Self-Perception
The people have spoken, and our latest Patreon Poll has come to a close. Asked to choose which Hero was most deserving of a wardrobe change/makeover, the good folk of Handbook-World voted for Cleric in a landslide. I hope you will all join me in passing our resident rules lawyer his fair share of compliments. (Better luck next time Bard, Druid, and Necromancer!)
As for Wizard’s confusion, I think today’s little tableau serves as a fine illustration of “the rich inner life problem.” We’ve talked about this concept in terms of acting, but it applies to a character’s appearance as well. Basically, the rich inner life problem shows up every time your character’s complex identity is invisible to the rest of the table. You’ve got this fascinating PC in your head, but no one else gets to experience it. Confusion and miscommunication are the result.
When it comes to costuming and appearance, so much comes down to your initial character description. That’s because first impression are hard to shake. Players are easily distracted creatures, and it’s all too easy to miss a crucial detail. For example, do you remember that one time my buddy the paladin thought his Nordic love interest was a bad opera stereotype? That can easily happen to you as a PC. Your youthful wizard might become an old man in the table’s collective imagination. That all-important burn mark on your character’s face might disappear, leaving your dragon slaying motivation un-foreshadowed. You might even go through half a campaign before your human partymates realize you’ve been an elf the whole time!
For these reasons, I think character art is a vitally important tool for setting the right tone. Trawling through Google Images, doodling something yourself, or even paying for a commission can all go a long way toward locking in your alter-ego. If you like the look of Laurel’s stuff (shameless plug alert) we can definitely talk shop about commissions, but I’d encourage you all to hit the Artist’s Alley at your local game con or shop around on Deviant Art. Because even if you know exactly what your character looks like, getting that information to the rest of the table is easier said than done.
So what about the rest of you guys? Has your table ever missed an “obvious” detail about your character? Do you try to avoid confusion by using character art? Or do you prefer to let the mind’s eye do all the work? Tell us all about your character’s appearance, costume, and important visual details down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
I’m recently playing a human life Cleric and for the most part people do remember some of the basic details: she wears half plate, has a shield, and wields a special torch as a club (aka it’s a normal club with Continual Flame on it). What most people tend to forget are two factors: she’s rather tall (6’2) And she has faded pink hair.
I can’t tell you how many times people have described her as short and blonde when it turns out she’s one of the tallest party members, and the only one with an unnatural hair color (everyone else has brown, black, or bald). Even more important during chase sequences and the party ends up getting a bit scattered due to failing skill checks during the chase.
I’ve since had some art commissioned for her that shows her pink hair, but because it’s a solo portrait it’s not immediately obvious how y’all she is. Win some lose some.
I had the exact same thing with one of my characters, who everyone was convinced had blonde hair.. he had blue hair for crying out loud
Any idea how that happened? If you the player have blond hair, it may be a case of bleed.
The short/tall problem occurs easily if your group has a mix of European/American players, as there’s different measurement standards in place (feet vs meters) that are hard to translate into an idea of how tall a person is.
It’s also a ‘stat’ that has no mechanics associated, but is affected by race/size (elves are tall, dwarves are short but still somehow medium, halflings/gnomes are shorter). It even effects monsters (e.g. the differences in scale between various types of giants).
I say to take a note from halflings. They’re all the time describing how they bring over a high chair or can’t reach tree branches to climb or whatever. Talk about hitting your head on low ceilings or how that new weapon is a bit short for you. Make it present in the game, and it will be more present in the other players’ minds.
The problem I have with character art is that I’m really bad at describing to an artist how my character should look. If I have an image of my character, it’s difficult to convey in words exactly what I’m seeing in my head. No matter how precisely described it is, someone will always have a slightly different interpretation of the character. This doesn’t particularly bother me when I DM because the I play so many NPCs and letting the players interpret the world is part of the fun for me. However, with PCs, even if I’m playing something completely unlike myself, each one is still me in a way and seeing them depicted differently than they are in my head just feels a little weird. It’s like if you saw a picture of a celebrity you’re very familiar with, but interpreted artistically. It’s still recognizably them, but it’s not a perfect representation of their likeness.
Unfortunately, I have no talent for art and little patience to learn, so it seems this situation is unlikely to be rectified unless science invents a machine that can transfer an image directly from my brain to paper.
