Point of Order: In Curse of the Azure Bonds, having a woman in your party allowed you to chat with the Swanmays and receive their mark, letting you bypass some of the onerous Drow patrols in the area. I don’t remember anything gender based in PoR or SSB, though.
It wasn’t a trilogy, there were 4 games including the final one, Pools of Darkness. I have really fond memories of those games.
This is me as well. Given the option, I tend to play an idealized version of myself, or someone I’d like to be, and my cis-malehood is a pretty important part of my self-definition. If I’m playing “someone else”, then whatever.
In the latter case, whether I play a man or a woman very much depends on the game. I’ve found that in games featuring a lot of romantic options, I tend to select a woman. That’s because, unfortunately, I still feel uncomfortable playing a man having sex with other men, whereas I have no problem playing a woman having sex with other men or with other women - so playing a woman effectively doubles my sexual target list, so to speak. That’s why I prefer playing Kassandra in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, for instance (also because the voice acting is better) .
Another game I prefer playing a woman is in the Saint’s Row games (3 and 4). There, it’s because having a woman as the gang leader protagonist helps undercut the games’ testosterone-drenched macho dramatics. It’s somehow a more relaxed, funny game with a woman in charge.
There was a cartoon in Dragon, “Why our characters do what they do.” A guy is slumped in a chair looking at his buddy. From off panel his wife is nagging about something, there’s an infant squalling in a playpen, and a dog is pissing on his leg. The caption: “So how about it, Phil? Wanna go on another dungeon crawl?”
As a young boy, I used to feel sexually confused playing Metroid. So I was very relieved when it was revealed that Samus was a woman under all that armor.
Seriously, wasn’t Lara Croft one of the most popular playable gaming characters ever?
Sure, but you don’t get the option to play as Larry Croft instead. I think most people aren’t going to refuse a game entirely based on character gender but rather most will pick their own matching gender, given the option.