I think there’s appetite enough for both.
- Character customization opinions (polls!)
- Poll: Canonical/Pre-set Significant Other
- POLL - What types of Protagonists/Main Characters are you open to playing in a Hosted Game?
- Poll: Main Character naming preference
- Thoughts on the option to choose the MC’s skin color? (poll)
Advocating for customization/agency/choice is one of my hobby horses, but as long as I am given enough control over the character, I’m able to look past some things being out of my hands or even enjoy them. Good writing buys a lot of good will.
Fallen Hero has a lot of the character’s past, abilities, circumstances, and motivations set in stone, but it immediately and continuously gives the player room to make that character their own within that framework. You can grapple with the things about yourself that are out of your control in-character. You can challenge and struggle with your preconceived motivations. You can define who you want to be, and often there is interplay between making that choice and reflecting on who you were/are and how you are perceived because of those things. When your character is going through with things you’d rather not do, and you as the player are screaming at them to stop, it doesn’t feel like the author’s hand is swatting you down because they have a story to tell, it feels like you are actually having an internal conflict. It’s really, really well done.
Not everyone can write like that. Not every audience or story needs them to.
Sabres/Guns/Lords of Infinity forces you to play a specific gender, insisting that in the world/story they portray, your character could only be that gender. Then, as you go through the story, you run into women planning and strategizing and scheming and plotting and leading and fighting just like you, grappling with similar problems and circumstances along the way. I start to wonder to myself “Did the protagonist really have to be male for this story? Why be so insistent on it?”
If you’re looking to appeal to the customization crowd (or at least my corner of it), while also having fixed elements of the character, just take some time to analyze why this character needs to be a generic white guy protagonist (or whatever you feel they need to be) in your story. Does it really upset things if the player can make the character representative of their own ethnicity instead? Does the character need green eyes because some side character they’re related to has green eyes, or could their eyes be any color, and all you need to do is match their associated variables? Is it really necessary that the protagonist have biological offspring, or could the child be adopted? Is it necessary that they dress like a vagrant, or could they perhaps have their own defined style? If it doesn’t actually affect the story, why not leave it open to the player?