An unusual mistake, however, is to presume that because you are roleplaying your concept, that makes it just as fair game to utilize as the canon of the world you are roleplaying in. When putting together headcanon, it is entirely possible to make headcanon that is so massive, have such importance, other people are forced to ask, "why hasn’t my character heard about this," or, "why hasn’t this had a huge impact on the world? Making It Without Breaking It So you have a general idea of what you want to do. How do you create your headcanon randomizer in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with other players?
I sort of want to do some comparisons between questions but the export format of the data does not make this easy. I don’t currently have any plans to do anything more with the data, partially because I think they have a pretty small reach. Silmarillion headcanons are often what I would describe as headcanons because there is so much empty space, so much inconsistency, so many ways to argue something doesn’t technically contradict canon. Headcanon became a popular term online in 2010, though usage on livejournal goes back to at least 2007, with a shared meme "Headcanon is love?". So if a character has no canon sexuality and you see a lesbian headcanon her as a lesbian, please just mind your own business and be kind.
In discussing headcanons, let’s start by getting incredibly jokey ones out of the way. Plenty of the time, when people say they have ‘x’ headcanon generator, they’re not really saying that they interpret a character in the text to be, say, a furry, but that it’s funny to imagine them as such. This is clearly not a reading and is primarily done for humor’s sake, so I’ll be excluding it in this discussion because it’s not particularly relevant. What we’re interested in here are headcanons which indicate a given person’s actual understanding of the world, the story, or the characters within it, even if that understanding isn’t actually based on the text to any significant extent. For instance, if someone says that they headcanon a character as trans, they usually genuinely believe that the character is trans to at least some extent. These days authors and creators take a large portion of their inspiration from religious precedents.
Remember, this was when MMO’s were still trying to grow into a fully fledged genera and good game design for MMO’s wasn’t fully understood yet. World of Warcraft wasn’t due to be released for several months until CoH was first coming out and at launch it had something of the same struggle. How do you populate a zone with enough enemies to keep people occupied without making them look like they’re just standing around waiting to get shot up? This actually becomes very apparent when you view how mobs are placed about the city in City of Villains which came out some time later and even in Atlas Park which was revamped before sunset. Enemy groups that are milling about up to no good are used sparingly or are with groups that likely would just be milling about while everyone else is set up to be actively doing something within the environment.
I'm not sure I agree that is a huge problem. Even insane levels of influence on the world isn't overly common. The biggest issue I've seen are characters that are super "jaded", so they have very casual reactions to really huge events because they've seen it all or something. This is more of an issue with power levels than lore/canon, though.