If I may offer a third option: the characters gender is fixed, but the it sexuality changes based on the MCs gender. Basically what Keeper of Sun and Moon did with the characters having fixed genders but being romanceable by any gender.
11 Likes
This would be my choice. I would like the opportunity to romance a diverse range of characters without being forced to play a specific gender to do so. I don’t think it would particularly detract from the quality or depth of the characters.
3 Likes
I think that swapping EVERYTHING is unrealistic and pernicious. The things are these games are about including diversity as a normal factor in society. Including games.
So the fact Everyone else in-universe Has Suddenly, the same exact sexual orientation I want… It feels weird and kinda wrong. As Hetero (even if role-playing with pan and lots of different characters) find that everyone is hetero in my game feels WRONG. For that, I have the rest of industry
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Personally I much prefer a variety of characters with their own set sexual orientations. As a writer, it’s personally more interesting for me to write these characters who have experiences with different sexual orientations that I might not otherwise be able to explore in a case where they’re genderflipped or otherwise constantly attracted to MC.
As a reader, however, while I prefer characters I can romance as a man I’m also perfectly happy to play as a different type of MC because I just generally enjoy roleplaying, whether that’s as the gay man that I am or a bisexual woman, etc. Of course, it’s always dependant on the world and decision of the author of said book, and I’ve read good COG with gender swappable characters regardless of what I would personally do.
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I like gender-swapping because it ensures that there’s going to be equality in romance options without having to create a huge cast of characters.
I do see why it can be immersion-breaking to be asked to decide a character’s gender as a player, but otherwise the writer would have a lot more work to do to have a good range of options for every possible gender / orientation. Which is perfectly fine if that is what the writer wants to do, of course!
But if they want to write, say, three ROs instead of twelve, I’d much prefer gender-swapping to having only one character be compatible with my MC, so that it’s either them or no one. 
Another option I have seen done on occasion is to only gender-swap some characters and leave the others fixed. Off the top of my head, Cannonfire Concerto does this (the inventor friend — Anna? It’s been a while — is always female, while the aristocrat — Z-something? I’m pretty sure it started with a Z — switches genders to match your orientation). Heart of the House, too, where Reaves changes according the player’s orientation but the rest of the characters are fixed — Oriana is always female, Dev is always male, and Loren is always non-binary. (I don’t exactly know how a writer decides which characters to make switchable — is it a way to encourage players to romance them? 
Though in both games I mentioned, it’s a character with blue blood… Wonder if there’s a pattern there? 
)
I feel in Heart of the House, it’s not much of a problem, since it has enough characters that it mostly evens out so that you always have a couple of options matching your gender preference (unless you only happen to romance NB characters). Cannonfire Concerto, however, only has two ROs, and if your MC doesn’t like women then you’re left with a single option, so I feel that it doesn’t work as well there.
Another pet peeve for me is that when I play as a bisexual character, I expect to have options to romance more than one gender, unless it’s a super-specific game like those in Heart’s Choice that you know beforehand are about romancing just women or just men or whatever. When the system of randomising character genders according to orientation is used, bisexual often means “randomise all genders” so you can still end up with all ROs being of the same gender if you have bad luck. Again, the fewer ROs there are, the more likely it is to happen, and it happened to me the first time I played Cannonfire Concerto.
13 Likes
As a writer, in the process of planning a game, I am right now in a very struggling dilemma, I have been in this situation several days. The dilemma between what do you want to write and what do you know your target audience demands.
The thing in the world I most hate write about, it is romance.
But. 99% of the public of Hosted and Cog is mostly interested in romances, with options from each one of the several paths, Rivalmances etc etc etc.
So, I should write something I know 90% of the public will say no, where are my romances? Or write something I don’t give a damn about because It is what people demand a game?
I still in that dilemma. All the games y write on Cys are about what I want to write. But the reason for that, it is because there is no commercial engagement. But, Hosted is another different situation. I mean
, if someone will pay I have to give what that person wants
4 Likes
Though I admit that I check if and what kind of romances a game has, I much prefer a game without romance than one written with bad romance.
