If you are curious as to what other rationales there are for "*", check out
[[http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/44271][this]] mail and the thread it is in.
+Even if you cannot use another character, you can add an overlay on top of
+the "*" characters and your buffer will look like the way you want. See
+the library =org-bullets.el= from the =contrib/= directory, or test this
+snippet shared by Jambunathan:
+
+#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
+ (font-lock-add-keywords
+ 'org-mode `(("\\(?:^\\(?1:\\*+\\)[[:blank:]]\\)"
+ (0 (progn (compose-region
+ (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1)
+ (pcase (length (match-string 1))
+ (1 ?\u2219)
+ (2 ?\u2022)
+ (3 ?\u25c9)
+ (_ ?\u25CB)))
+ nil)))))
+#+END_SRC
+
* Todos and Tags
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: Todos-and-Tags