It’s funny listening to folks ask Laurel for commissions. Whenever she’s doing speed sketches at a convention, I’ll overhear patrons giving elaborate backstories, listing subclasses or archetypes, and talking about favorite spells. Meanwhile she’s sitting there like, “Color of hair? Distinguishing marks or scars? Any facial hair?” I think they real key is to make like you’re describing a police sketch. Those are the details an artists actually needs.
Try using this template. I was good enough that it got featured as an example of a good description on the subreddit!
https://www.reddit.com/r/characterdrawing/comments/9m0cms/lfa_shinku_kyo_drunken_master_monk_kitsune_for/
The same subreddit has a bunch of other ‘templates’ for how to get artists to properly/accurately draw your character.
My local community are also big fans of character art which helps, but tends to introduce some problems on their own, if something changes and it isn’t easily added through photoshop. (or alternatively so complete that it now justifies an entirely new picture, such as getting reincarnated for instance).
That picture I found on deviant-art might have been perfect for my first level plucky naive squire fighter, but it doesn’t fit that well several levels later when he has been knighted, is wearing a full-plate and has exchanged his original longsword, for that cool flaming holy flail/incense censer that we found in that forgotten temple to the sun god you know?
I also have a story of a time I missed a detail.
It was an emerging Supers game using GURPS, more Heroes the tv series than comic book in tone, but still with a lot of weirdness.
I where playing an ex-military gadegeteer that had build his own powersuit, and we where fighting these lizard gorilla thing a reality-warper had made and things where going bad.
The last one had our invulnerable brick wrestled down and was trying to chew through him while the rest of our group except him and me had been forced elsewhere. The chewing wasn’t going so well but it prevented him from taking it down.
Well said brick had mentioned that he was carrying some grenades so I decided to shot them with the idea that my armor and his invulnerability would protect us from the worst of it, but the blast might separate the two.
Problem was said brick wasn’t carrying a belt with 2-4 grenades like I was imagining, he was carrying a belt plus several bandoliers with 10-20 AND 2 light anti tank rockets on his back AND a backpack full of C4.
The explosion was enormous, sent me flying through a reinforced wall, destroyed my suit and broke most bones in my body, severely injured even the invulnerable brick, and even hurt another pc in the next room over where they had run for safety.
Still the brick had been considering pulling out the “technical grappling”[1] rules so I still feel kinda justified.
[1] You know how normal grappling rules are famously complex? technical grappling is an optional ruleset that is to normal grappling what normal grappling is to throwing a punch. It cares about things like leverage and “grip strength”.
I guess he’d have to be a brick. That’s a lot of grenades to lug around!
On the other hand, I love having characters with secrets. I get a big kick out of dropping hints and even things that should be enormous red flags, confident that my fellow players will never put it together before the reveal.
One character has a pet that gets mentioned occasionally, but then apparently disappears and isn’t seen again for a while. Another has teeth
filed down into sharp points, which she claims was an act of teenage rebellion. A third has been acting strange ever since he was resurrected by dark magic; no-one knows where he disappears to during downtime or what he does while there.
(That last one I’ll go ahead and spoil, since the campaign he was in was abandoned. Jaun’s personality hasn’t been changed by his unusual resurrection, but his new body reacts violently to his (previously) standard tactic of pouring divine light into it, the black goo his new flesh was forged from being repelled by it and exploding off of his body. He’s been spending his downtime practicing channeling smaller, directed amounts of divine light, to control the shape of his body, creating ‘wings’ of dripping black goo that (along with his now skeletal appearance without most of his flesh) should be terrifying enough to end some encounters without bloodshed. Essentially, a fluff justification for the switch from Scourge Aasimar to Fallen Aasimar racial powers.)
If the party notices these little details and gets suspicious, that’s great, but it’s just as fun to have them slide under the radar so the eventual reveal takes them completely by surprise.
I’m not at your table, so I don’t know if this comes off well. It very well might. But from the description this sounds like exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about with “the rich inner life problem.” If you want “the eventual reveal to take them completely by surprise,” you risk coming off as arbitrary.
Here’s where I’m coming from. Foreshadowing is hard to do. One person’s enormous red flags can just as easily be throwaway details to the rest of the group. The goal is the big reaction: “You’re what!? I should have known all along! It was so obvious!” But if you play too close to the vest, the big reveal might just be a shrug and an anticlimax: “OK. Cool I guess. Does this affect my character?”
