Poll: All else being equal, what do you play as?

[Asita]

Note:
Race here means ethnicity. For the sake of total clarity here, 'race' is not being used in any fantastical sense, but as we use it in real life and as it applies to humans. It means Black, White, Asian, Native American, Latino, etc, not what species you'd choose for your pathfinder character.

This is something that I've been mulling over for a while now, at least as long as I actually took note of my character creation habits, which show roughly even distribution of male and female PCs but very little variation in terms of race. So naturally, I'm curious as to what other gamers do with their PCs.

Assuming that a given game that you're playing has a character creation system, how do you craft your character? Do you gravitate towards what you see in the mirror or do you change it up a bit? This is, of course, presuming that you have the options, and - just to reiterate - this premise only assumes human options, and is not asking about whether you play elves, orcs, khajiit, androids, undead, tieflings or whatever. That's another question for another time. And to the min-maxers out there, just assume that there is no statistical variation in this hypothetical system, so stats don't factor in. We're looking at this from an almost purely aesthetic perspective.

With that as a given, do you jump freely between male and female PCs? Between PCs with noticeably different skintones? Neither, both? Does it matter if the game includes different romance options? What do your characters end up looking like?

 

[Zhukov]

All over the place.

I haven't kept a tally or anything, but I can't think of any particular pattern in terms of gender.

Oh, except in multiplayer or MMO-ish games I tend to go male. I really don't need people giving me the, "Are you a girl IRL?" routine. Although that's become less of a thing over time.

In terms of race/skintone I tend to go with something in the range of swarthy olive to lightly toasted brown (think middle eastern), just for aesthetic reasons. Sometimes pale can look good too though, so eh, whatever works.

EDIT:

Spoiler: Actually, just for the heck of it, here's a list of every character I can remember making recently.

(Elves, orcs, aliens, robots etc not included, except when they're visually indistinguishable from the humans.)

Mass Effect 1-3 - One swarthy female, one white male
Dragon Age: Origins - Made one character for each origin, then picked my favourite. One black male, two white males, one white female, two dark skinned females.
Dragon Age 2 - One swarthy female, one white male.
Planetside 2 - One white male
Dragon's Dogma - One black female
Kingdoms of Amulurblahblur - One grey skinned female
Dark Souls - One male, can't remember colour.
Kotor - One black male
Kotor 2- One pale female
DayZ - One brown male
Baldur's Gate 1+2 - One white (I think) male
Brink - One Asian male
Fallout - One male, one female (no option for race)
Fallout 2 - One male (no options for race)
Fallout 3 - One female, don't remember colour
Jade Empire - One Asian male
Mount & Blade - One brown female
Torchlight 2 - One brown female

Like I said, all over the damn place.

 

[MysticSlayer]

More often than not, they are the same race as me. The only exception I can think of is my first FemShep, and that was honestly not intended. It just turned out that her "tan" was much darker than I anticipated based what she looked like on the creation screen.

After that, I seem to have a mix. I may do male more frequently still, but it seems more like I'm switching between male and female rather regularly. I think it's just that I've finally gotten over the "icky" factor some men have to playing a female character.

 

[Raikas]

I picked the "usually same sex/not usually same race" option, although that's a bit of an oversimplification.

I usually play a male character when I have a choice (although if I'm replaying something I'll try the female option at least once), but I rarely make the characters look any one way - for one thing I enjoy messing around with character creation tolls, and when I'm replaying I like to make the characters look distinct from each other.

 

[Tanis]

Other:
Whatever looks the best.

Some games have UGLY options for my race or sex.

So I'll go with the one that's not ugly to play as.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Generally I play as female characters, often of the human race though race is variable depending on how that race is represented in the game in question. In Dragon Age, for example, I found the dwarves and both varieties of elf much more interesting than the humans, so I played as them.

Romance options do have some bearing on my choice of gender. As stated above, I like playing as female characters but if that means my only romance options are going to be male then I'll often play as a male instead.

 

[DoPo]

Whatever looks/sounds better. Or, alternatively, whichever is less annoying. That's it really. I have made, say, female characters because I liked a haircut a female had, and I have made a male character because...dunno, something else. And for the latter principle of choosing, most recently I started playing Might and Magic 10 - Legacy and I found most, if not all, combinations of race/voice to be rather annoying, so I tried to pick the least annoying ones.

As for race (if present as a choice), to be honest, I tend to go non-human. Mostly because humans are too often generic and boring.

 

[TheRiddler]

I generally play as myself, in terms of sex, race, hair color, height, etc. It helps me feel like I'm actually there. Makes the experience a bit more immersive. I know, I'm boring that way.

 

[Voulan]

I only tend to play as a female when given the chance to match my gender, but race does not bother me in the slightest, as long as it's humanoid.

 

[Meg Galuardi]

I tend to play female not only because I'm female, but because playing female custom characters is the only way to get a decent female protagonist in a video game. Almost every game where you can't choose has a male protagonist so this helps balance it out for me.

That said, I go all over the place in terms of race. I tend to choose what I think is the most aesthetically appealing or appropriate in the graphics engine/world in question.

In terms of species, I actually don't do humans usually, because I'm looking for variety. I mostly go for elves if that's an option, or something weird.

