The different kinds of custom characters

Image: Dungeons and Dragons 5E fanmade character sheet (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Since the earliest days of gaming developers have wanted players to project themselves on the character they play as. The silent protagonist was the earliest form of the custom character allowing a new level of immersion for the player but as technology advanced developers have put the power of creating these characters into the players hands, but custom characters come in many different forms and have many different uses. 

One of the most typical custom characters are the blank slates which predate video games and go right back to the days of the tabletop games. Some games with examples of this are Fallout: New Vegas where outside your characters being a courier everything else about them is decided by you. Another example of this would be Baldur’s Gate 3 where due to its heavy inspiration from old tabletop games, itallows you to have complete control about every detail of your character. These types of characters are usually more common in more detailed and traditional roleplaying games. 

Another type of custom character is more of a middle ground. You do still have a lot of control over these characters such as their love interests, personalities and how their stories end but there are many more preset details about them. Cyberpunk 2077 does this where you can choose the protagonist V’s life path, dialogue and ultimately how their story ends. Despite this you will follow a predetermined path and have a similar personality whatever choices you make. Another middle ground is in Fallout 4 where unlike other Fallout games your characters backstory is decided for you. The protagonists always looking for his or her son and have you preset backstory of being a soldier if you’re a male and a lawyer if you choose to play a woman. This gives the player less control but allows there to be a stronger narrative focus on the overall end goal for the character. 

The final type of custom character is the preset, this may sound counter intuitive but many RPG’s like the Witcher will have a preset character that has a design, a personality, a backstory and a goal. This may sound absolutely nothing like a custom character, but the player can still make many choices that effect this character in terms of their moral standing, their romances and other gameplay things such as if they use a sword or bow. Despite less control over these characters by the player, in a sense they still have elements of custom characters. 

Overall custom characters have their place in gaming and play a very important role in the industry and especially the RPG genre where they help us connect to a character, even if they are not all our own.