Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous lets you auto-level everyone or everyone excluding yourself. I chose the latter when I played it (I never quite finished it but I made it quite a ways in). I did this because I always thought that the player making decisions for a bunch of pre-defined characters was a little weird. The idea in a lot of games is that you're the party leader and thus you're determining what you want those characters to focus on, but I still think the idea of giving everyone in the party their own autonomy to achieve things their own way is way better for story and immersion and whatnot. These characters are supposed to be powerful people. Frequently, they were very much their own person before you met them, with their own goals, their own powerful sense of agency, and their own adventures before ever having met you. Are you telling me that someone who has been wandering the land by themselves, improving their fighting skills or learning more about magic or whatever, is going to suddenly let this random guy that just walked into their lives direct where their attention goes?
On the other hand, that line of thinking is what leads to Mitsuru endlessly casting Marin Karin in Persona 3.
Anyway, it's one of those strange video game disconnects, where you just have to accept that a mechanical structure such as a game is going to clash with a more fluid, artistic thing such as a story and there are cases where leaning more towards a world and story that makes more sense is going to sacrifice something more mechanically interesting, or vice versa.
I'll finish playing, or maybe just restart, Wrath of the Righteous at some point. When I do so, I'll probably just start leveling characters myself instead of letting the game do it. I eventually came to feel like I was missing out on some great gameplay ideas because I never bothered building characters in a way I found interesting. And in the future, I'll probably also stick with leveling characters myself, regardless of how strange it is for them to submit so easily to whatever my main character wants them to do.
Or more games could just be like Icewind Dale, where you make your own party of six characters and determine everything about them yourself. You are their creator, so it's not strange for you to determine everything about their future development.
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