I can’t compare that, because I haven’t played Final Fantasy. Thanks for explanation.
Dragon Age is not really a CYOA game. While it lets you make choices, plot is very linear and differs mainly in final sequences.
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Interactive fiction is a very widely used genre but it’s the difference between something that is predominantly about making choices and games that just have some interactive elements. They’re all at different points of interactivity. Just as how with books the Choose Your Own Adventure series and the Fighting Fantasy series handled interactivity differently, there’s a difference between Mass Effect, Detroit Become Human, Telltale’s Walking Dead and a COG game.
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It’s not simple actually. When you say “CYOA genre,” you’re using as shorthand a copyrighted term for a line of print books published in the twentieth century, and those books offered no customization whatsoever. Almost without exception, the protagonist was a boy or man, and not always just in the illustrations - some of them included dialogue which referred to the protagonist in masculine terms.
Of course, character customization isn’t really possible in a print book. But the fact that “Choose Your Own Adventure” is the first thing that comes to mind for so many of us when we think of choice-based interactive fiction - to the point that it’s become metonymous with it - should put paid to the notion that “customizable characters are expected.”
I’d go so far as to say that customizable characters are actually pretty rare, outside of this particular corner of the IF world. The company that most often gets brought up in comparison with CoG, Delight Games, creates games only “from a specific character’s perspective, a character with a personality, a gender, a sexuality…Delight Games commit the reader to role-playing fleshed-out characters rather than just swapping pronouns…” The XYZZY Awards have a category for “Best Individual PC,” because it’s not an unusual thing for a game to have. One of the most beautiful and deeply moving IFs I’ve ever played was a lesbian love story. Another was an interactive retelling of how the author came out to his homophobic parents, and it beautifully captured the tension of yearning to be both truthful and safe.
A lot of IF is meant to illuminate a subject by forcing the reader to project themself into a character and see the world the way that character does, make decisions in someone else’s shoes. It’s an excellent exercise in empathy, and it even allows for a kind of representation the CoG model doesn’t. CoG is great if I want to read a story about a demisexual woman who slays dragons, defeats the evil empire, or captains a spaceship while being treated with respect by every man she meets, but that’s pure fantasy. If I’m not looking for a power fantasy - if I’m looking for a story that reflects what my life has been like in the real world (or if I want to recommend a story that will help you understand what my life has been like in the real world), the CoG model isn’t going to cover that. CoG staff have admitted as much in interviews: their goal is for any player to be able to see themself as the hero of a story with as few restrictions as possible, and the trade-off is that there are good and worthy stories about identity-specific experiences that can’t be told in their flagship line.
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Set main characters are almost always better, imo.
You get a better story when the protagonist is more detailed and has background and relationships and history. It’s just how it is. It’s damn near impossible to write a great story around a blank slate protagonist, because they’re specifically designed to be relatively bland and flavorless, so that they don’t interfere with the reader’s ability to project onto them.
There’s a reason that almost all the RPGs you see getting praise for stories have fixed main characters. Witcher, Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment, etc. It’s because a good story is a lot easier to tell when the main character has enough development to carry it.
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I don’t understand the disdain. Interactivity is the ability to play with the text and can exist without character customization. An author who doesn’t opt for the customization isn’t betraying their own genre.
You are going to make decisions for a character, which some story are going to say that’s you, dress them up. Some are going to say, that’s not you, but you still need to dress them up or that’s not you and you can’t dress them up. But they can do the last two and still you need to decide where those characters are going, you’re still choosing their adventures.
(But on the other hand variety is important. I can play as a character that’s not me, but please let me make my own in the meantime)
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I see Dragons Age Origins, PoE, KoToR 1&2 and Baldur’s Gate II are all conveniently missing from this list 
So I wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘almost all’.
On the flip side, plenty of games that feature set protagonist don’t get a lot of praise for storytelling. You don’t have to choose between a very set protagonist and a blank slate, semi-set protagonist is popular for a reason.
