Do you play them as a straight self-insertion as originally intended? Do you use your real name in-game? Or as some bloke living in an alternate-reality Texas? Do they have much of a personality, apart from their Avatarhood? If so, is it a roleplayed one or your own?

I recently caught myself answering the gypsies questions with the sort of character in mind I envisioned myself playing rather than my own values. Not out of a sense of powergaming, but rather I believe because in the meantime since I first played this series as a kid, I have been so conditioned by many other RPGs regarding the meaning of role-playing as a sort of Stanislavsky method acting: that is coming up with a character entirely removed from yourself and filling them with life. Is the Ultima series the odd one out, maybe because of its less defined P&P roots, or do you play it in that vein, too?

I generally make my starting choices from a game mechanics standpoint. (Some could call it "powergaming", but I don't really like that term and similar ones.)

In Ultima 4 (non-NES), I generally like to play as a mage and avoid recruiting other companions; the mage is the best caster, gets the strongest ranged weapon, and armor differences don't actually matter once you attain Avatarhood. One problem with this game is that the classes aren't well balanced; fighters, in addition to lacking spellcasting capability, are unable to use any ranged weapon that will work in the Abyss. The style of character creation would work a lot better if the classes were more balanced, and if there's some indication that choosing the humble choice will make the game harder (Shepherd is quite obviously the worst class, and new players shouldn't start with that class).

In Ultima 6, I end up giving my Avatar as much INT as I can, since they are the only character with at least decent spellcasting ability (which honestly feels wrong to me). Thing is, the way MP is allocated in Ultima 6 is as follows:
* The Avatar gets 2x INT, which is a lot, and more than anyone else.
* Fighters get 0 MP, and hence can only cast spells through staves (which someone else will need to enchant).
* Bards get .5x INT, which is only a quarter of what the avatar would get with equal intelligence. They *can* cast spells, but will run out of MP quickly (and I note that 16 INT is needed if the character is to be able to cast 8th Circle spells, though you can easily beat the game before that level, unlike Ultima 4).
* Mages get 1x INT, but there are no mages that can join your party! Mariah and Captain Johne, two makes from Ultima 5, are in the game but nto recruitable. Jaana, who was a Mage In Ultima 5, is now a Fighter and can't use magic at all! (The game gives no explanation of this. Maybe someone should make a mod that makes her a Mage (as she should be), and gives her a spellbook with a selection of low level spells and a reagent pouch.)

One other thing, I always make the Avatar female. The only exceptions are Ultima 3 (where I'll sometimes make my characters the Other sex; yay for non-binary represenation!), and the NES version of Ultima 4 (where gender is determined by class and the game's language always assumes you are male, even if you are playing as one of the 3 female classes (Julia was replaced with a man in this version)).

Note that I have no intention of playing Ultima 8 or 9 due to the lack of the option to make the Avatar female.

I'm a game mechanics type of gal, and as a result, I have studied the mechanics of some of these games and it's rather interesting to compare them to Dungeons and Dragons, which is the P&P game from which most WRPGs trace their ancestry.

In D&D:
* Class, level, and strength affect melee accuracy. Ranged accuracy uses dexterity instead of strength.
* Evasion is affected by dexterity and armor worn.
* It's worth noting that armor reduces the chance of being hit, but does not affect the damage taken by an attack that hits.

In Ultima 3 and 4 (but not Ultima 4 NES):
* Dexterity affects all accuracy, while Strength affects damage.
* Armor affects evasion, but does not reduce damage. (This mechanic does feel D&D'ish; systems not descended from D&D tend to use armor as damage reduction.)
* Note that the mechanics are asymmetric; the party and the enemies follow different rules.

In Ultima 5 and 6:
* Accuracy is affected by Strength or Dexterity, depending on the weapon type (only blunt weapons use Strength)
* Strength does *not* affect damage, which is rather unusual.
* Armor reduces damage received; here the developers finally broke free of that D&D-ism.
* Dexterity affects turn frequency, while Strength affects carrying capacity (though in Ultima 5 only equipped items count against this).

In Dragon Quest 1 (for comparison):
* Accuracy is not affected by the attacker; each enemy has a fixed chance to dodge.
* Strength affects damage dealt (and is added to the weapon's attack power).
* Agility reduces damage received, ambush chance (IIRC), and chance of running away, but does not affect accuracy or evasion.

