Hair, Tans and Dyes: The things you can't refuse

[JTG]

Lets start with Hair:

As it is every person looks generally the same with exception of work gear, but make it so that overtime you grow a beard and hair.

You can choose to trim this beard, or trim your hair.

Or style it, styles would require a specific amount of time to accomplish, so you could some uniqueness.

Maybe do this with generating hair tokens over time representing length, and making it look scraggly and unkempt if not styled and grown.

Hair drawing not hard, beard drawing, just a general middle section that connects a top and bottom. Middle would extend with ages, and maybe if you wanted to be ridiculous make it drag behind you, ala dwarfs.

Skin Tans:

Being out in the sun should make you more brown, we do not have African skin tones, but this would be a decent substitute.
Likewise, not being out in the sun would make you more pale, you could get a good idea of how people function in game with this one.


Dyes:

This would help a lot with distinguishing groups from other groups, or making strange outfits. Not every color on the RGB is going to be available due to the fact that I doubt most of the things required to make whack ass random colors wouldn't be around these areas.

But you would basically just hue every color on a object that can soak it, with the added on dye, such as anything made with cloth.
You could mix together dyes with plants.

Add in some choice pieces of non intrusive cloth stuff to wear, and whala village and kingdom and empire uniforms.

And by non intrusive, I mean headbands, and armbands, or bandannas, or sashes, that wouldn't block out other slots for the most part.

The colors would be prominent enough to stand out.

[theTrav]

this has come up before, I think it might even have been suggested by you. I agreed then and I agree now, the ability to differentiate your character along these lines would be a good thing.

[sabinati]

I guess I might chip in a bit on this topic. The main reason why there aren't more hairstyles and beards in the game is, as you may have guessed, because Jorb has been too lazy to draw them.

Here are my (current; subject to change) thoughts on managing hair:

There ought to be some number (maybe 4 or 5) of different "hair lengths", each of which would have a number of associated hairstyles, including a "rough and wild" one. Every once in an ingame while, a character's hair would grow to the "rough and wild" style in the length above his current one. A character with the Barber (Barberism?) skill would then be able to cut it into any of the hairstyles that he knows of in any of the length levels strictly below the current one. A player with the Barber skill should be able to discover new hairstyles to cut in some as yet undetermined mechanism. It should be possible to cut the hair of unconcious players, so that you can knock down people and shave them bald.

It is unclear just how to handle hair colors. I'm thinking that a new character should be permanently assigned a hair color "at birth", which it would be next to impossible to change, and that all hairstyles should exist in all colors. Of course, once we add character aging, characters' hair should turn white (and maybe grey before that) as they grow old. Men might have a certain chance of turning permanently bald when old, as well. I'm guessing that the hairstyles would be completely disparate between men and women.

Beards would be handled analogously, of course, except that women couldn't have them.

[Chakravanti]

...Jorb has been too lazy...

Edited for relative importance

[jorb]

Grumble grumble.

[Jackard]

Just don't add faces. Please.

[jorb]

Just don't add faces. Please.

What's that? Add faces? Will do!

[Brickbreaker]

And varying skin tones?

[Winterbrass]

And varying skin tones?

Call me crazy, but I suspect that few non-Caucasians lived in north and north-eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.

[theTrav]

Call me crazy, but I suspect that few non-Caucasians lived in north and north-eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.

You're crazy... but for other reasons...

Variation in skin tone does not equate to non Caucasian. I don't think anyone expects J&L to allow equatorial levels of pigmentation.