Would Nameless One’s story change if we could customize his face and called him ‘Big Drippy’? What if he was a woman, would that affect Planescape Torment? Nope, it’s all due to limitations, Nameless One is actually semi-set - we don’t customize his backstory but we customize the current incarnation.
That’s what the best Hosted Games do.
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Dragon Age Origins’ protagonist is semi-set and carted along a linear plot with few ending branches. Working for Bhelen or Harrowmont only changes your guest giver and ending slides, most allegiance choices only matter in unit type selection of the endgame and epilogue slides. The games you use as an example feature protagonist with set traits and features that traverses a linear plot with several branches.
And said protagonist is often lacking most features, despite being set. Dragon Age roleplay can be very limiting, Pillars is slightly better, but they both give you a doll with several set traits and lacking ties to the game’s world.
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Which is appropriate, because I’m advocating for semi-set protagonists 
I disagree DAO protagonists lack ties to the game’s world.
I don’t disagree, I’m just saying: that’s still a semi-set protagonist category.
I never said games should never limit their players, but the games I like to play offer enough customization to roleplay.
But that’s just me, I avoid interactive fiction with very set protagonists like fire, you wouldn’t see me play a Telltale game or Parser game (the puzzles are… unique).
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Yeah, but often you can’t have both. In terms of DA, the only PC with actual personality was Hawke. You can’t have both set features, mutability and strong character core without working in way to balance freedom of choice with personality.
And PC has to have a personality. He’s the core, foundation and main course, he supports the entire game. He must be tied into the world and support it.
In a certain sense, all characters are semi-set. It’s just a matter of where they fall on the continuum.
Even in a purely plot-driven story (like a CYOA print book) or one so entirely character-driven that it’s more a character study than anything else - the circumstances in which a non-customizable protagonist makes the most sense - the player is driving the character’s decision-making process. For example, do they tend to do the safe thing, or the most interesting thing?
And then even in the most customizable games, the author is still setting parameters. It wouldn’t be playable (or writable) if they didn’t. Some of these parameters are obvious, inherent to the story itself. Of course, within these parameters, the player is generally given as much freedom as possible. You can’t play NOLA Is Burning as a gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but you can decide whether you’re proud of your career as an organized crime enforcer or deeply remorseful. The PC in Faerie’s Bargain is greedy and cynical, but you can decide whether they pursue honest gain or resort to trickery.
Other parameters may be set by the author’s biases, conscious or otherwise, or simply what they’re willing to write. Most characters are written with genuine social ties and a conscience, for example, so you can be mean, but not a complete sociopath. Some parameters you’ve probably never even thought about. If you play a game set anywhere from the mid-20th century to the near future, it’s a sure bet the protagonist knows how to drive a car. Chances are you’ve never thought before about all the disabilities that means your character doesn’t have.
Maybe the reason I’m so comfortable with the idea of non-customizable characters is that I’ve almost never been able to play a true self-insert even if I wanted to. These past few years, I’ve been able to play a non-disabled version of me instead of having to play an allosexual, non-disabled version of me - and I recognize that’s probably as good as it’s ever going to get.
The difference between fixed and customizable characters isn’t whether they force you into a box or not. The difference is the size of the box.
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He sure was a hero with a heart of gold. Sometimes he was snarky. Other times he was a hero. Had to make some tough choices, but good thing he was a hero. One might even say he had a heart of gold. He was a real hero, and a real human being.
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Honestly, still more than I could say about Warden or Inquisitor without a heap of headcanons, personal writing and genuine effort to work with the provided mold. Hawke has more personality by default.
I think what Hawke has are snarky one liners and emotional voiceacting and that cons people into thinking that they have a personality. When really, you project - headcanon - that personality onto them, just like with other DA protagonists.
They are, just like the Inquisitor, “just a dude/girl” trying to live but oh no, they are dragged into heroics by circumstances. Hawke never had a drive, never really did anything without the game railroading them into it. There’s a reason why Warden is DA’s fans beloved child, even with their unnerving staring.
Back in the day the criticism heaped on Hawke because the personality system was more vivid but also made them seem mental if you ever switched from picking just one personality-flavoured option. And that wasn’t great. So they made Inquisitor as a way to compromise: blank slateness of Warden, voiceacting, and no soul.
