't stand it.
Agreed. I'm just gonna hang out here and take notes.
Preface: This isn't a pleasant response, but trying to be objective. . . Nevermind. This conversation won't be had here.
Simply.
Sentience.
Aren't there a few places in Golarion where magic doesn't work or it isn't allowed to work?
Barring that there are those evil countries that want to keep all the money to them selves (and the beauty) and the people at the bottom of the food chain have to suffer.
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Well we have polymorph in reality. It's called plastic surgery and the reasons why everybody doesn't get plastic surgery would apply to fantasy as well. I also agree that a person polymorphed to be more attractive would still have the ugly genes to pass on to their kids.
The book, Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne is worth a read to get an idea of how ideas of beauty altered wildly from place to place and within a few hundred years.