I totally get what you are saying and it even makes sense. However, I believe a lot depends on the reader as well, not just the character. In my case for example, I treat my character the same way I would treat a PlayStation character. On a PlayStation, when I press the punch button, I expect my character to punch. Likewise, when I want to do a certain action in these kind of games, I expect very much the same. I mean, if you want a character to have a life of its own, it may as well be a simulation or just a novel, and the only true player pulling the strings are the authors themselves. I’m sorry, but if it comes down to choosing between my own agency and my characters agency, I select my own, unless you can give me and my character the same amount of agency at once, which will probably be a very hard task. To make this long story short, it all comes down to this. Do you want agency for yourself, or for your character in a game?
I think that’s it in a nutshell. Which is what a lot of the authors on here try to do - give agency to both the prot and the player all at once - though its definitely a very hard balancing task and often a coding nightmare.
All good points. I wouldn’t say there’s a right or a wrong answer on this. Many different tastes and possibilities on the spectrum of protagonist agency and personality ranging, for example, making personality and personality defining choices pretty common and free ranging in philosophy and methodology. For example, one way I like and do myself, is that in early and mid-game its fairly free-range agency wise but then it gets far more restrictive towards the end, where most choices fail to alter personality and available choices are more policed by personality, which I feel is somewhat realistic to the human experience. During our formative years our personality is more mailable, yet later in life the big events are what changes us the most.
Just to clarify, are personality stats are those with dual opposites, like Careful/Reckless, and Attribute stats are those with a single description, like Fine Arts Knowledge?
There is a difference between how you do things and why you do things. The personality aspect speaks to the ‘why’ part and the attribute aspect speaks to the ‘how’ part. This can be sometimes confusing. So how well you use them, and how appropriately you use them, will determine how coherent the story flows. Both give character depth, but in different ways. As an example, If a pacifist character somehow has, against their pacifism, to shoot a rampaging robot, you have to account for that in the ‘why’. The ‘why’ here is more important than the ‘how’. As mentioned earlier, you can be very kind, but there are people you will never show your kindness to. And please make it clear. For those that self-insert, what happens?
Relationship stats are more for character interactions.