you can change it - outside the game, which changes the whole parameter of the game. its not an option ingame. it sounds small, but that has a big difference on the pschology of the player (‘hacking’ the game vs just making the best character the game allows).
This is a singleplayer game, so I don’t really see the competitive aspect to it. If you want to challenge your self, you can choose bad traits. When comparing playthrough, I’m assuming you do this by posting memorial files, the playthrough with bad traits will of course looks more better than those that don’t. Forcing everyone, newbs or pros, to start on even footing despite this being a singeplayer game is silly in my opinion.
I’m aware of the psychological aspect to it, which is why it’s presented as a difficulty scale rating “survivability” rather than describing how “powerful” the character is. Of COURSE people are going to play as “demigod”, there’s no down side. But if that’s explicitly stated as an “easy character”, I think a lot of people will take up the challenge of playing more limited and difficult characters.
In df the distinction between a normal and demigod character was also pointless, you could trivially grind to make up the difference, so starting out as a demigod was simply skipping the early game grind.
In DDA, there are some transient stats you can make up in game, but 1. surviving early game in cata is a lot harder than df (last I played anyway) 2. we do have a lot of permanent traits you can only take at game start.
I agree with Kevin - there will be a psychological trait, but if anything this sort of change would encourage people to make LESS powerful characters. This is generally the sort of player base that chooses harder difficulty settings on purpose. Knowing that you’ve given your character enough benefits that he’s been pushed into “easy mode” is more than enough for most players to avoid it in a serious game, and for the competitive aspect you simple compare player characters in the same “bracket”, if you will.
It also means we can make some very expensive uber professions and keep them in mainline for people to play around with without making their characters less interesting - but they know that picking that profession puts them in “easy mode”.