In that sense, my preference runs to the blatantly obvious. If you’ve ever seen a PC completely ignore clues in a mystery, the same principle applies here. Multiple, redundant hints are the key!
We mostly avoid it by me being a fanatical model painter; with an embarrassingly large 30-year-old collection of Warhammer (and other) models, when a player is first describing their character, I can usually put my hands on 20 or so models that come close to the description for them to choose from. And if nothing fits, I am more than happy to add another model to the collection if and when the player finds something online that matches their vision.
I swear up and down every time a new game comes up that I’ll base a character on a mini rather than vice versa. Every time, I forget until I’m already excited by a character concept that fits zero of my collection. It’s a problem.
I once played a damphir whose entire body was covered in burns, had a problematic thing with fire, and covered her face because of the terrible burns. The whole thing was tied to her backstory and obviously conversation bait. And yet despite me playing it up no one at the table gave any bites. It was kind of frustrating.
Players are selfish. If it doesn’t affect them directly, they tend to ignore it.
In that sense, asking the party wizard to mix your a soothing balm or for the ranger to find you some aloe is the only way to work it into the game. Character art helps, but at the end of the day it’s all about getting the detail to become relevant to moment-to-moment play.
My group will use heroforge or the character creator in soul calibur and keep a screenshot handy on a phone or some such so a visual reminder is at easy access.
HeroForge is great for that, yeah… indeed, quite a few of my more recent character concepts have come from just playing with their modeler, coming up with the look, and then figuring out who the character could be.
Heroforge seems like a good solution for the ‘minor changes and character updates’ problem mentioned elsewhere. New gear becomes a button click rather than a brand new commission.
Also of note, it seems like a nice way to do facial expression and reaction shots for us non-artistic types.
To be fair to Cleric, medium armor is the dwarven equivalent of business casual. 😉
My group is very good about describing our characters. It helps that our character ideas need some description to properly appreciate. I’ve seen a luchador that wrestle with his mustache, a high schooler who’s only comfortable behind the controls of a giant robot, and an androgynous aasimar with authority issues. And those were all from the same person!
I guess that makes plate armor formalwear.
And somewhere in the multiverse, Cheery Littlebottom heaves a heavy sigh.
Being a Ankh-Morpork police officer pays relatively well, but definitely not well enough for full plate formal wear.
But Cheery doesn’t actually want to forsake armor. She’s still a dwarf, for cavern’s sake! She would just appreciate some flexibility in selecting her armor. Have you seen this season’s micromail? It doesn’t chafe!
I try to use art that matches the desired concept as closely as possible, and add in more details in a description. I also occasionally request art from one of the wonderful pro-bono artists of the /characterdrawing subreddit, where you can post a request for artists to draw your special snowflake.
In practice, however, ones appearance is rarely an actual factor, outside of jokes for certain kinds of magic equipment (e.g. corset of dire witchcraft and most headbands on a male character). In fact, with all the gear and equipment and magic items one might wear, you either need to have wrists of many garments/hats of disguise/other illusions to appears as you desire, shape-shifting, or custom-made magic items (one of the benefits of crafting your own stuff is you can flavor it on demand), or you assume your initial description is fixed, regardless of your gear.
Because going by RAW item descriptions of equipment you might loot from a monster or dungeon hoard, you will otherwise end up looking like a character that fell out of a MMORPG. What with having a magic belt with a specific animal motif, a magic headband of a specific gem color, a pair of magic rings, specific looking magic boots/bracers/cloaks etc… And if you start with a class kit, every character also has a big mountaineers backpack (and bedroll), various survival tools… Bags of Holding become mandatory to keep your careless adventurer image, unless you want to look like you’re going camping all the time.
I might be familiar with this problem:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/fashionable-and-practical
It’s not uncommon for me to play female characters… and it’s not uncommon for my fellow players to forget this. Usually that’s just a case of wrong pronouns, easy enough when talking to a male player, but we’ve had the occasional incident where the mistake has actually been plot-relevant… NPCs reacting as if to a male character, etc.
It’s definitely good to get some kind of art, though… something to help myself and others visualise the character. Where I get it from depends on the game… if it’s something set in the past century or so, searching Google for old photos works well… I think the portrait I used for my current CoC character was a Polish doctor. Another useful standby is HeroForge, since their online mini-modeller can be used to quickly throw together an image.