DA2 was raked over coals for not knowing if it wants to be a visual novel or a crpg. But what it did right ended up influencing interactive fiction - a similar personality system can now be found in hosted games and with less limitations, it can work much better.
But
Now that I think about it, I might controversially maybe disagree. Most stories and games don’t revolve around how vivid and amazing the personality of the main character is - it’s the opposite, they are often boring and passive, and you end up looking wistfully in the direction of the villain or the support characters. But they work, 9 times out of 10.
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I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with set characters, but at least personally I don’t usually go to RPGs or CoGs for that. I like Heroes Fall and Keeper of Sun and Moon and Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous because my character is mine and I can define them.
I like roleplaying, deciding who my character is, making decisions based on what I think they care about, seeing those play out.
That said, my absolute favorite RPG ever is Disco Elysium, which has a protagonist with a set backstory and personality (well, personalities, which are emphasized or de-emphasized based on your stats) and who will always be an absolute loser no matter what. And I love it. Importantly, I can still decide how I react to my character’s backstory and decide who I’ll be (or at least try to be) going forward.
I think if a choice of/hosted game has a set character, I’d like it if two things were true:
1: I still had control over who that character would end up becoming.
2: That character’s past is important in such a way that it’s important that it’s out of my control.
If Disco Elysium was a choice-of-games title where you could decide your protagonist’s backstory and who they were, you wouldn’t have Disco Elysium. You wouldn’t be able to roleplay reacting to the realization that you’re a terrible person, you wouldn’t be able to have to deal with the consequences of the actions of the person you used to be, you wouldn’t be struggling with alcoholism and depression, you wouldn’t have a game about reacting to who you used to be and either rejecting or embracing your past self.
Because most people wouldn’t voluntarily decide that backstory for their protagonist. And even if they did, the writers wouldn’t be able to focus on those themes because they’re too busy focusing on catering to the other possibilities where the protagonist isn’t a terrible human being.
They wouldn’t be able to make a game where one of the major themes is that you’re still responsible for your actions even when you’re trying not to be that person anymore, even when you don’t even know what you did to get you here.
That said, unless the story is in part about the fact that you can’t control your past, I prefer being able to decide who my character is, what their backstory is, etc. where possible.
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Of course, whether you consider MCs to be set or the opposite or partly set, depends on your definition of set, like what aspects will be included in that definition. Will it include only background, appearance, name and gender or will it also include personality? And will it also include choices you make for the MCs later in the story that influence things such as “line of work”/character classes and etc or mandatory events in-story that “locks” how your MCs are and what they are like in some ways. If all of those aspects mentioned can be considered to be aspects that helps to determine whether MCs should be considered to be set or “fluid”, then just about none of the MCs in the COGs and HGs published are fully one or the other, but rather varying degrees of partly-set MCs, with some of the COGs and HGs having MCs that lean more towards a set MC and some of COGs and HGs having MCs that lean more towards a fluid MC. So I suspect, in this context, it’s more helpful to talk of Choicescript IF with MCs strongly leaning towards being set and Choicescript IFs with MCs strongly leaning towards being fluid.
I won’t deny that I really enjoy when there’s a strong level of fluidity to my MCs. There are many reasons for this, both that it allows me to make so many different types of MCs, which makes for greater variation and replay value and also that it allows me to make MCs who are more relatable and who I feel less distance to.
But another reason, which is also connected to the level of interactivity you get in COGs and HGs that give you a high level of control over the story, instead of to a large extent railroading you both into certain outcomes and developments is this: It opens up a huge space for me as a reader/player to feel like a true co-creator of the story and be able to make my own, invisible to the outside world, storylines about my MCs outside of the what is explicitly in the story and also, according to how the MCs I’ve created are and how they interact with the story, interpreting certain elements of the story to representing certain story arcs, even though they’re not explicitly story arcs in the story.
