This game is NOT an RPG. It is IMPOSSIBLE to rolepay

Optimally, like in an P&P rpg, skill development and personality expression go hand in hand. However, in the end, your skills - what you can do - is less defining for a character than your personality - what you *will* do with those skills, and why. Thus, I consider both aspects important, but one is less so than the other.

MEA actually illustrates this: you can switch skill templates, but noticeably remain the same character. However, if the autodialogue in the intro were different, you'd be a different one.

Never play BG, JE, KOTOR?

Might as well call FIFA 17 an RPG.

So the other half of the autodialogue didn't?

I picked logical and professional options and then my character became a Joss Whedon character on the planet with Liam. *shudder*

A good thing about ME1 is outside player controlled conversations Shepard was unvoiced.

Not saying ME1 was perfect before you all shoot me in the crotch.

But it was a good compromise between RPing and voiced protag.

ME:A ---- far, far below that standard. 10 years later, not improved, massively declined.

It is definitely more than ME1!

I honestly saw BW games as fanfiction. You take a character with a semi-written story and shape it as you go.

Not shape, more like observe.

I managed to shape a few of my characters into something they weren't at the start. It just takes time.

Creating your own story would be impractical.

But an RPG should have a good range of response based on logical assumptions that the a)world b)characters c)scenario creates.

In ME:A's case you are a person who has been asleep for 600 years and traveled light years away from home. This is the scenario your character finds itself in. Your character's reasons and feelings to this scenario should be the driving force behind your character for at least the first part of the game (before you can develop your character).  One logical reaction to this scenario is that your character has been forced by his/her parent to go on this trip and is deeply resentful of this. This is not an option in the game. If you are trying to RP this character it is completely torpedod the moment Ryder meets Liam and is all chummy and friendly jokey with him.  Maybe your character went on this mission because he/she is a serious scientific explorer. Another character personality torpedoed with the endless jokey auto-dialogue with Liam.

Hawke for example. I see people lean all the way one way with Hakwe, but I managed to make her start off gentle and optimistic, but after losing her mother, she becomes more aggressive and less sympathetic to mages like when she first moved to Kirkwall and starts making choices she normally wouldn't. By the end of the game she is just done with everything. That sweet optimistic woman saying "let's see what happens in a year" changed quite a bit.