Chris sat at his desk, bored out of his mind. His favorite thing was to theorycraft weird builds in games, minmaxing to achieve something like functional invulnerability or to break the economy, but that normally ended with the game patching it out. Once he ran out of ways to game the system, he'd move onto another game, only checking back every once in a while to see if the latest patch opened new builds. Normally, there was always another game ready and waiting in the queue, but this was one of the rare times he'd ran out. Chris's solution in such rare cases was to move to increasingly-odd methods of finding a game. Sometimes it was through dead forums, other times it was just by typing random words into a search engine, including enough to keep it loosely related to games.
It was entirely by chance that he stumbled onto Moonlight Rhapsody. His search had been "moonlight game," and to his surprise, something popped up at the top of the search. Based on the site, it was definitely newer, but he couldn't find much about it when he searched up wikis or forums. He only found a couple disparate posts on it, and they were all people asking others about getting into it or how to play. Based on the splash page, it seemed like this was some sort of MMORPG, or maybe a play-by-post kind of thing. It seemed your accounts was the same thing as the character, meaning he'd only get one character. More importantly, it meant everyone else would also get one character. He could fill a niche and corner the market on something, then spread his influence into other aspects. All he'd need to do is find some way to mix whatever options it gave him to get the absolute most out of it.
Chris clicked to begin creating an account, and by extent, his character. It seemed the initial page was all pre-made characters, like what the developer thought people would find popular. There was obviously the werewolf and some offshoots, like werefox and werecoyote. Weredragon also popped out to him, but none of these things immediately interested him. He wanted to know exactly what options he had to work with.
There was a small "build character" button, which he gladly clicked. It opened a mostly-empty page, except for an "Animal Class" tab at the top. Going into it, the options were things such as Mammal, Reptile, or Insect. He selected Mammal, and a second tab appeared. This one contained all manner of mammals, even things that would clearly make for a terrible werecreature, like cow or platypus. Selecting "wolf" just to see what would appear next, two tabs appeared. The first was defaulted to random, but it allowed Chris to pick the specific species of wolf, apparently. The second was simply labeled "class."
Going into it, Chris was shocked by how many class options were available. There were a couple fantastic ones, like Warrior or Mage, but there were far more mundane ones, like Farmer, Janitor, and so on. Maybe this game wasn't focused on combat? Selecting a class at random opened the rest of the sheet, which included stat allocation, a Quirks section, and method of contraction. The Quirks section appeared to have a limit of 3, and each was a drawback. Taking a quirk granted additional stat points, but more surprising was that some of the quirks looked unique to werewolves.
There were actually very few options for method of contraction compared to the rest of character creation. There were only cursed item, moon-cursed, and natural-born. Cursed item seemed like the easiest to control, but it had a required drawback of changing once per day, which if failed, would slowly remove your character's natural form. Moon-cursed seemed to be a forced change based on the night cycle. While it was good roleplay, that sounded awfully inefficient for combat purposes. Natural-born seemed to be a permanent effect, with a roll done at the start of the day to determine how much bleeds through. A good roll meant the character could freely shift between all forms, but a bad roll could end up with the character only being a wolf or a human for that day.