When Less Is More: Player Characters, Customization and Leaving Room for Headcanon

There is no element more important to an RPG than the Player Character. As the player’s avatar, they are the focal point of the whole experience. It is through them that the player gets to explore the world and the characters who inhabit it.

For most games, this means that the player is playing as a pre-established character—boot up the Witcher or Horizon series and you are walking in Geralt of Rivia or Aloy’s shoes. By playing as them, you not only experience the world they inhabit, but you also have a hand in how their journeys unfold. Depending on the choices you make, you may see different angles of their characterization, but at the end of the day they are always the same character. Regardless of who is playing the game, they are always going to go through the character arc crafted for them by the game’s writers.

But then, of course, there is the whole subgenre of RPGs where the player character is player created. While the overarching story may remain the same, one player’s character will be vastly different from another’s. The intention here is to give as many avenues for roleplay as possible. Because interactive fiction games are text-based and there is no visual avatar for the player, they can theoretically have more diverse and more in-depth options than any other type of RPG. It is quite simple to have a list of boxes for the player to check, determining everything from basic details to incredibly specific traits.

But what does customization look like in practice? What does that checklist do? How does the player’s selection impact the game? How much flavour text is determined by the player’s character creator choices? How many choices? How much does the game shift depending on what they’ve chosen? And how is that choice ultimately reflected in game?

When it comes to customization, you generally want to strive for those options activelydoing something. Variety and customizability is a good thing, but it can be very easy to get carried away with it. You can have a long list of options, but if they only become a list of character traits on a character page and don’t actually have any utility, that breadth of customization becomes hollow. To give your CC options substance, you need to have some basic definition.

Some of these differences are straightforward, such as elements that often do not have much of an impact on the PC’s existence within the game’s world—physical appearance (hair colour, eye colour, etc.), gender, presentation (clothing choices, tattoos, scars). Others are more complex—race/ancestry, origin, personality, morality, relationships.

With this in mind, one could assume that the more fleshed-out an option is in-game, the better the customization, and therefore the better the roleplay experience. However, there is a point where too much definition impedes roleplay rather than supports it.

Crafting a roleplayable player character is a bit like making a colouring book. You need to create the picture—give the broad strokes, some outlines, and some direction. There may even be the assumption that some colours should go in certain places. But once the book is in someone else’s hands, it’s their prerogative to do whatever they want with it. They can colour all their tree trunks purple. Make the grass red. Or the sea yellow. They can colour neatly inside the lines or out of it.

Colouring books are like player imagination. It is broad and infinite and you really don’t know what someone is going to do with your creation. It is impossible to account for player imagination in text, but that doesn’t mean you should its potential completely. This is where leaving room for headcanon comes in.

Headcanons are integral to roleplay. These are the ideas and concepts that the player creates for their character, fleshing them out beyond the boundaries of the text. But because headcanons specifically do not exist within the game itself, it is easy to dismiss them as less than the defined, concrete parts. But roleplay doesn’t exist without some degree of headcanon. The player utilizing what exists in the text as a jumping off point to define their character for themself is a very personal part of having a player-created character in the first place.

And I think there are times when giving room for the player to headcanon makes for a better player experience than outright defining it in the text.

Take family, for example. In Wayfarer, the PC can come from six different origins, all of which imply different types of relationships with their family. But how far this implication goes or how it is interpreted is up to the player. There is room for the player to imagine what they want, and this will be different for all players. Did they have a close relationship with their family? Were they distant? Was their family neutral to their lack of magic—or did they hate it? What was their family makeup like? Were they from a single-parent home? Did they have two mothers? Two fathers? Was their family unit large, encompassing grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins? Did they have none of this?

Because there’s so much potential for variety here, Wayfarer cannot define the MC’s family for the player. To give it definition—these are your parents’ names, here’s your sibling, your cousins, and the type of relationships you have with them—takes away from the roleplay experience and moves it closer to the experience of playing a pre-determined character. However, if the game diddefine those elements, then they could be used concretely later in game (i.e. using the MC’s family in a later subplot and having them actually show up). But that would mean selecting specific iterations and applying them to all player characters, across the board.

There’s a balance here. On one hand, there are the practicalities of customization. I, as the writer, can’t see into the players’ head, know what they are imagining, and then reference that in text. In order to reference something and actually use it in-game, it has to be concrete: your hair is black, your eyes are brown, your heritage is half-aeda, you have a scar on your knee from falling out of a tree.

But on the flip side, leaving room for headcanon gives the player more flexibility to personalize their character in a way that is meaningful to them. Your heritage is half-aeda, but which parent was aeda and which was human? What kind of relationship did you have? You got a scar from falling out of a tree, but what were you doing up there in the first place?

Now, of course, I could take the time to define that for the player, but ultimately there will be options that would be missed. Character traits and elements pile up quickly and it isn’t possible to account for everything. Eventually, you will have to make a decision about what elements you want to define and which ones you do not. And the more you define, the closer you are to making a pre-established character rather than a player-created one.

Ultimately with player-created characters, you want to have choices that are vaguely specific—just enough definition to guide the player down the right path and to have a CC option feel like a substantial choice, but with enough room to allow the player to imagine things on their own terms. Headcanons are a part of roleplay, and creating an environment that can support them and not contradict them later down the line (within reason) is key to creating a solid, roleplayable character that feels unique to the player.