I'm all for the spitball! hehe
These days I take issue mostly with the R in cRPGs, cause it seems to me that the sorts of roles we get to step into are largely similar across most games of this type. Character is expressed mainly through what the player character gets to say. So whatever mood or sense of spirit can be captured by something like a voiced line, or just the plain text word for word. We all know how the dialog trees tend to look. Usually there's a naive response coupled with a crass response, or sarcasm paired off with earnest, things like that. This fits pretty well with the limitations as they used to exist, but what I would be interested in is player choice within character creation that went a bit further than that to catch up. What I think would be particularly cool for a roleplaying game would be to start with an avatar who is essentially mute, and then see how far one can get in terms of character just from that alone, like via mask acting or pantomime conventions.
So having the character defined by how they move and emote and gesture rather than by their voice. Or put another way, to make "voice" encompass all that stuff too. I think that would be an interesting kind of characterization to explore. In the same way that a player usually has to select from a series of branch dialog choices or disembodied bark-sets, something similar could be done for dynamic figurative tropes. To use an analogy from comics, focusing on the action frames rather than the little text bubbles or thought clouds.
I imagine something very simple for a start, say selecting idles and some stock facial animations to convey the character's baseline. Maybe how they take their seat, or how they carry themselves just standing or walking around. I want my character to have certain ticks, but ticks that I get to choose. This could all be done before we even get to the point where we select a voice set for the specific sound, or a face for the specific look, or anything in wardrobe and makeup.
It could start with the body and then zoom-in, incrementally, as the player begins to flesh this all out in Char creation. Starting from the basics like gesture, and then going into the deets. Just as if one were trying to paint a character portrait, they might start with broad stroke concepts like that, then iterate once they found something that grabbed them.
Handled in that way, an RPG might be able to achieve something like emergent Character, to complement emergent gameplay, but where the character who emerges is recognizably riffing off the player's initial inputs. Where the player sets the initial parameters, maybe in some sort of dimly lit cave skiagram scenario, where they can pretend to be Praxiteles casting shadows on the wall. If the player can start to build a concept that works on that level, like at that basic level of the silhouette, then by the time we step out into the light and see it all come together, that character would feel uniquely invented. Like as if the player character really did innovate their role and can see their choices expressed, visually.
I've never seen such a thing, at least not in a SP type campaign, (as opposed to say an MMO where it's more important for various roles to feel somehow differentiated, just so you're not constantly running into yourself everywhere hehe.) It seems like a thing that could be done though, especially now that I've been playing BG3 for so long, and can sort of piece together what makes one particular bit character feel notable compared to some other bit character that maybe doesn't, or among the mains the same thing comparing say companions to the protagonists. In that game the companions got all the flare and all the nuance. The companions all get first dibs and end up like very well dressed Potato heads, whereas charname is sorta just left picking from whatever was leftover in the bucket of parts. For games like D&D I've seen version of this at various points, like for digital table top charsheets or whatever, but I haven't seen it animated out and actually brought into a game. I'm not sure why really, cause I think it's almost stand alone. Meaning you can almost scrape by without even needing a particularly compelling campaign or a story per se, provided the character creator is immersive enough. NWN basically demonstrated that as proof of concept, but if such a thing actually could be married to a compelling campaign/story then it's on hit right?
I honestly don't know how many technical artists one would have to hire, probably quite a few, because the whole idea would be to have artists create the tool that then allows the average player to be their own character artists. Not exactly paint by number, but sort of like that. I think it would require a particular skillset to take what a portrait painter or character actor does, and translate that so that the language/grammar that an artist would just use. Like the main things already exist in modelling and animation and rigging suites but those are all very complex things to use. Presented in a way that a non specialized player could actually use and made part of the initial gameplay I think that would take off.
Not a hodgepodge of sliders, but an actual matrix of gestural and emotive concepts that is readily adapted and presented to the player as archetypes. The conventions from cartoons, or comics or slapstick silent era cinema more or less. I think it should start there, at like the level of Rocky and Bullwinkle. You can't make it avant garde or all extra idiosyncratic and new wavy, until the basic tropes are established. I think most RPG players can probably vibe on that, because most characters are going to riff on some kind of familiar archetype, probably coming from more established stories in novels or movies, just where the player gets to put their own spin on it. I don't think anyone would be able to create such a thing at one go, seems like something that would have to get built over time in successive waves, but I've yet to see the foundation on it even. I just want to glimpse it one of these days, in a game that has sufficient staying power to keep that concept humming beyond just a single curated campaign.
Weirdly I feel like 4x games sometimes can pull this off, but they do it at the level of like civilizations and armadas, rather than individuals, which is kinda funny. Just cause of the AoE and Civ mentions, or like how to have a computer GM who's looking to thwart our alternative timeline and throw obstacles in our way on the fly, that feel like they are somehow catered towards us specifically. I thought BG3, sorry to always keep brining it up, just that it remains top of mind, but I think BG3 did manage to touch on the idea with the Daisy/Dream guardian set up. So sorta like, not just defining your character by how they look and sound, but by what they dream of at night. But then they didn't really follow up on that in any terribly meaningful way. An interesting concept might have been something like creating ones own nemesis, or their own Yoshimo, but then not knowing how that all will coalesce in the end to form the big reveals, or surprises down the road. Or just that whole idea that everything which is chosen in character creation or in the prologue would have knock ons that just kept knocking on the entire game, all the way to the finish. In pathfinder we had the mythic paths, but then the framing there was sorta more frontloaded. I think it was almost too much there at the outset, and perhaps not as emergent as one would want for a more general sort of audience that isn't as familiar with planning out their character build/arch - or with the same sorta systems familiarity that a game like pathfinder assumes the player has. What I mean is rather, the character creation stuff that doesn't even require it, cause it's operating more on the level of like universal/generic character tropes, and not stuff like say class or fantasy race or level progression.
I just keep coming back to this idea, that the player is somehow their own casting director and the character creation process is like some version of an audition, and we get all that sorted with the look and the voice in broad strokes, but then it keeps on going. We go from casting director to voice coach and motion coach, hair and makeup, wardrobe and then the really important decisions like which sword hehe. The whole thing should be like a campaign unto itself and maybe take several sessions just to get through that and the prologue. By the time the lights dim and the show begins for real, we'd already be halfway to total immersion.
Anyhow, I might have switched from spitballs to paper airplanes or jacks or something mid-post, but anyway, yeah. Just were head ran hehe