A friend of mine (female) once played a character called Samantha, Sam for short. (A Star Wars character inspired by Sam Spade, btw. :)) A newly arrived PC to whom she introduced herself as Sam spent some time thinking she was playing a guy. 🙂
Yup. Voice acting helps. But I think that’s a case of ‘picture is worth a thousand words.’
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s best practice to put a little placard with a portrait if front of me on the table.
That’s certainly one advantage to remote gaming with a VTT… come up with a good image of the character, and that’s the image the other players are primarily seeing when interacting with you.
I forget the exact conversation, but remember asking Strahd at some point, “What kind of man are you?”
He went into this big diatribe about his methods and his motivations. At the end of it he turned the question around on my character: “So tell me: What kind of man are you?”
“Well, as a woman…”
There were giggles around the table. It’s hard doing the crossplaying thing sometimes.
First thing I do when making a character is checking for some suitable artwork as inspiration and my groups sofar had no confusion as to what my PCs look like (or didn’t mention til now).
This gravatar I’m using I originally stole for my woods-living halfling serial killer (Bloodborne-inspired campaign, most cathartic session I’ve ever had in my life). It’s Martin Sensmeier’s Red Harvest from The Magnificent Seven (2016).
I used it until I found a miniature with a passing semblance and painted it in the same colours as the gravatar. (Amiri Six-Bears miniature to be specific. Who’s neither halfling, nor male, nor a fighter and also doesn’t have a small size or weapon similar to my PCs. Oh well.)
Good on ya for sourcing the art properly.
I tend to look for art second, which turns out to be a much harder thing to match. I really need to try it your way next time.
So, is Cleric officaly hatless now, does he keep his old hat, or is there a new hat/helmet in store?
His holy symbol necklace seems to be missing/changed as well.
Otherwise, great new look! Very clerical.
Hat? What hat? There’s never been a hat. >_>
(See alt text.)
Glances as the cast page pictures
Right…
If there’s never been a hat, what brand of dome-wax is he using then, to keep that pristine bald shine?
Web goblins. I blame those lying web goblins.
Not so much the party getting it wrong as them seeing it wrong.
I played a priestess on my first NWN server when the game first came out.
A lot of her character history revolved around her one shock white lock of hair on a half-elven head…I liked that head 🙂
I didn’t realize for months that I was using an override package that changed the body part numbers and that everyone else was seeing a Gnoll head…
lol. Nice. And no one commented on it?
The gold-trim makes him look a bit too Paladin-y.
So from the fact that he has medium rather than heavy, does that make him Knowledge Domain to represent his understanding of the rules? I assumed Life because “Stock archetypes” seemed to be the motif, but those have heavy armor.
So I never played a Cleric as a wee lad. Coming back into the hobby as an adult it kind of threw me for a loop that Clerics had armor. Most fantasy video-games didn’t give healers armor, so it was weird to me that Clerics would. Whenever I saw a holy-person (Particularly a Dwarf) in armor I assumed Paladin.
Google for “dwarf cleric” some time. It’s an education in all the latest pauldron styles.
This is why I have grown to love Hero Forge (and the new color options). No more guesswork when it comes to basic look and even typical attitude (facial expression, poses, all easily done there). Are all the options available for every possible combo, of course not, but it can give a better idea than most in a fairly short amount of time and allow each player to look at the other players concept of self and say “Oh… so your blue skin is more like almost white skine, not navy blue… well that makes more sense.” (or like in my case, we used an icon in roll20 that gave a red appearance to our barbarian, because raging barbarian is red, but then when we finally colored her mini on Hero forge, her skin was not red, yet I had for some reason been thinking it was red the whole time, even though I knew it was not red… it can alter your perspective seeing a character in a physical form)
Those first impressions, man. They count for a lot.
Even if I don’t share it with anyone, I always have some piece of art for my character. I’m a very visually focused person, so picking a piece of art for my character is usually my very first step, even before picking class. I’ll find a piece of art I like, and build from there, interpreting the little details into my own story.
Why wouldn’t you share your character art with the group?
Perhaps it comes from a… questionable source?
