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First of all, first post here and all that malarkey, so forgive me if I come of as a bit newbie-ish. Right I have a few ideas floating around my that degenerative wonderbox I like to call my brain, and I was wondering what would people prefer? 

A Pre-determined Character would be much more well-constructed, and it'd also be less writing intensive then writing a story of a character made by the reader, as there would be less variables considered. On the other hand, a created character might be more easier to feel immersed as playing as them. I've got a story I'd like to write, but first I'd like to see what people prefer.

Well, make your own is always nice but it's a huge risk. It takes a shit ton of scripting to pull it off, and who knows if it'll even be good after that. For an example, look at Mommy, May I Go Out and Kill Tonight by Madglee if it's back up. I know he took it down to update it but I have no clue if he re-published.

I've read through that particular story, and I was thinking more of the gender of the character, the appearance, maybe starting faction and such. Scripting is one thing I was wanting to avoid, I was thinking just doing it through normal links. I know this would require a ton of going back, copy and pasting the same pages, with slight alterations, and would ultimately VERY time consuming,  but considering the amount of free time I have ( IE: the whole day for another couple of weeks) I think I could pull it off. I could handle the extra work. I was just wondering whether it would weaken the writing to the point where a I would be better off with a fully fleshed out character would be the better option.

I don't think it would weaken your character. Allowing the player to decide what kind of character they end up becoming is a cool idea.

Thanks for the encouragement! 

Hmm, honestly a pre-determined character would be much easier for you as the author, I think. Though, I think there is a sort of 'middle ground'. What I've done with a game I'm working on is a pre-determined main character, but the player's choices throughout the game trigger different variable scores to go up and down. I call them Behavior variables.

Basically, depending on the choices the player makes, the variable scores will trigger certain options(or scenes) to appear/disappear giving the character a more personalized feel to him. 

That's how I tackled it. But, you have to keep careful track of what score the player is capable of having per variable up to the point where you create different paths that will appear or be hidden based on scoring. When I first started I accidentally put impossible scores in the link restrictions and it was impossible to get any of the paths until I realized it and calculated the possible scores. 

There may be scripts that are much easier than what I just described. I know practically nothing about scripting :(

As for what I personally prefer, it depends on the story. Certain games suit pre-determined characters and vice versa. It all depends on the authors approach. :)

That's a lot like Mass Effect 3. Instead of just letting your Renegade and Paragon scores allow you to intimidate and inspire,they actually control what Shepherd will do in the game. For example, when you're on Sur'Kesh and there's a bomb on the elevator when teh doors open, I've seen Shepherd react in 2 different ways. The Paragon Shepherd shouted "Bomb! Everybody get down!" and throws himself to the floor after giving everybody a warning, but the Reneage Shepherd just says "crap, a bomb!" and throws himself to the ground, uncaring if any of the Salarians die. It's a pretty neat system.

Tl,dr: I like that system.

That is actually quite a good system.  I get what you mean with that mass effect analogy. Still being completely inept at most things in life, I think I'll avoid scripting and such until I have a bit more experience under my metaphorical belt. Do you think Gender choice has a major impact on the story? I'm leaning towards the pre-determined character, but I'd like to at least have that as an option. Stories would close to identical for both, except certain encounters which would be wildly different.

I wouldn't say it would affect EVERY choice, but it would make things differ. For example, in a tense situation, men would be pumped by testosterone and might make a more violent choice than the woman. I would advise adding a co-author of the opposite gender, to write pages where these choices would occur. He/she wouldn't write every page in the branch, just what you feel should be an authentic-feeling choice, and you two could likely converse about how each gender would react. Of course, you could just do that here, but still.

I was thinking more of (this will be a mature story) Certain characters Either threatening the player with violence (male) or with a*ahem* deviant acts (Female). I'd rather write most of it myself tbh, I'm not entirely sure if I could find someone of the opposite gender whose writing style I agree with, although if I did I agree that would probably be a good way to go about it. 

I'd also like to just quickly thank all you guys for the advice, I was unsure at first but this seems to be a really good community.

I did that system entirely without scripting :) If you want me to explain how I did it in more detail I can. I haven't been here long either, but both editors are easy to learn once you play with them a bit ;)

I'd really appreciate that. The system seems perfect for what I'm writing, which is basically two different spirits/mindsets (whatever you want to call them) trying to influence the reader/main character into doing certain actions. If you keep siding with one of them too much, eventually you'll have less control of those decisions, but be rewarded with additional paths. It probably sound a bit confusing (Im bad at explaining things) but I like the idea. Could I ask you later on about how you did that? I'd like to flesh out the story quite a lot more before I do the adittional paths and such.  

Ok I think I understand. That should be fairly easy to work out a system for. You can message me anytime! I'd be happy to explain it all when you are ready. :D

Alright thanks again!

Doing that without scripting sounds hellish! Scripting was originally conceptualized practically for this very situation!

It's a bit of a pain. But, not knowing scripting I already figured out a way to do it with just the plain variables and link restrictions. 

I would love to know how to do it through scripting, though. :)

It doesn't LOOK difficult, but I'm far from a talented scripter. The solution I can see is based on the variables you were talking about, like have a personality variable, then in a link script at a certain choice you could right

IF %PERSONALITY > 2 THEN $DEST := P34

I haven't scripted in months so that's extremely rusty and most likely flawed :P

If I'm understanding that script right(probably not). It seems like I would still have to calculate the possible points for each variable, though. That's the difficult part for me. I don't mind manually setting it as a link restriction. It's the calculating possible points that get me. 

For example let's say I have 2 possible links that will appear based on the Brave variable.(Page A, Page B). Page A link restriction is Brave > (highest possible Brave variable score - 2). Page B < (highest possible Brave variable score -2).

It's the keeping up with the highest possible score for each of the as of now 14 behavior and 9 relationship variables that gets to me. My lap top doesn't have excel which is what I would have used to keep up with it. So I'm trying to go back through each page(over 100 so far) and calculate each variables possible scores at the end of each chapter so that I know what number to put in for the link restriction.. -_- I would literally give anything to have a script to calculate that for me.

EDIT: I think I'm going to post about this question on the advanced editor forum.

Being able to create your own character is cool, but only if your choices actually make an impact during the game (though it can still add flavor (like name, gender, age, etc) even if it is all just cosmetic). If you are going to use a variable heavy game with lots of random (dice determined outcomes) then having a PC build is worth it. If you are going to do a game based on little or no random rolls, but more on link choices, then it's not really needed.

I was also wondering how hard it would to implement a name choice? I recall on some other cyoa website the player was able to choose from a few predetermined names, or create their own. Is there anyway I could implement that feature on this site? Or should I not bother and the main character is not referred to by name, or referred to by a title of somesort?

Unfortunately we don't have text variables, which makes writing your own name impossible, but you could have some predetermined names to choose from and a variable set to a different number for each name. I wouldn't recommend it though, as it'll be a lot of extra work for a minor detail. 

You can do it, but the Scripting is very heavy. Basically, you need a Variable for each Digit in the name with a value from 0 to 26. Then you have a massive code on each page to show the name. For example, a name with six letters in it requires 162 parameters to show on a page. For the most part, it's just not worth the trouble.

Having a list of premade names to choose from is a lot easier, because you only need a Name Variable and a value and number of parameters for it equal to the number of choices.

For example: The %NAME Variable has a value of 1 to 3. You'd use the following anywhere you wanted the name to show on a page -

%%NAME%=%1%Bob%%%%NAME%=%2%Fred%%%%NAME%=%3%Jake%%