It would be cool if we were able to make our own playable character (from a template (like in my avatar)) for use in game. This would require moderation, which may be too much to ask for, but I think the finished result would be a very interesting range of people.
Not a terrible idea, but I think it would undermine getting some of the armors or other things in the game. That and when people get end game armors it wouldn't be out of the question for some people to make a new character and just draw the item on their character to trick people. Also, while it worked well for minecraft, I think the template for starbound characters would be much more extensive then you might think. Minecraft looks at your login, and pulls a skin from your profile. The skin is pasted over the 3d model and you're good to go, but in starbound its not a model that we're dealing with, its a sprite. The main difference (from my relatively poor understanding) is a model has all the animations there, and all its missing is a skin. But with a sprite there isn't really a model, theres a different drawing and different picture for every action/animation. The best comparison I can think of would be imagine for every time your minecraft character had his arm in front of him, beside him, or behind him (like in the walking animation), you would need to change the drawing so the arm was there; pulls his arm back for a punch, another drawing; the action of the punch, another drawing; arm extended with the fist out, another drawing. So for a simple walk and a punch with one arm, we're talking 6 different pictures. Don't get me wrong, its not that it would be impossible, and theres probably a WAY easier way of doing it than I explained. But I don't think theres a good way to add a template for everyone to draw their own character and successfully import it into the game and bundle that into an easy, simple package that most people would use. Especially when you consider armor will probably cover 90% of your character most of the time.
