So, I think something pretty interesting is happening in regard to the people angry at Guy's apparent lack of preparedness.
Obviously the relationship between the protagonist and the challenge he faces is pretty important to a story. In general we want the protagonist and the challenge he must face to be on roughly the same level, so the hero can believably triumph in the end against the odds, without trivializing the entire story. That's where plenty of young writers fuck it up, by making their hero overqualified for the challenge, or even (in porn games) taking away any challenge whatsoever. The MC is a hunk, a schemer and a silver-tongued bastard with a huge dick, and their opposition is just some "college" bullies and getting to know girls to fuck them. That's a pretty common pitfall.
Which doesn't mean that you can't have fun with it. Picture our hero searching for a missing person, picking up clues in a creepy environment, something happened here, something bad, and there are a bit too many coincidence piling up... When suddenly our hero comes face to face with a demented serial killer who successfully lured them in their underground compound, noone will hear them scream. Except our "hero" is a honest to God vampire. The kind that's near immune to bullets and has superpowers. And that warps the entire scene, something that would be a nail biter in a Thriller about a mundane detective suddenly becomes comically tragic when the evil demented serial killer traps an undead horror instead of a run-of-the-mill detective. It also works off dramatic irony. We, in this instance the players, know we're playing a vampire and the mundane elements of horror happening still work on us because in real life we're normal humans, so the build-up works, only to be subverted for the punchline, which turns the entire thing into one big farce. It wouldn't work if that was the entire story, but it works great as an early-game scene. By the way, that's from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodline, and I do heartily recommend that game.
I wanted to mention that scene because it highlights a more subtle point, so far I have basically been speaking in terms of "power levels", the hero must be level 15 to tackle a level 17 challenge if you will, but the VtM:B scene I just described also works because of the likeness between the serial killer and the vampire, the "hero". Both are killers, hunters who prey on the unsuspecting, and while this time the vampire was the bigger fish, there are plenty of fish bigger than him in the setting that could get the jump on him. That's the subtle thing when it comes to hero/challenge relationships, they must echo one another on some level. Going back to FiN for a minute, Guy is (as his name implies) an average guy. He is an everyman, a normal, average, random dude you could find anywhere that just happens to win the lottery, be put in an interesting situation, and the story is seeing how he navigates that. Which is the perfect protagonist when the challenge is having friends in need. On Guy's end his challenge is feeling like a purse, like he only has friends when they need something from him, he does not help friends, he loses friends over cash, and the outward challenge is that at the end of the day, Guy can't actually help anyone. He can bankroll people, but he can't fix anything for them, the onus in on the people he meets to fix their own lives. That naturally forces the story to focus on the girls, which is frankly what we're here for and so all that works great. That's the basis, the entire setup for the game, and it works great. But as it develops, there are two problems that get introduced. One is easy enough, Guy is not one character. What is reasonable for Good Guy may not be for Bad Guy (like being unarmed) as the threats they can expect in their daily lives are not actually the same, so there is some dissonance here besides choosing to good or bad option with a girl.
To illustrate the second problem, let's look at a different everyman character, in a very different story. When it comes to being the protagonist of Hellsing, Seras Victoria works just as well (if not better) as Alucard, the main protagonist. The story picks up when Seras is introduced, the challenges introduced are a challenge (in power level) to her, she is ironically the most human member of the main cast while also being the audience surrogate, and we follow her heartaches at her new condition and being forcefully introduced to the masquerade and the main plot. On the surface, you would think Seras could be bland as milk toast and still work just as well, the entire point of her character is out of her depth she is, and she has her vampiric condition tying her to the story. But Miura specifically avoids divorcing her from the rest of the world by introducing deep set traumas in her from way before being turned into a vampire. Hellsing is, at its core, a story about people who are hurt at their core and lashing out against the world, to work as a character in that universe, to avoid breaking the willing suspension of disbelief, to avoid dissociating a protagonist from its own story, you need that relationship between the plot and the hero, that echo. That buried darkness that turns a side character into a main character.
Back to FiN, I think that what the people pissed off at Guy for being chronically unprepared and laid back, is that he has none of that buried darkness, he has no dangerous spark and the story has evolved to kind of requiring him to have one. The story has slowly picked up in threat level. Guy is introducing a criminal (I forget off the top of my head what he did) in his life by introducing the guy's family into his life. We have a crazed ex-boyfriend on the loose who seems to be in the middle of a psychotic break, there is something deeply wrong about the guy who transformed Nicki into something deeply personal and the guy seems unsettling and rich enough to enter the story with a bang, and now we're introducing some actual, active career criminals into the mix.
This ends up dissociating Guy from the story, to the point that Guy stops looking like an everyman to some people, with some players even expecting a normal random dude to be more prepared than that when getting stuck in the situation Guy finds himself in. Not everyone though, but that's also a thing, real people react to danger in different ways, what's normal and expected for one person is alien to the other (like the whole discussion about getting a gun). When exposed to a dangerous situation, Guy can't be the everyman, he can't be any random dude, he has to be one specific dude and some people will find the main character, their avatar, not reacting the way the player would expect anyone to do (shortsighted as it is) infuriating, and I believe that this is what we're seeing with some players here. As well as players finding the protagonist lacking because the story calls out for an echo of something dangerous inside Guy, to tie him in to the world he is currently wading through, to spark the interest of the players into the darkness and secrets of the Guy they're playing as, who seems drawn to dangerous situations like it echoes something in him. And if there is nothing, if that echo is left unanswered, Guy will end up seeming lacking.
tl;dr If you're introducing some danger in the story, you need to have some danger in Guy's heart beyond Bad Guy being an asshole.