You mean, like, the OTHER handbook? 😛
A couple different reasons. Some people in some online communities get real mad if you just use some random piece of art from google, because they’re of the opinion that if you can’t afford to commission an artist to make you your very own character art you don’t deserve art for your character. I don’t go to those parts of the internet anymore.
The other reason is indeed that sometimes my character art isn’t exactly safe for work, as it were, and sometimes creative cropping only goes so far.
I have a funny story about this from our Rise of the Runelords that just wrapped.
Somewhere around level 9, I upgraded to Heavy Armor and basically had saved every piece of my share to get a really strong suit of armor. I made a decently big deal of it, and everyone was like cool!
No one asked me what the armor looked like. Not even the GM. I had described it very briefly as ‘dark colored, heavy armor,’ which was at extreme odds with my original character art. Work prevented me from updating it.
It was only in the last I think 8 sessions or so where the GM actually asked me what that armor looked like, and when I described it to him, well… that went about like this:
His literal reaction: “You’ve been in BBEG armor this entire time!?”
And I was like “Well, I made that armor to better blend in with and infiltrate the evil cult of Lamashtu, what’d you think it looked like?”
As a result, he decided to make a new rule, which I think we could apply to all our tables.
Every few levels / sessions / whatever, everyone has to share a fresh description of their character.
I really like this, actually. I might give it a shot in my next session. Cheers!
Actually one time we did the oposite, we didn’t tell anything about our characters. Not only appearance, but race and class too. To this day they, even our DM, don’t even know who or what i played. I actually cheated and played three different PCs. “Wait!!! Spells? I though you were playing a rogue”. “Multiclass?” was my quick and wit answer… after fifty minutes of thinking silence 😛
Is just me or Cleric is a little lower than before? Also he got weight, and i don’t speak of the breastplate 😉
You know that scene in Avatar where Uncle Iroh gets jacked?
https://i.redd.it/dl26qoc137751.jpg
I assume that surviving a kraken fight is worth, like, 10,000 situps.
That is totally not the case 😛
More than anything he looks like he ate the whole thing. Kraken is tasty 🙂
He clearly leveled up and got to a level where he was able to permanently buff his physical stats.
I don’t think so, no DM would allow a width based class. Just look at Cleric, obviously it’s OP and unbalanced 😛
as I‘m not much use at wrapping things up in words, I do a picture search for character art if Paizo‘s pdfs don’t have what I want.
Same.
Being married to an illustrator is frustrating that way. I’d like to commission her, but when you’ve got a my-money-is-your-money kind of arrangement, making art requests can get a little awkward.
That’s where you do extra chores, cooking or, ahem, ‘favors’ instead.
Or you trick them into liking the character enough to want to do it instead as a guilty pleasure.
I couldn’t even explain to an illustrator what I want for a character till I found an approximation on picture search, than the only point would be consistency in the artwork across all characters.
I participated in the Hero Forge Kickstarter for color miniatures, so now I can design my characters with that and use a screenshot.
Does the newly braided beard serve a symbolic purpose here (e.g. age/seniority, clan affiliation, title, rank), or is it just fancy/practical?
As someone who has had all of one piece of character art done, I’ve found I tend to put too much of my descriptions into hair and costuming, without being able to define any of my characters in terms of facial structure.
Still very happy with how the one I did get came out. https://imgur.com/a/QKmlp03
Interestingly I was just discussing basically this with someone else the other day. More or less.
I was discussing how I use this particular table in my IC posts that include various things like character name, link to character sheet, Current/Max HP, AC, Passive Perception (and Insight and Investigation), what they’re concentrating on, what conditions are effecting them, and almost most importantly a picture.
Because having a character’s name and picture in every post makes it a LOT easier for people to remember my character no matter how many other games they might be playing in. I know I certainly often completely forget key information (like name and appearance) of character for people who don’t do stuff like that.
As for how I get pictures, for the last while I’ve been saving stuff I find on tumblr and pinterest and when I need to make a new character I use one of those. If I don’t have a picture that matches something I’m considering, then I’ll just look for one. Of course some ideas are harder to find a good picture for than others. And sometimes you sadly just have to do without.
At the end of one campaign, my sister was excited to show off the art she did of the party. Looking at it, I was going “Okay, the dragonborn is Player A’s paladin, the human lady must be player B’s druid since she’s the only one playing a female character, I think Player C once said his character was bald, so the bald dude must be his monk, and…
…Who’s that last guy?
