Thanks Hustlertwo for the advice. I guess Cog-HG wants to manage the earlier mentioned expectations in order to make sure the informal contract between author and reader aren’t broken too often. I can see that as both a good thing and a limiting thing. Your abreviations AIM and A/S/L are new for me.
I will have to take that into consideration. Do I want to write for myself, to be read or to maybe make some money or at least be popular? I am not sure yet.
@Nils_Lindeberg Welcome to the forum. Just to let you know (and I don’t know if it was said above), you can reply to multiple people in one post, rather than separating it out into many different comments. The way to do this is to highlight the text you are going to reply to and pressing “Quote” when it pops up. This will allow you to address different users in one comment.
Nice. 
I will use it and minimize the spam, hehe.
Well some of your questions have already been answered, but let me take a crack at this.
I suppose there’s a lack of ‘rules’ towards including personalities, ideologies, goals, religion, and backgrounds is because… well… they aren’t really seen as important as gender, romance, and ethnicity in the CoG forum crowd.
The key words here being “as important” and “CoG forum crowd”.
If you browse Steam reviews or Google reviews of IF games, you’ll find a very different reception to what forum goers prefer.
Another possible reason these things don’t have rules is because they’re not commonly included in an IF. Speaking from a coding perspective, it’s hard to crunch down a personality into a number or a percentage and even harder executing it to be worthwhile in a game.
Most of the times personality stats are usually fluff or just provide flavor text in a game. And what I mean by ‘flavor text’ is that if you are 70% Sarcastic then an NPC might make a snippy comment about your snark maybe once or twice.
A lot of the character customization choices (ethnicity, sexuality, gender, etc.) are static, surface level even. They don’t mean much in terms of gameplay except to maybe affect the romance aspects of a game, if the author chooses to do so.
And… I say the coding gets as complicated as you want it to be, in relation to character customization. If an author wants to make a variable for the MC having vision correction and then do a classic Scooby Doo gag and have their glasses knocked off, then they can go for it.
It’s entirely up to how much effort the author wants to put into the game and its variables.
As @Eiwynn said, you don’t have to do X or Y in a game. You could end up writing and then go onto publishing your IF in an entirely different publisher instead of CoG if you wanted to. But CoG, the company, has varying requirements, depending on which brand you submit your work to.
To answer your question about inclusive heroes over elderly, ugly, etc. type heroes, I would say that it’s what’s popular. Most people don’t really like slice of life, under dog stories in their IFs since IFs are primarily escapism fiction.
To answer your other question about why it’s strange that settings remain static despite swapping gender or any other choices, it’s - again - escapism. Pure and simple.
Besides obviously inappropriate story topics, the world is your oyster.
You can write a preestablished character or write a blank slate one. We have a few very successful publications where the MC is an established character.
You can choose to have the most detailed character customization or just the bare bones customization. It’s up to you.
When in doubt if you have questions or comments or concerns about your work, just ask your readers or ask around the forum and you’ll get answers. And from there? You can make an informed decision.
It depends on how you want to play the game. A lot of people take issue with how customizable the MC is in CoG or HG games because they would prefer to have a preset MC that they aren’t so much inserting themselves into as they are reading the story of this person for a while. But many others prefer to choose even if it seems a small, insignificant choice to those who do not. Particularly with romances, when you would like to imagine yourself actually taking the actions the MC does, it can be extremely off-putting to be told by the author you are attracted to someone you would never in a million years be interested in. And whether it’s a good thing or not, it has become the norm to avoid the latter rather than focus on avoiding a MC that may not have as strong of a voice/identity on their own without the “power of imagination” that CoG quotes. That’s the nice thing about CoG and HG though, there’s a wide variety of games available and more and more writers are creating or deciding to create their own visions every day. There’s tons of diversity in terms of what kind of perspective the authors are hoping to bring into their work, and with HG, there’s more freedom in how they execute it. I’ve played games where the MC is completely decided by the player, but there’s also games that more resemble a book you are engaging with as I mentioned before.
