Basic Trope: Player character in Strategy Game is, literally, a non-entity.
- Straight: Player character is voiceless, is referred to by rank, and does not appear on-screen.
- Exaggerated: There are no characters whatsoever. At all. No voice acting, no pictures, not even a single name.
- Downplayed: The player character is shown in cutscenes and does speak to others, but his face is always hidden in shadows and his nametag shows the name that the player typed in.
- Justified:
- The general is controlling the army remotely.
- The general is a Computer AI
- The general is an Eldritch Abomination.
- The general is a literal God.
- Inverted:
- Player character is fleshed out rather well. Commanding interface he uses, on the other hand...
- Alternately, the Player character is a very powerful unit and thus heavily used, even if that does risk instant loss.
- Subverted: Player character seems to be one of these - until later moment. As enemy rush approaches the headquarters, a cutscene shows said character scrambling for transport and escaping. He is very clearly shown and freely interacts with other characters.
- Double Subverted: Only that cutscene is shown from a first-person perspective, and no-one refers to you by name.
- Parodied:
- Anyone who talks to player character gets referred to as a crazy.
- Oddly enough, your name is actually "Sir Yessir".
- Zig Zagged: After a standard mission as a Non-Entity General a cutscene is shown where a general overlooking the field is told by his secretary "Rudy you need to get out of here!". Rudy ends up getting sniped at the end of the cutscene. Cue the next mission where Rudy is made into a mobile command tank. If Rudy gets blown up the mission is over. At the penultimate mission however Rudy ends up getting hacked and you are forced to destroy him. The player laments his death in text form. After the final mission a cutscene shows you getting injured by another sniper and it ends with you getting converted into a mobile command tank like Rudy with General Player Name painted on.
- Averted: The player character is explicitly shown and named in the intro cutscene, and appears in many others later on.
- Enforced:
- "We don't have the budget to depict him! Let's just have him referred to as Commander!"
- "We want our players able to identify with the character, regardless of age, race, or gender."
- Lampshaded: "Commander, how about when this mission is over, we go and have a couple of beers togeth- oh wait. Sorry."
- Invoked: In order to prevent the enemy from simply killing the general, they have him control the army remotely.
- Exploited: The general uses his anonymity as a weapon against the enemy infiltrators.
- Defied: The general decides that in order to properly motivate his army, he must fight alongside his troops.
- Discussed: "So who exactly is in charge of us anyway? It seems like he lives in a whole 'nother world..."
- Conversed: "Even after all those years, I fail to understand why there's no such thing as 'player character' in many RTS games."
- Deconstructed: Some time into the story, your character is revealed to be Brain in a Jar. Decades of nearly no human contact left him seeing his soldiers only as a means to an end, as opposed to, y'know, self-aware beings.
- Reconstructed: This is the only reason your character is psychologically capable of making difficult decisions with so much on the line.
Welcome back, Commander.
