I’m fine starting from “nothing” and working my way up, but there are conditions:
First, for some devs, starting from nothing means at level 1 you lose in a fistfight versus a rat, which I find unacceptable. The fantasy of progression comes from the gap between where you start and where you end up, but—for one reason or another—all too often where you end up is just where most other games start you: a competent adventurer. So the only way to have any progression is to start you off where you can barely tie your own shoes; whereas, in my mind, I expect to end up like a high-level D&D wizard, in which case the game could afford to start you a little higher on the ladder.
Second, and more importantly, you should be able to progress at a reasonable pace. Too often in these scenarios are you completely squeezed at the start, unable to make progress because of how weak you are, and I don’t think that’s desirable. I think a game that starts you “from nothing” should reward being creative at the start, which would mean giving a lot more options for players to gain experience; most games require that you kill mudcrabs for 10 hours before you’re able to fight anything else.
Oh, I’ve already written a novel about what I dislike in Peasant’s Quest in this thread, lmao.
The problem with Peasant’s Quest is that it has a lot of the problems I mentioned: while, as far as I understand, it has more to do with a lack of experience and resources, as opposed to a lack of imagination or interest, the gameplay is underdeveloped (combat is the only real way to make progress, and it’s practically nothing but the barebones RPGM system), there’s a lot of tedium, and the balance isn’t amazing. It’s kind of hard to ask players not to cheat when this is the situation they’re dealing with.
