Man may look upon the outward appearance, but the Lord looks upon the heart.

  These words of the prophet Samuel, reported in First Samuel 16:7b, are often quoted to remind us that God doesn’t so much care how things look, or what we pretend, as He does about who we are.  In the context, Samuel had been sent to choose a king from among the many sons of a certain man named Jesse, and he had seen strong and capable men among the older brothers, but somehow knew that these were not God’s choice for the next King of Israel.  Rather, God pointed him to the youngest, a lad of such little promise that his father had left him to tend the sheep when given the opportunity to present his sons to the greatest living prophet of the Lord.  That lad, of course, was to be David, in some ways the greatest king Israel ever had.  God could see what was in the boy long before anyone else could; God’s interests were not so much in his talents or his abilities as in his character.  Thus we have this maxim, reminding us that we can only look at how people look and what they do, but God is only interested in who people really are, how they think and feel and what they believe.

  My interest, though, is in that part about the outward appearance.  That is where man looks, all of us, to some degree, whether we want to admit it or not.  We judge a person by what we see first, the way a person presents himself to us.  Like Samuel, we are impressed by people who look strong, or capable, or confident, or well-appointed.  We also find ourselves rejecting or discounting those who convey the opposite impression, those whom we perceive as weak, incompetent, uncertain, and slovenly.  For some people, we will never get past that first impression; for others, it will be a slow road to discovering that our attitudes are tainted by things that don’t matter.  We look at the outside, because we cannot see the inside, and so we make our decisions based on what we can see.

  Personally, I find that annoying in the extreme.  I find the idea of people judging me by my appearance so egregious that I specifically do nothing to make myself presentable beyond the bare minimum.  I wear clothes in which I am comfortable, without much regard for how they look to others beyond the basics that I’ll try to wear shirts without obvious rips or holes if I’m expecting to go somewhere.  I comb my hair and trim my beard to the degree required for my personal comfort, only rarely for the sake of appearance.  I am willing to bet that anyone who is so shallow as to determine that I’m not worth their time based on my appearance is not worth my time.  I’ll go to church in jeans and an open denim shirt over a pocket T-shirt; if I’m going to be up front, I’ll wear a dress shirt over the T-shirt instead of the denim, and button a few of the buttons.

  I find, though, that I am not immune; I, too, judge people by their appearances at times.  Some of the friends of one of my sons insist on wearing their jeans in that sliding off position that shows more underwear than a Hanes commercial.  I keep wanting to tell them to pull up their pants before they trip over the waist band.  They talk in that ghetto slang cadence laced with vulgarity (vulgarity is, to me, a clear mark of a limited mind–another of my personal appearance-based judgments).  I conclude based on first impressions that these people don’t have much left in their heads, however they managed to destroy whatever they may once have had.  It turns out that this is not always true (although the jury is still out on a few of them).  Some are decent human beings of above average intelligence.  Thus it seems that the very flaw I condemn in others I find in myself:  the tendency to draw conclusions about people based on appearances.

  I can’t help recalling the two young woman teachers my mother knew when I was in high school who took a house together around the corner from us to save expenses.  According to my mother, one of them dearly hoped to marry one day; it’s just that any time an eligible bachelor showed up at their place, she was trying to fix the car, or the furnace, or some other piece of equipment that left her dirty and disheveled, so she was always hampered by bad first impressions.  It’s too bad I wasn’t a decade or so older.  There’s something to be said for a wife who knows a bit about auto repair and home maintenance, even if she does at times look like a grease monkey.  But then, had I been older, how would I have reacted to an otherwise attractive blonde covered in soot or grease?  I guess it would tend to discourage at least some suitors.

  Relationships are helped or hampered by first impressions; and relationships are often critical to our lives.  Everyone kept telling Martin Luther what a wonderful girl Katherine was, but the few times he’d met her had not gone well.  It seems in his presence she was often tongue-tied and so said either inane things or nothing at all.  He thus thought she was haughty and not very bright.  Friends encouraged him to consider her for a bride, and he wouldn’t even consider her for a luncheon guest.  Thus it was many years before he finally married her, and realized that she really was the perfect girl for him.

  I may very much wish that no one judged me by appearances, and may very much intend not to do so to others, but this will not be true as long as we are limited to outward appearances.  People will form impressions from what they see, of our clothes and hair and jewelry, of our mannerisms and speech patterns, of our conduct and demeanor.  Smokers will lose respect in the eyes of non-smokers.  People who drive pickup trucks may think people who drive luxury cars are snobs, and people who drive luxury cars may think those who drive pickup trucks are boors.  Once those impressions are formed, they are difficult to overcome.

  In trying to create and run hundreds of believable characters in our settings, we often tend to build them rather simply.  That is often necessary.  The bartender generally is either nice to everyone or nasty to everyone.  If we’re really creative, we’ll come up with something discriminatory, such as a bartender who doesn’t like elves or flirts with women.  What, though, of a character who doesn’t like one of the player characters because of some initial bad impression, and whose dislike of that one taints his relationship with his companions, although he’s generally a nice guy to strangers?  Perhaps he had trouble with some guy, and now he doesn’t like men with red hair, or priests of Odin, or gnomes, or whatever unusual characteristic he associates with that guy who gave him all that trouble.  Perhaps he thinks right-minded people should drink ale, and is annoyed by the guy who passes up his excellent well-made house ale in favor of mead.

  Or perhaps the mayor noticed the characters entering town when they were coming from some venture, wounded, dirty, tired, and generally looking like riff-raff.  When they appear before him later to ask for assistance in their current noble mission, does he remember them as the bedraggled mess he saw on the road, and so take them for scoundrels trying to deceive him now?  Did someone see the heroes doing something he didn’t understand, and draw the wrong conclusion from it?  In the old film White Christmas, the housekeeper listens to part of Bob Wallace’s telephone conversation, enough to hear the person with whom he is speaking suggest a course of action she finds horrifying, but not enough to hear him reject that option.  She then repeats that offensive idea to Betty Hanes, with the result that Betty’s opinion of Bob (recently heading toward a major romance) falls dramatically and she will hear no explanations.  Even his desperate “If I said anything, I didn’t mean it” solves nothing.  Gossip spreads like wildfire, and if the characters have been observed doing something that might have been misunderstood, they might find the locals disenchanted with them before they’ve found a room or ordered a drink.  Impressions make or break relationships, and relationships are so important to so much of life.

  I am unlikely to change my ways.  I’ve had too many people react poorly to me when I was making an effort to make a good impression, so now I’m just going to stick with being comfortable with my own appearance.  I am going to have to work harder at accepting the fact that some people aren’t going to like me merely because of how I look; this is the price I pay for ignoring their expectations.  I am also going to have to remind myself more often not to draw conclusions from first impressions.  After all, the people who don’t much care how they look are most likely to be those who don’t much care how I look either, or at least one can always hope.

  My non-player characters, however, are going to be a lot more attentive to first impressions.  For most people, outward appearances are all they have on which to make their judgments, and they’re quite satisfied with the judgments they make on that basis.  I’m going to have to work harder at playing most people with the attitudes most people have, and give more thought to the first impressions my players’ characters are creating.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.