Re. the main character… what interests me most, by far, is creating your own unique character. That could come down to strict role-playing within the game; certainly, it involves creating a character that can be vastly different from playthrough to playthrough.
So, Heroes Rise is a really great, well-written game - but the character you play isn’t going to be massively different from one game to the next. You’ll always have the same superpowers, and the same motivations. By contrast, Life of a Wizard is a much narrower game, in terms of story description. Places and characters rarely get more than a smidgen of description. But your character, the MC, can be immensely different from game to game. Of the two, I much prefer Life of a Wizard.
So, the main character doesn’t need a lot of description, or backstory, or pre-written personality. That’s for you, the player, to create.
Re. the NPCs in the game… I want description. My own way of thinking is that the player gets to control his or her own actions, but has to accept the rest of the universe as-is. So, you don’t get to choose the names of NPCs, and you have no authorial control over their characteristics. You want them to behave a certain way, manipulate them with your character - just as you’d have to do in the real world.
That said, fiction in general is a simulation of reality; you don’t have to detail every crease, every imperfection. That’s doubly true for interactive fiction, which favours a short descriptive form.
(By the by, I know that Life of a Wizard breaks this rule again and again… I still think it’s a fantastic game…)
I wrote The ORPHEUS Ruse (respect the capitalisation!), and in that case I felt it was important to provide a physical description of the player’s own body, just because they spent 95% of the game out of that body. In all of the player’s body-swapping shenanigans, the difference in appearance was one of the first things remarked upon - because, well, you would. The differences in more internal characteristics - memories, fondness for certain people or things, aptitudes - came more slowly. Because they’re buried more deeply.
In retrospect, I wonder if even this much emphasis on physical appearance was an error. As I recall, early drafts of the game even had a ‘Beauty’ characteristic, which was a big, big ideological mistake. After a while, I came to my senses and realised that notions of beauty are wholly subjective; I deleted the stat entirely.
At least I think I did. Didn’t I? It’s been a while since I wrote the thing.