If you do not want to write romance, do not write romance even if the market seems to demand it. If the end result would be awful romance that potentially oozes of your dislike for having to write these parts of the story, it’s going to hurt the overall game.
If the romantic content is bad, I’ll be salty about it. If there is none but the rest of the story is good, then hey, there’s no romance. I’ll live with it.
11 Likes
Or you could find a different audience who’d be willing to pay for your particular story! You might not have as big of a following/audience for writing what you want to write, but at least it’s what you want to write. 
Related to the poll?
Yeah I’ll be briefly disappointed if a female character happens to be straight since she’s not an RO, but I’d be satisfied if the platonic/friendship route is as well written as the romance route since then I don’t feel like I’m “missing out” on content.
2 Likes
Thanks for the advice all! 
Right there with you. I am not into inserting random banging into stories I write either, but not including that is always a handicap. Parenting did about as well as a story can without having it, and it still gets mentioned as a negative in many, many reviews. It is definitely the most problematic part aside from the fact that it dares to cost money to purchase. It all comes down to how many concessions you want to make in the face of making money.
1 Like
I criticized you hard for your first story… But lol, the laughing will be on me. As probably I am outlining the less commercial Hosted game in history. No, I wm not in this for money. If not my plotting would be totally different from head to toes.
Sincerely, If someone does this for commercial purposes First primary focus has to be romances plot is basically secondary for casuals. And polls are adamant too. The good news is Hosted is not a power-hungry company and allows very different and unique stories about stuff not popular. There is none other that do the same.
2 Likes
There’s a guy in the interest check thread atm who really wants to do a set-male-protagonist story with only female ROs and insists that giving the option to change anyone’s gender or orientation will add ten thousand complications. I think it’s kind of silly, but it’s his game. The point being that if the justification is laziness, adding in an optional “change this character’s gender” cheat is roughly exactly the same amount of work as just including that as an option in the first place, at least from a coding perspective.
I’ve had at least one person complain that the ROs in my story Til Death Do Us Part aren’t gender-swappable. At this point it would be way too much work to go back and do all the coding to allow the player to change their gender for ROs I’ve completed (like 200,000 words worth of work) but I’ve taken that into account for the RO I’m working on now. Right from the outside I’ve provided the option for the gender to be changed. The character is so ridiculously powerful and (in some sense) alien that gender actually does not significantly affect their life experience anyway. Another future RO can change at will as well, and I’m debating whether to make the final RO gender-swappable even though there’s no in-universe justification. Maybe I’ll limit the RO so it can’t be the first pick, then track the gender of the most recent RO the player pursued and use that so it feels more natural. I don’t know!
5 Likes
@will What I mentioned is just a personal preference, so you can do whatever you like with your RO. It’s more extreme sort of cheat menu (for example: if you have a kingdom ONLY ruled by men, it’d be inconsistent to have a Queen as a RO. But for code snakes such as myself, I can put up with the inconsistencies in-game by having altering the code to have a female monarch. Going by this, I altered the entire cast of Sabre to female once 
Duchess Wulfram, Cazarostina, Queen Miguela. Just for fun.) If gender isn’t important to your character then give us an option to flip it. But as a writer, you know best for your story.
Think I might add a poll in myself: If, playing in an open world sort of game with multiple factions and conflicts, would you want to see other characters perspective intertwined with your own? To tell a bigger story, this sort of thing. Many times I’ve seen IFs try to do the same with only one perspective, but it came out stuffed and rigid (player character gets thrown around to be spoonfed information that’d make sense very easily if you get to see some other, more related character’s perspective. Also to develop NPCs. Once again using Sabre, I’d like to read snippets from Cazarosta’s POV)
A recent exanple I can think of is @Charles_Parkes Aegis Saga. The multiple perspectives was fresh, but can be confusing since the beginning wasn’t very grounded.