So, looking at this, we see that the Ultima games still hold on to their D&D roots mechanically, albeit only partially (though still more than DQ, which is very *not* D&D-esque in its mechanics). I see this as perfectly reasonable; answer the questions so that they give you the sort of character that *you* want to play. If you feel like playing as a decent fighter with limited (but not non-existent) magic, feel free to choose the choices associated with Sacrifice. If you want a challenge (and it's not your first playthrough), feel free to take the Humble option. Would rather prefer a character who presumably lives in harmony with nature (even though the game doesn't really reflect that well)? Choose Justice.

Interestingly enough, the remakes of Dragon Quest 3 start with a questionaire not too dissimilar top the Ultima approach, but it further ends with you actually being sent into a scenario where your actions determine your character's starting personality. (For example, maybe you're now a dragon who can kill people by breathing fire; do you just leave right away, or do you go on a genocidal rampage and kill everyone?) It's probably one of the few examples of actual role-playing (by the table top definition) that you'd ever find in a JRPG. (The actual effect isn't that big; it affects your personality, which affects stat growth, but not the abilities you learn, and personality can be changed with books.)

Hello all! It is nice to talk to you again.

I've always answered to my soul. I have always valued honesty above all so I always ended up with a mage.

Now I'm a scientist in real life so a bit of analysis is not above me. I have ended up making spreadsheets multiple times in my games. For instance I've made spreadsheets for all the different components of the game "sword of stars" and I also did the same for Star Wars: Rebellion.

I beat both 3, 4, & 5 back in my college days. I beat 1 years later when I got it through gog but I've not managed to beat 2, 6, 7, or 9. It hurts that I work something like 55 hours a week because of my background and training means I'm very much in demand even if the pay ends up poor as there are very few companies in my field.

I should add that I started thinking about this after reading the CRPGAddict's interesting musings on the character. It struck me as odd that he seems so appalled that the Avatar turned out to, after all, not be a representation of the player in the literal sense, when that is how I've been playing the game for a while. But then I remembered that as a child, Ultima IV indeed felt like it was "myself". Then again, maybe that has less to do with the approach of the game but rather the lacking powers of abstraction of an 11-year-old.

I think the situation is as follows:
* In the earlier games, the Avatar is intended to represent the player. There's the series of questions asked at the beginning of each game from 4 to 6, and there's an option to play as a female character as well.
* In Ultima 7, this started to become less pronounced. The questions at the beginning of the game were removed, and you can no longer type what you want to say, instead having to pick from a list. There's also the fact that the Avatar is pidgenholed into being a mage simply because there are no others (which Ultima 6 foreshadowed by having the Avatar be the only *good* mage; Ultima 6 has no recruitable Mages for whatever reason (can't recruit Mariah or Johne, and Jaana has inexplicably lost her magic). (Perhaps the need to rely on AI control for companions might be intended to help emphasize the player just being the main character, but that (with the real time battle system) just seems to make the battle system too chaotic and out-of-control for the player (the battle system change was the worst thing Ultima 7 did to the series).)
* Ultima 8 takes it further, with the option to play as a female character removed (hence female gamers like myself can't self-insert so easily any more), and also forces the player to do things that are clearly un-Avatarish.
* Ultima 9 is the one with the famous "what's a paladin?" line that the protagonist speaks, which even further differences him (because you are *still* limited to male for your main character's gender), making him feel even less like the player.

Also, it can sometimes be fun doing things in the game that you clearly wouldn't do in real life, and the game lets you do this. Speedruns are often funny to watch, with the Avatar doing non-virtuous things in order to beat the game faster, like cheating the reagent seller in Ultima 4 (you still have to make it up later, but in the NES adaptation, where money is more limited, it's worth the cost in virtue), or killing a child that has the rune you need in Ultima 6 (along with some lies because you talked to someone before doing what they told you to do). I have a math degree in real life. I sometimes do this sort of analysis (though I prefer to use Python rather than spreadsheets, and I've been learning some OpenGL/GLSL in case I need to do heavy GPU number crunching), and in fact, it's part of what I find fun. Sometimes I do experiments to figure out the game's mechanics, which end up looking a lot like actual scientific experiments might (I often need a control, for example).

(I also have a science degree, and a computer one, though those are batchelor's, while my math degree is a master's.)

(Also, note that I do have a serious interest in game design.)

(Does this post explain why I went into so much detail on mechanics earlier in this thread?)

Just looking for an interview about Dragon Quest 3's remake, and I found one for Dragon Quest 6 where the creator said "the main character in the game is actually the alter-ego of the player" (which, unfortunately, breaks down due to the forced male main character in much of the series, and the forced heterosexuality of DQ5; DQ3 and DQ4 are better, with the female character option and no forced relationships).

