I don’t love playing through a long series of questions about appearance all in a row, but it’s never going to be really seamless. I tend to lean towards feeling that there isn’t a need to specify in huge amounts of detail because players can imagine more specificity than writers will ever be able to cover, but mileage will vary about what constitutes “huge amounts of detail”. Although some players really enjoy choosing granular details, others will be turned off by the pace being slowed down too much - so it’s just a case of figuring out priority.
I found some threads about it which may be of interest, some of which have examples of games where players have enjoyed how it’s done. Zombies Exodus has been called out a few times as a positive example:
I liked A Study in Steampunk’s use of the war wound to affect the PC’s stats, and some of the outfit choices in The City’s Thirst or Heart of the House, and the masks in the HotH ball and in Mask of the Plague Doctor. I’m pretty sure I liked how appearances were done in Heart of Battle - it was pretty unobtrusive - and in Asteroid Run there was a bit where you could do some outfit tweaks which demonstrated some stuff about your personality and what was considered masculine or feminine in the setting.
But I’ve generally found that appearance-customisation like hair or eye colour hasn’t stuck with me particularly, and the times I’ve liked it best was when it was short enough not to slow things down - maybe sprinkled through the first chapter or two.
I’ve generally spread it out as much as I can; I can’t speak to how it feels for other people but the way I wrote it is the way I like to play:
-
I’ve tended to do things like “here is a very tall/short character: how do you compare to them?” for height; I don’t love height measurements because I wouldn’t be able to eye someone and say “they’re 6 feet” etc.
-
I try to combine stuff about hair with haircare if I can, so things like what you do with it during/after washing, or going to bed.
-
Sometimes I use biological relatives like “like your mother, you have [this] colouring, [this] colour hair” etc - I did this in Creme de la Creme and Royal Affairs.
-
I did looking-into-a-mirror for Noblesse Oblige which felt a little more static than I liked but it was “your face looks [this sort of skintone] because you look a bit sick/tired” so there was a bit of movement there.
-
In Honor Bound you’re returning to a hometown and seeing someone for the first time in many years so I put some of it in there like “they recognise you from your [hair colour] etc even though you’ve aged”, and so on.
-
I tend to have players pick pronouns through speech, with options provided for an NPC saying a variety of things, eg “we’ll always be proud of you, son”, etc which the player can choose.
-
In Honor Bound, there’s more detail about having coming out as trans when you were living in your hometown previously, or having transitioned after you left; picking that branches you into a bunch of choices about what social or medical transition the PC has gone through. It ends up longer than I’d usually devote to customisation, but I figured the people picking those options will be invested in those details and I didn’t want to spread it out in the way I usually would because it was important for players to know what was and wasn’t covered in those choices.
-
I haven’t been able to bring myself to write an eye colour choice yet and I’m not sure how I would because it feels tricky to make it dynamic
if I did, I’d probably do it in relation to an outfit, accessory, or makeup choice, a biological relative, or a silver-tongued NPC giving a compliment.
Most of these involve some sort of action/interaction/personal history/responsiveness to the world, small or otherwise, when picking the customisation, which is what I like best when I’m playing.