- My own only. Single perspective.
- I want to see a short page of other character’s perspective if needed, but not play as them.
- I want to see other character’s perspective AND play as them.
- I want a choice to toggle multiple POV on/off
- I want to see the perspective of my RO/selected character only
- I’m fine with reading about other characters, but only after I established a groundwork of the world/my MC first.
- Other
0 voters
My personal opinion about them is, I hate when I get an option to harm/kill a character but everything fails no matter what because they’re actually plot important and death of them would ruin the story somehow so they shouldn’t die.
WHY? WHY YOU’RE ADDING AN OPTION TO HARM/KILL THEM THEN? WHAT’S THE POINT OF THIS? TO TORTURE THE READER?
Sorry if this sounds aggressive but I’m REALLY frustated when this happens. If you think they should stay alive, then don’t create options to kill them. It’s that simple and will save the effort of planning their “fight”. Win-win, there’s literally no reason to torture both reader and yourself.
But of course, I’ve also opened that topic because asking writers/readers opinion.
- You’re right, that’s frustating
- You’re wrong, that’s awesome (please explain why)
- Other
- I am a writer who did that in my book and I regret my decision
- I am a writer who did that in my book and that’s awesome.
- I am a writer and I have another opinion about this
0 voters
4 Likes
There is a thing called realistic expectations. No player can expect automatically their desires to become a tangible reality in the plot. A plot needs conflict between Mc and antagonist forces.
The fact of failing in the middle of a story to kill your enemy Is part of the cultural heritage of all human groups in the world. From Stonehenge to Harry Potter.
So I don’t know what you pretend . Lol, I want to win everything and don’t have any conflict… Then why in hell are you reading. To eternal boredom of plotless not conflict?
4 Likes
That’s not I want. While I love power fantasies where you’re pretty much immortal, I’m pretty much ok with realistic books too. The thing I’m angry at is in some books you can fight against a plot important character for a long time, to only they somehow escaping thanks to either an invisible force or totally random nonsense because they need to live.
This is an example from Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG game (spoilers): Satele Shan is a character that hated by Sith characters for varying reasons, in an expansion you get the chance of “killing” her. Game especially points out that as [Kill Satele Shan] (Game points out all other kill options as “Kill him/her/them” so that part is really important). You press that, to only she disappearing by using an unknown Force technique when you raise your lightsaber.
Thats what I hate, and I’ll give an excellent executed example of this now. In Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic There is an early enemy called Calo Nord, he is a famous bounty hunter and also plot important character that have a death shield at Taris. You get to kill him but you meet with him at an early game, you have the chance of pissing him of to only get an instant death because he’s too strong for your current level. You get to kill him when you got your Jedi training.
In this example, plot important enemy character is perfectly and realistically protected. I’m ok with this
1 Like
Yeah generally it seems counter intuitive to include choices that always fail, unless that’s something that the story is about. On the other hand, in some cases that might be really effective. So I should probably have voted for “I have an other opinion”, heh.
4 Likes
I have a *label plotarmor in one chapter. It’s not something I’d do often, but it has its time and place.
1 Like
Those really, aren’t good exemple.
Those fall under the banner of BW suck at writing choices, as it has been shown in their kotfe- kotet expansions. Where the ‘choices’ were related to your companions, and you could do NOTHING to alter the story in any way , form or shape.
A good exemple that they suck, would be the fact that Senya death or staying alive is tied to Arcann. You kill her, you gotta kill him. You can’t keep her and kill him . You steal money from the Vault, just to have Arcann at the end shrug, making the whole heist meaningless.
I think the choice to kill a character that still have a role to play, is a mistake.
If the writer wanna make the player or reader feel good, then let the player insult said character or something. But to have the ‘Kill’ then it does nothing…thats just pointless bullshit. and yes, its frustrating. Especially, here you are…looking at your stat and they have plot armor 
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One.
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