I could put that in a picture and hang it on the wall 
Exactly, I fought that too in the past, I might have liked a customizable character but instead of working on a superficial attribute just for the sake of customization and to add one string in some part of a 200k word game that says “your black hair shined under the sun” or “your brown hair shined under the sun” I might as well dedicate the effort to make a character with a complete background that form his personality and good and bad traits and behaviors and failures that make him look more real and not just a doll in which you put some color stickers on it.
Again, that is just the way I faced it, maybe someone can write a doll on the first page and work the way up to be a character with a player selectable job, attributes, background, hair color and all on the second page and have meaningful repercussions through all the story. For me that was not an option because I would very much like to finish the book while I live, so that’s something I sacrificed, I don’t know if the book will be bad or good or whatever, but is the way I liked it.
Regarding the subject of the character sex and relations with other characters, I guess that just like everyone I have my thoughts and my way to see things, and I’m not comfortable writing some genders, so instead of doing something that I don’t like and don’t know how to do and don’t even want to learn I preferred to stay in my comfort zone so to speak, that’ll for sure cost a lot of public that don’t like to play a gender_locked game, well, yes, but the game would be as I wanted to.
So, in resume, the question you should make yourself before start, are you writing for yourself?, or for the masses of different people all around the globe?
If you are writing for you, go ahead, restrict as many things as you want, but have in consideration the repercussions of that. And it goes the same for the other way.
Wow. I should really put all this enthusiasm on writing my book once and for all. Sorry for the long ramble
It is nice to be able to roleplay someone different, but when your gender and sexuality in real life are never represented the option of roleplaying someone different because a lot less valauble. After all if I want to immerse myself in a man or a woman I can just go and pick up basically anything else. Even in a TTRPG I would be wary of picking anything close to my real gender because I would be extremly wary of the other people around the table. When the option to pick my own gender is just not there, the option of being something else become a lot less valuable.
People absolutely do complain about being persoanlity locked. Just look at samurai of hyuga and the soul stones for too recent examples.
As other has said, though, you are not forced to do anything when you write hosted. Though, readers are not forced to pick it up either. Just as readers don’t pick up a game where it says “become the most feared pirate of the golden sea” if the reader is not into pirates.
I dont know whether it appropriate or relevant for me to comment, because I am not a writer nor experienced in writing.
But I want to write my personal views about few things maybe as a reader/player. I won’t be touching on technical stuff cause I don’t have wide knowledge about that.
This all came down to personal preference. Playing as a revolutionary pirate with a somewhat shady background seems like fun. Like how you yourself said playing as Hitler sounds interesting in order to understand what he is thinking and what is motivation of his actions. It will never justify what he done it but we may get insight of why he done many terrible things. Playing as shady characters is the same.
For example, Fallen hero. We played as a fallen vigilante now trying to get revenge. Some of the options given are “good” and some are “evil” but it was well received.
But why choosing gender and romance is important? It all come down to personal preference. For example, me. I like playing as male. I want to play as male. I prefer male ro but I don’t mind girls as long as the romance is good and I get to play as a male.
Sex and romance are elective because there’s is a wide variety of audiences . It impossible to satisfy everyone. So leaving it as elective is like a save move by the author.
By making sex and romance to be non-elective, it means that the author only target a certain part of the audience that may enjoy the content.
Personally I think the connection between the player character and the player themselves is important. Once they feel like there’s no connection between them and the player character, it hard to continue progressing through the game. So the first connection here is the gender they want to play as.
Something like that. Sorry if my point is hard to understand or if I m missing your point
I think a facet of player choice in gender and romance specifically that is being alluded to here in all our answers is that romance itself is inherently elective. In CoG and HG games, the player chooses whether they want romance to be included in the story or if they just want the story to unfold without it (generally at least, unless romance is integral or the key point). It follows then, that we should be able to choose what gender the MC/ROs are to make said elective experience as enjoyable and desirable to have as possible. At least in my opinion, there’s no point in making up tons of romances that a lot of your audience wouldn’t even be interested in due to gender/sexuality conflict when romance is a side plot in the first place.
We’ve discussed a lot of this before, but it’s certainly worthwhile to revisit these sorts of conversations!
