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[LeoLeonardoIII]

Mentioning Clementine is excellent: you could argue that Clementine was the protagonist, the one most changed, and that the choices made in the story by the player are just exploring / revealing the personality that the player-character already had.

Perhaps a good RPG would have stats that reflect the choices made by the player. For example, light/dark Jedi powers based on good/evil choices made in the game. Or you're in a medieval warzone and if you slay villagers and disrupt humanity the monsters grow stronger and you gain favor with them, allowing you to gather an army of monsters. If you slay monsters and disrupt the forces of chaos and entropy, you gain favor with human civilization, and gather an army of people. If you do a little of both, you lose favor with both, ending up universally reviled and unable to attract troops either way, leaving you weak. Both sides are then at equal strength instead of you fighting a weakened enemy, meaning your relative strength to each side is even lower. In this case, killing a human would give -4 human favor and +1 monster favor. If you killed 25 humans and 25 monsters, you'd end up with (+25, -100) -75 favor each. If you stuck with humans and killed 50 monsters, you'd have 50 human favor and -200 monster favor.

So:

Start: 100 Human Power, 100 Monster Power, 0 Human Favor, 0 Monster Favor, = 0 Personal Power (Can't recruit because neither is positive Favor)
Attack Monsters: 100 Human Power, 50 Monster Power, 50 Human Favor, -200 Monster Favor, = 50 Personal Power (Recruit humans because humans have positive favor)
Attack Humans: 50 Human Power, 100 Monster Power, -200 Human Favor, 50 Monster Favor, =50 Personal Power (Recruit monsters because monsters have positive favor)
Attack Both: 75 Human Power, 75 Monster Power, -100 Human Favor, -100 Monster Favor, = 0 Personal Power (Can't recruit because neither is positive Favor)

In this way your "stats" are how many people or monsters will fight for you. Which is a direct feedback from the world based on your input on the world.

I'm sure you could do something cool with areas of lush vegetation vs. scorched desert in a Dark Sun setting with Preserver Wizards vs. Defiler Wizards, or a Thief / Shadowrun / Arcanum:OSAMO technology vs. magic ruleset where if you have a lot of technology you can't use magic well and vice versa.