Carried over from the Jan thread but I was really surprised to close to a 50/50 split between those who would like to pat the dog at any cost, and those who would prefer not to release the hellhound onto the world at large 
. That’s good, hopefully will give some variation in the playthroughs then.
I’m currently finishing up the section in this chapter where you have the opportunity to attempt to fight the hound rather than trying to creep around it/bribe it then that chapter should be done. (Not sure why I left so many bits and pieces undone in this section.)
Personally I’m not a fan of it either, but at least sometimes it gets it out the way. In saying that if I open a game and instead of starting the story it says: pick your gender, now pick you height, now pick your eye colour… that’s almost enough to make me stop reading it.
There’s kinda two schools main of thought, one is to do the check list or the slightly more story relevent "look in a mirror, getting dressed and brush out “x” coloured hair, put on “y” clothes etc. Which is probably the most typical and what most games seem to go with. I personally try not to do super long lists here for things you aren’t going to reference unless there’s a way to skip it for those who don’t like doing detailed character creations where they’re not going to be mentioned again. (I do also have games where extra character creation details that are mainly there for flavour text can be set via an optional link in the stat menu/start of the game for things that are not essential to allow people to jump right in if they want or set all the things if that helps with visualisation. Not sure how this’ll be received though. Imprisoned did it, I think that’s the only published game I can think of that basically asks if you want a long character creation or not.)
The second if your story allows it is to try and make it a bit more organic as the story goes along. It seems to be easier for some styles of stories than others. As an example in one of my WIPs you’re transformed into something else. When you’re found it’s dark and you’re asked your name (set name and pronouns here), then later when you’re trying to work out what has changed you notice changes in your hair, skin, eye colour and type. The character can note they’re shorter/taller/older/younger than someone else etc. So the character creation is kind of used to also push the story along rather than stop it for a character creation break. (I’ve attached a few examples from one of my games. It’s still a bit clunky setting visuals in text and I’m sure there’s games that have done it better, but I think sometimes this sort of thing flows better than setting a list at the start of the game.)