 

[Caiphus]

Same race and sex. Played as a male human in DA:O, in pretty much every MMO I either play as human, or the closest thing to a human. Occasionally will roll a female character, but my main is generally male.

What else lets you choose your race? Uuh. Not much, I guess. But yeah, I'm completely boring, and usually try to make my game characters look like me.

Edit: Ooooh, I understand the OP now. For some reason I thought we were only talking about games with elves/orcs/whatever. Okay, well even in human only games, I still try and play as myself.

 

[Cerebrawl]

I tend to play same sex(male), but race options are all over the place. Sometimes I pick the best looking, but often I just go for the stats I want. Even if the race is human, skin colour and racial features are all over the place, I can play white, black, asian, etc. I don't really care. I do often end up going for a tan skintone and try to mimic my own features as well as possible if the facial modeling system is really good(better than Bethesda's) though, even if it's mostly futile.

TL;DR I picked equal variation of race but not sex across my characters.

 

[grey_space]

I tend to go for the stock character unless s/he really annoys me.

And that is rare.

Generally male although in dark souls 2 I hopped in the coffin, changed my sex, didn't realise straight away and genuinely didn't notice for ages after until I stripped my character naked to better min/max my armour sets (it's a thing I do) and realised my character had breasts and a rather rounded bum.

I haven't bothered my arse going back to change her back so I'm a chick in Dark Souls now. It actually kinda fits my high dex build now I think of it....

So anyway yeah op; I don't care, in the main but generally male, because that's the default.

 

[Radeonx]

It's generally pretty random, except for WoW, where I will generally always roll female, due to virtually every single male armor model looking absolutely horrendous. Otherwise, I don't really care, so I just pick whatever I feel like at that specific time.

 

[-Dragmire-]

In Character creation, when creating a male character, I always try to make the character look like me. It's not too hard as I have a couple defining features like my thick eyebrows that allow me to make something that resembles myself.

When creating a female character, my skintone of choice varies a bit more but not by much(pasty white to slightly tanned as opposed to the male character which is almost always pasty white[footnote]there's got to be a better word than 'pasty' but it escapes me at the moment. Pale isn't really what I'm thinking of[/footnote]). Oddly, my female characters almost always look eerily similar to each other even though I don't make a deliberate effort to do so. FemShep is an exception but that's due to a limitation of the character creator, notably the hair options.

 

[Asita]

Edit: Ooooh, I understand the OP now. For some reason I thought we were only talking about games with elves/orcs/whatever. Okay, well even in human only games, I still try and play as myself.

Righto...I think I'll go ahead and put that clarification at the start just to be doubly sure the intent got through...

 

[Caiphus]

Righto...I think I'll go ahead and put that clarification at the start just to be doubly sure the intent got through...

Haha, sorry. I just read "presuming you have the options." and then saw "elves, orcs, khajiit..." in the same sentence. Skipped the salient bit in the middle, filled in the gap, and assumed I knew what I was talking about . Whoops.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

Depends on a few factors. First is the kind of romance options. If there's a girl in the game that I think would be interesting to do some kind of romance route with, then I would pick a male character. Second, it would depend on how much more fun playing as either sex would be; I find the idea of a man jumping around Cyrodiil punching things in the face and throwing Hadoukens from the shadows funnier than the idea of a woman doing the same. If neither of those things are a factor, I default to a female character, especially if the aesthetic options are better for female characters. Finally, I generally play as a race that resembles myself (i.e. Caucasian human), though if there's a race that would be funny or novel in some way (i.e. a "lizard wizard" in the Elder Scrolls) or a race that I would consider more aesthetically pleasing in some way, then I may choose them.

I tend to default to human, Caucasian, female characters because I usually find them to be the most aesthetically pleasing. However, if there are romantic sidequests that I'd be interested in pursuing, then I'd choose to be male, since usually only men can romance girls, and being a girl would lock me into romancing men and I don't really have any interest in romancing men. The fun factor tends to overwrite these, though, since that's the reason I play games in the first place. If fun and romance aren't factors, I go with the avatar that looks best, which is usually a cute girl.

 

[ZtH]

I just popped open guild wars to check how my characters spread out and I would say that I go equal across sex, but tend to play the same race as myself. I'm actually perfectly 50/50 on my characters in Guild Wars at least, and I've been playing female characters more often, but I actually find it concerning that from my characters I almost always play the same race as myself.

 

[Headsprouter]

I never really get into romance in video games if it's a choice, so that's irrelevant for me. I never make females. What race I pick depends on how cool the races are, although usually I'll pick the least human character. Guild Wars 2 had the achievement of every race giving me an overwhelming sense of "meh", so I just went with a human for the sake of better identification.

Example: First playthrough of Skyrim and all Elder Scrolls games I've played to date Crowbar "Crow" the Argonian thief and his descendants/ancestry, all the same name, all the same role. I've had probably a dozen different characters in Oblivion, played as one in Morrowind (although in a much earlier playthrough I was the ragin' raptor, but I barely consider that part of my "canon"), but my second dedicated character in Skyrim has been myself. I've had a "me" in Oblivion, too.