One example of this is one of my go-to MCs in Jolly Good-Cakes and ale. He’s always a high-intelligence and abrasive,arrogant, kind of know-it-all who also seem to often have a hard time getting along with other people. Firstly, his general personality is partly what I imagined it to be, based on what I choose about his background and his highest stats in the beginning of that COG, it opened up a space for me to become a true co-creator and build on the options I choose from and build an even more fully-formed personality, which in turned helped informed many of the other choices I made for him over the course of that COG. And during the course of that COG, there were choices that he made where he helped other people, although still being rude and put his intelligence and other strengths in the service of others, not least his own club. And, although this wasn’t explicitly in the story, the combination of his personality ant the choices he made, lent itself more easily to me to interpreting this to be a kind of character growth, where he though still being arrogant and jerkish, at least turning into a jerk with a heart of gold and though still generally thinking of himself as the smartest person in the room and still generally having a low opinion of the intelligence of most other people, growing to care about them. In the same way, I remember playing a female troll wizard in Life of a Wizard. Although, that HG didn’t say anything specific about her personality, the fact that she was a troll and generally choose the kinder and often more peaceful options, lead me to picture her as a kind of gentle giant-kind of person. That particular HG is also really good for creating other storylines for the MCs, since there are still many spaces in the life of your MC that are largely left open, so that you can fill it with your own storylines and such.
And of course, this also applies to romances as well. I do like short guy-tall/taller woman romances and in the majority of COGs and HGs where you actually can choose the height of MC, this isn’t really mentioned in the scenes with the RO. But that just means that I can add further scenes in my mind, even if just scenes about the RO thinking about the MC that fleshes out the dynamic more fully than what is done, at least explicitly in the COG or HG in question. In the same way, where the RO in question seem to have a particular type or it, for other reasons, are just easier to romance the RO if your character is a particular type, your MC not being a particular type, also allows room to add invisible story-lines and such. Like when my high-charm but not particularly high-strength MC romanced Thea in The Lost Heir trilogy, it’s clear that what made her attracted in the first place in the first place, was quite different to what it would have been with a high-strength MC, and may also mean that their dynamic is different, which I can explore outside of what is explicitly being told in the story.
And it just seems that having characters with a comparatively high level of fluidity, ideally along with(I guess) a story that allows for a reasonably high level of interactivity compared with other COGs and HGs, just lends itself much more naturally for the reader/player to create these other storylines and stories about the MCs and about the story of the COG or HG in question as such than IF, I guess it’s largely HGs here, where the MC is largely set in the first place. It does so for me, anyway, and at least judging by the stories other posters and commenters have made about their MCs in other threads, I think I’m far from the only one.
And I think that the people reading/playing COGs, HGs and other IF with high level of interactive when it comes to creating the MC is a feature, not a bug. I do think that too many people are too stuck in just thinking of COGs, HGs and similar kinds of IF as working almost like a regular book, where the writers write the story and the reader is just a kind of guest in the story, who just experience whatever the writer put there. But that doesn’t really take into account the signficantly higher level of co-creatorship that COGs, HGs and similar IFs allow the reader to have compared to regular books and which has a tremendous amount of potential. Whether and to what extent a writer want to tap into that potential is of course up to each writer, I’m aware that there, at least for some writers, could be trade-offs when it comes to otherimportant aspects they want to focus on. But that potential is one of the strengths of this format and, at least to the extent it can be talked about in reviews and such, should IMHO become an important part both in the reviews of COGs, HGs and similar IFs and a become a part of the general conversation about these kinds of IFs.
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Personally for me it depends on if I like how the set mc is written and how much is set about them
I can’t play games genderlocked to male in second pov with out it feeling to misgendery for my brain to ignore.
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as a absolutely huge rpg buff im going to pretend im not offended by this list 
/jk
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Can’t forget Pathfinder, Fallout, or Vampire the masquerade. I don’t necessarily believe the set protagonist = better story, hell there are non-rpg games such as Bioshock that have great story but a silent protagonist.
Hopefully I can add Warhammer 40k Rouge Trader to my list.
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Warhammer 40k Rouge Trader: “Buy my cosmetics in the name of the holy emperor!”
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