(I'm looking now for an interview with Richard Gariott, to see if he's ever said anything about whether the Avatar is supposed to represent the player in Ultima.)

Here, found a quote:

https://www.usgamer.net/articles/how-richard-garriott-got-players-to-start-thinking-about-the-choices-they-make-in-games

I agree, it's extremely frustrating how they jump back and forth between allowing customisation and predefining golden-mullet-male for the Avatar. I don't mind games with pre-defined protagonists at all, nor do I mins playing the opposite sex, but after you already created your own Avatar and brought her through five adventures, it was extremely annoying to find out you suddenly had to play a different character who was still treated as if he was the Avatar in your head. I never played UIX, but I remember being really confused by this and even searching for an option to switch gender in one of the World of Ultima spin-offs. Now I'm considering to just go with mullet man from the start to avoid this inconsistency.

Garriot's take is interesting there. He obviously has quite a spiritualist notion of "you", which I'm inclined to agree with. But when you abstract it to this level, that holds true for almost all games, as "you" are still the one making the decisions.

There's still a distinction between main characters with pre-defined identities, with default names and personalities, and the sort of character who could be a representation of the player. For example, if we take your typical non-DQ JRPG, you have a main character who is not intended to represent the player. Final Fantasy 4's protagonist, for example, is a dark knight named Cecil; it is clearly not representing the player. Then, later on, you even get JRPGs that actually *remove* the main character (or at least the one who's the main character at the start of the game) from the party. Imagine if an Ultima game did that; I'm having trouble doing so (assuming an Ultima game like 4-7 where you have a party and a specific main character; 3 doesn't have a defined main character, and the others give you only one playable character).

Of course, since I'm mentioning Dragon Quest, I could point out that Dragon Quest 4 does something strange; you choose the name and gender for the protagonist right at the start, but that character doesn't actually appear until Chapter 5. With that said, I could conceive an Ultima game taking that sort of structure; you'd basically be following the stories of some of the companions, like Shamino and Iolo, before the Avatar's arrival. and I think that could work.

(And, of course, I'm realizing that the Dragon Quest series is actually atypical for a JRPG, despite being one of the most famous examples of that genre. Going back to Ultima, it feels like that series, particularly earlier in WRPG history, is actually pretty atypical; you have Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and Might & Magic building off each other, while Ultima just does its own thing (until other WRPGs started to borrow a few things from it).)

(Of course, as I write about Ultima, I'm reminded of how Ultima 3 basically copied Wizardry's "resurrection failure turns character to ashes" mechanic, despite the game being totally different.)

I don't really think about the 'Avatar on Earth', besides the little bit covered in the game intros. But lately I like to think of him/her (tend to play them female in the games that will allow it, and sometimes 'other' in 3) as someone who desperately needs redemption by Ultima IV.

The Triad of Evil trilogy makes it really easy for your character(s) to not be much better than Mondain/Minax/Exodus. Going on massive theft and/or murder sprees. Especially with how primitive the early game characters are, having at most a single short line of dialogue.

Becoming the Avatar is perhaps something the character needs to do for him/herself far more than the official story of Lord British wanting a role model for the people of Britannia.

Don't forget:
* In Ultima 1, you *have* to commit murder (against someone in the castle) in order to beat the game (you need to rescue a princess from a castle, and killing the jester (IIRC) is the only way to get it).
* In Ultima 2, from what I've read, you *have* to steal in order to complete the game.
* Ultima 3 can be beaten without doing illegal or non-virtuous things, though in the NES version you can't get the Mystic Armor without stealing.

same can be said these days as the vast majority of games insist on a female only protagonist and that includes "role-playing" games that do not neceassarily force you to play a certain way but force you down an certain gender or look that some of us may not be pleased with. in fact, some old games are fan kickstarter "modded" for reverse stereo-type. for changing the male character to a female or if he remains a male, emasculating him and making him more cowardly. Then "revamping" the dialogue. so in your argument the reverse is just as true. this has been going on for the last 10 years. long enough for both parties to have a say in this!

you are not yet an avatar in these games. killing yeah, that is a real bad thing that won't go away. you are a bad person after that for the innocent are killed by your hand. As in real life. but stealing "illegal" is a word for the mortal. Good and/or spiritual people do it for the right reason. I like to think of it as when you are questing to become the avatar your evil is cast off as the Guardian. as for killing Iolo and gwenno for keys, it is more you are knocking them out. since when you return they are alive again.