#that reminds me baldur's gate got integrated mods and fellas. i'm tempted

[rad-roche]

i think the way people engage with character creation screens in rpgs is interesting. i wouldn't say insightful, necessarily, i don't think it reveals anything about a person's character other than a particular preference, but interesting. i also think it's pretty personal, in that you can encounter somebody engaging in it in a wholly different way and go wait, huh? here are a few camps for your consideration, with the assumption that this is the first playthrough of an unfamiliar property

the self-inserter: my name is jane doe and so i have made jane doerún, the tiefling warlock. her preferences are my preferences. jane doerún is going to go on a sick ass adventure and kiss the cool companion and it's gonna rip. and it does! not the way i play at all but make no mistake jane doerún i respect the hell out of you. of course, every character you make, every dialogue choice, is going to be a tiny bit of a self-insert. it has to be, unless you get somebody else to play the game

the scholar: before the download finished i had 73 wiki tabs open combing through obscure links to find particularly juicy morsels for backstory. my character is the tragic heir of the house of smimble, a location i will not reach for ninety hours and will pronounce incorrectly in all that time. there is a spreadsheet involved somewhere. this lore is canon-compliant and watertight. if my character was dropped in this world, nobody would bat an eye. again, not my jam, but i see the draw

the waffler: cool appearance, very vague semblance of a backstory, but choices ingame are made without consideration for character beyond 'what cool thing happens if i push this button'. then, at the end of the 100 hours, locks in a character and starts changing things around retroactively. this is very much my camp. gloria 1.0 was very vague and vibe-y. now she has two whole books and a comic. if that's not weapons grade waffling i don't know what is

uses a preset, minmaxes stats, skips all dialogue and cutscenes on the first round: i see the appeal intellectually but am a tiny bit afraid of you