Obviously the relationship between the protagonist and the challenge he faces is pretty important to a story. In general we want the protagonist and the challenge he must face to be on roughly the same level, so the hero can believably triumph in the end against the odds, without trivializing the entire story. That's where plenty of young writers fuck it up, by making their hero overqualified for the challenge, or even (in porn games) taking away any challenge whatsoever. The MC is a hunk, a schemer and a silver-tongued bastard with a huge dick, and their opposition is just some "college" bullies and getting to know girls to fuck them. That's a pretty common pitfall.
Which doesn't mean that you can't have fun with it. Picture our hero searching for a missing person, picking up clues in a creepy environment, something happened here, something bad, and there are a bit too many coincidence piling up... When suddenly our hero comes face to face with a demented serial killer who successfully lured them in their underground compound, noone will hear them scream. Except our "hero" is a honest to God vampire. The kind that's near immune to bullets and has superpowers. And that warps the entire scene, something that would be a nail biter in a Thriller about a mundane detective suddenly becomes comically tragic when the evil demented serial killer traps an undead horror instead of a run-of-the-mill detective. It also works off dramatic irony. We, in this instance the players, know we're playing a vampire and the mundane elements of horror happening still work on us because in real life we're normal humans, so the build-up works, only to be subverted for the punchline, which turns the entire thing into one big farce. It wouldn't work if that was the entire story, but it works great as an early-game scene. By the way, that's from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodline, and I do heartily recommend that game.
I wanted to mention that scene because it highlights a more subtle point, so far I have basically been speaking in terms of "power levels", the hero must be level 15 to tackle a level 17 challenge if you will, but the VtM:B scene I just described also works because of the likeness between the serial killer and the vampire, the "hero". Both are killers, hunters who prey on the unsuspecting, and while this time the vampire was the bigger fish, there are plenty of fish bigger than him in the setting that could get the jump on him. That's the subtle thing when it comes to hero/challenge relationships, they must echo one another on some level. Going back to FiN for a minute, Guy is (as his name implies) an average guy. He is an everyman, a normal, average, random dude you could find anywhere that just happens to win the lottery, be put in an interesting situation, and the story is seeing how he navigates that. Which is the perfect protagonist when the challenge is having friends in need. On Guy's end his challenge is feeling like a purse, like he only has friends when they need something from him, he does not help friends, he loses friends over cash, and the outward challenge is that at the end of the day, Guy can't actually help anyone. He can bankroll people, but he can't fix anything for them, the onus in on the people he meets to fix their own lives. That naturally forces the story to focus on the girls, which is frankly what we're here for and so all that works great. That's the basis, the entire setup for the game, and it works great. But as it develops, there are two problems that get introduced. One is easy enough, Guy is not one character. What is reasonable for Good Guy may not be for Bad Guy (like being unarmed) as the threats they can expect in their daily lives are not actually the same, so there is some dissonance here besides choosing to good or bad option with a girl.
To illustrate the second problem, let's look at a different everyman character, in a very different story. When it comes to being the protagonist of Hellsing, Seras Victoria works just as well (if not better) as Alucard, the main protagonist. The story picks up when Seras is introduced, the challenges introduced are a challenge (in power level) to her, she is ironically the most human member of the main cast while also being the audience surrogate, and we follow her heartaches at her new condition and being forcefully introduced to the masquerade and the main plot. On the surface, you would think Seras could be bland as milk toast and still work just as well, the entire point of her character is out of her depth she is, and she has her vampiric condition tying her to the story. But Miura specifically avoids divorcing her from the rest of the world by introducing deep set traumas in her from way before being turned into a vampire. Hellsing is, at its core, a story about people who are hurt at their core and lashing out against the world, to work as a character in that universe, to avoid breaking the willing suspension of disbelief, to avoid dissociating a protagonist from its own story, you need that relationship between the plot and the hero, that echo. That buried darkness that turns a side character into a main character.
Back to FiN, I think that what the people pissed off at Guy for being chronically unprepared and laid back, is that he has none of that buried darkness, he has no dangerous spark and the story has evolved to kind of requiring him to have one. The story has slowly picked up in threat level. Guy is introducing a criminal (I forget off the top of my head what he did) in his life by introducing the guy's family into his life. We have a crazed ex-boyfriend on the loose who seems to be in the middle of a psychotic break, there is something deeply wrong about the guy who transformed Nicki into something deeply personal and the guy seems unsettling and rich enough to enter the story with a bang, and now we're introducing some actual, active career criminals into the mix.
This ends up dissociating Guy from the story, to the point that Guy stops looking like an everyman to some people, with some players even expecting a normal random dude to be more prepared than that when getting stuck in the situation Guy finds himself in. Not everyone though, but that's also a thing, real people react to danger in different ways, what's normal and expected for one person is alien to the other (like the whole discussion about getting a gun). When exposed to a dangerous situation, Guy can't be the everyman, he can't be any random dude, he has to be one specific dude and some people will find the main character, their avatar, not reacting the way the player would expect anyone to do (shortsighted as it is) infuriating, and I believe that this is what we're seeing with some players here. As well as players finding the protagonist lacking because the story calls out for an echo of something dangerous inside Guy, to tie him in to the world he is currently wading through, to spark the interest of the players into the darkness and secrets of the Guy they're playing as, who seems drawn to dangerous situations like it echoes something in him. And if there is nothing, if that echo is left unanswered, Guy will end up seeming lacking.
tl;dr If you're introducing some danger in the story, you need to have some danger in Guy's heart beyond Bad Guy being an asshole.
