RPGs will be like. Okay, here's the the most beautiful portrait of a character we could render. And here's the goofiest fucking 3D character model you've ever seen.

A big thing about me and RPGs is that I do not need or even want the game to constantly reassure me that my player character is the specialest and most important person who ever lived. Yes, they are the hero and most of the time the main character, and the power fantasy that comes with being level 100 in a video game and eating monsters for breakfast is fun. But for me that power fantasy needs to be balanced with the verisimilitude of a world that doesn't feel like it revolves around one character 100% of the time. I want NPCs that are rude to my OC. I want NPCs who don't like them. I want NPCs who don't know who the fuck they are and don't care. I want to feel like they can lose sometimes, not because they found the One Other Character who is as badass as they are but just because they are a person and sometimes people lose. I want them to sometimes participate in stories that are about other people. Because for me, if they are too special and too perfect and too powerful, it's not just the character that stops feeling believable and engaging; the entire world stops feeling real and inhabited, and starts to feel like just a flattened tableau to pose in front of. And that's not what I want out of a game. I want a world to play in that feels vaster and fuller than one character could ever know. And it's infinitely possible to make a world feel like that if you just make parts of the world indifferent to and even casually hostile to the player character without being villains. They aren't your archnemesis. They just don't know you. Ma'am, this is Fantasy Wendy's. It is good worldbuilding for a world to not fawn over your player character all the time and this is a hill I will die on.

adding real-time minigames to your turn-based combat is a great way to engage the more action-y parts of our brains. it's also a great way to make combat trivial to anyone really good at those minigames.