I was perplexed when I asked her about the blond-haired pale guy standing with the others. That was my character, apparently.
Turns out that while I had a vibrant mental image of my cleric, I’d never actually made it clear to anybody that he was supposed to be a black man. Apparently everyone else had assumed he looked like Fighter, from this very comic, for some reason.
The art was edited to properly portray him, I’m glad to say.
When I got a commission of my character Lini, I found 4 ref pics online just for her head – hair color, hair style, nose, and hat. I then found refs for her sword, shirt, and boots and it all came together.
Irlana I got as a line-art so I could try different colors myself. I described her hair style and clothes and made sure to mention Mick was wearing a saddle.
Lately I’ve been using Hero Machine to make some pics for my characters. They’re not very detailed but they make good starting points for later commissions. I’ve also played around with Hero Forge, but never bought any minis.
Hopefully after I get a job, I’m going to save up for a commission from Laurel. I’ve got a half-drow monk that needs a better picture.
So during Tomb of Annihilation my DM misheard me say my character’s name. And so she kept referring to Ulfgar as “Wulfgar”. It spread through the table. Eventually it became canon that he had adopted this mistaken name because giving people your name is dangerous in magical circles.
Whenever I crossplay, everyone addresses my character as a dude unless I take great pains.
When I played a female Firbolg Druid I played her as basically an “Elusive bigfoot”. Taking all pains not to be seen in public. This included frequent use of her racial Disguise Self which would usually be “The most unremarkable woman of whatever ethnicity is dominant here. Not tall or short, skinny or fat, no distinguishing markings. If plain pizza were a person.” This description was so distinct that people could separate their mental image of my character from the hulking, hairy dude sitting at the table.
When I play an asexual magi-bot who uses object-pronouns everyone knows, because I take great pains to roleplay its’ robotic nature.
Rathmore: “Hey X, if you don’t have junk, why do you bother wearing clothes?”
X Machina: Robotic monotone “Excellent query Wizard-unit! The X Machina-unit’s prime-directive is to advance and spread civilization. That includes obeying the laws of civilization when they do not hamper said directive. In short; this unit wears pants because it’s the law.”
X Machina: “Enemy-units are no match for the superior tactical capabilities of this unit’s 56 kilobyte processor!”
At my old table, we had a hilarious in-universe example of this phenomenon.
The players and GM in this group were always superb at knowing each other’s characters inside-out, and using this knowledge in-game in ways large and small. In one campaign, my earnest little ratfolk merchant Churrik would write to his home warren regularly, quivering with excitement at all the interesting people he had met and sights he had seen and smells he had tasted on the Surface!
When our travels finally brought us back to Churrik’s home city of Queenswarren, we found that we were already famous, sort of. Churrik’s cousin had written a children’s book based on our early adventures, complete with lavish illustrations…but her mental picture of both our party and our enemies were based entirely on Churrik’s letters. The GM’s spouse was kind enough to draw some of the book pages for us, and they were unforgettable.
Our proud, prickly ravenlike tengu, the cousin had represented as a giant rooster. The humans were hulking, caveman-like brutes, except for the paladin who was a punchably prissy-looking angel, the kineticist was made of lightning, and the well-intentioned elven wizard who had set more than one stand of forest ablaze with her arcane mishaps was a literal wildfire in a very pretty and fashionable dress. And in the middle of this chaos was Churrik, looking exactly like himself in his neat but slightly shabby business suit, because he was the one character whom the author had actually SEEN before.
Oh man, that is hilarious! I wish I could play at a table where things like that happen!
I always intended for my tiefling, Derrik Darkluster’s, tail to be put to use more often, but for some reason I constantly forgot about mentioning it after the first session. I remembered to account for everything else; needing to have special holes put in his hat to accommodate his horns, mentioning the light points his teeth had whenever he smiled, even mentioning his special boots that allowed him to look like he had normal feet instead of the two clawed digitigrade legs he actually had.
I had this come up WRT my PFS characters. The first two I did I had clear mental images for how they looked (and did some homemade character art for them), but the third one, my human wizard, I didn’t realize until the first time I ran him that I hadn’t come up with a clear mental image for what the character should look like. Made it a lot harder to play as him, more so than I expected.