I mean, I have to agree with @hustlertwo.
If a writer is designing a product with the intent to maximize sales of that product, the writer should be aware of audience/customer expectations and deliver on them. The purest form of that would be called “writing to market,” where the writer is focusing on delivering a story in a hot-selling genre, being sure to hit all tropes and expectations. IMO, with CoG/HG, that would include:
This is the SAFEST best, by far!
The other end of the spectrum would probably be something like, “I am writing what I like, and I’m going to execute it the way I want to.” These are passion products that may not have much commercial appeal, or maybe the writer wants to push boundaries, as we’ve talked about. These might look like…
There are always outliers, and we’re all painting with somewhat broad brushes here, but I think the above is pretty accurate.
Now, if we ALL “wrote to market” we might end up with monthly releases of “romancey superheroes” and “romancey vampires” and “romancey elves,” all between 150-200k words, and all using the same conventions, which might get pretty boring, but again the audience has to SHOW that it wants other things. And yes, there are hits well outside these parameters, but again we’re talking about the Safe Zone for what at least a large chunk of the audience has shown sells.
I want that post to be the first thing anyone who is looking to write a CS game reads. Like, stuck to the top of the Interest Check thread or something.
I know we tend to repeat ourselves around here a lot, but I think that has to not really having many stickies to work with, and the constant flow of new people.
I would love if we could do a sticky like this, but one that is more a wiki so that other authors could add their own takes. I wish there was a more streamlined process for new folks, readers and writers alike, to get acclimated. It’s a lot.
Hmm, I would be open to creating a stickied thread just for this type of thing, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean by it being a wiki type of thing. @Eric_Moser Would you be okay if I moved this specific line of discussion to its own separate meta thread where we can hammer out the kinks?
By wiki, I just meant I didn’t want anyone to think I was treating my opinion as gospel. I just wrote my opinion on the Safe Zone; I’m not sure if other HG authors would agree.
But yeah it might be fun to have a stickied thread, something along the idea of “Tips from Hosted Games authors for getting started” since CoG writers generally don’t hang out here, and they get their guidance right from CoG anyway.
And hey @rose-court!
Shiro, you are on point. It is just me that haven’t come to terms with peoples focus on gender, sex and diversity with CoG HG games. I am a cis person and fairly secure in my sexuality, but I would never read a story about Hitler, told from his point of view and say; at least he was male and heterosexual so I could relate to him. 
Using Hitler and references to him in game making as examples is something that we should avoid doing.
Thanks everyone!
Very well said. I think this is also why book romances can be very good, while at the same time I have basically never in 40 years of TRPG liked a campaign with lots of romance. Most of the time romance in TRPG feels cringy, strangely presented and a little off. In short there is a big difference between improvised theater, theater, books, multi player games and single player games. Inherently elective means it is very easy to present players with no real good choices when it comes to roamces. So I will probably go with limited and generic romances, if at all, and focus on other relationships/loyalties that are more easily portrayed in TRPG which is my forté.
I will definitely take a look at Samurai Hyuga and the Soul Stones. And it is good to hear that people also feel personality locked sometimes because that is a bigger problem for me personally. No matter if I chose my personality for my character and don’t find the correct choices, approaches or language in dialogue to fit that, or I get a personality chosen for me, or chose to play as myself.
I feel for you when it comes to your first point. I think it is great that there are options, in all media, for non cis MC’s, but I don’t really see that IF-stories are inherrently better at addressing these issues. Some stories can do it quite easily, others a little less so. It should be encouraged ofcourse, all diversity should be encourage, but I am a little sceptical about strict rules. But I do see your point about different point of views not being that enticing if you don’t have the option to chose your own to begin with. Never thought about it that way.
Stereotypes; a love hate relationship for sure.
Love your explanation and the variety that is out there. I guess I will aim low (and easy) and if things go well, aim for professionalism and safe in the future. 
Most people who want to look at things involving Adolf Hitler don’t really associate him with inclusiveness.
Genocide, mass murder, the Holocaust, Wars of Aggression.
Things like that.
Also, please use the quote function.