New Year's Resolution: My collection of untold stories

@GrumpyGlowfish It sounds to me like you're having fun with the initial setup stage and there's nothing wrong with that :)

I'm not a storyteller so I just play my one family to complete goals. Switching the main focus between family members. For example the teen daughter of one of my original three sisters was the focus when High School Years released and the matriarch of the family was the focus for Realm of Magic.

The closest I come to changing direction is selecting another aspiration for a family member before I've completed the current one. Sometimes I'll complete it with the original sim or choose a different sim to work on it.

You say nothing was finished, but your post reads as if you were looking back warmly rather than frustrated, so all is well? I keep my fingers crossed that you fulfill your resolution!

My 2022 statistics don't look great, either:

I don't have that specific problem, but a related one. I've been having trouble getting started recently - the ideas aren't there, but the desire to play is. About a year and a half ago, I had a thriving save I was playing in, with about a dozen interconnected families. But then I ran out of steam, felt like the story needed a new occult life state for drama, and I took a break. I tried setting up a new save (didn't last longer than a week for each family), replaying a few old favorite sims, and a new legacy (made it generation 10, but the game got buggy). I feel like I've spent the last half a year rebuilding a new base save for myself, making over townies, and trying to figure out what I want to do when it's finally time to start playing. Basically, my goal is to find a good place to start!

If this isn't mood idk what is :lol:

I have bad habit of coming up with stories and then not actually proceeding to play them through cause I always have to do something first :lol:

also I get so easily distracted with different sims and their potential stories like i just be seeing a sim and go "Oh! but what if..."

aand then there is also problem of sorting screenshots after because i have been hoarding way too many screenshots from last year without actually writing stories they were for :lol: so I feel like i must do folder clean out before i can continue to play my sims just to stay on track myself

even now I almost accidentally started a whole "Simmingals toddler memoirs" story I wasn't supposed to be writing :lol: goodness me stop making more chaos to organize its not time for new stories simmingal

I'm glad so many people can relate to this! I used to make fun of my sister for spending more time in CAS and Build Mode than actually playing the game, but now I'm slowly becoming like that myself. :D

"Liebeslottchen;c-18214773" wrote:
@GrumpyGlowfish I tend to do the same. But after some time & a couple of other stories I often pick them up again. It depends on the mood I am in. Do you start stories and then never continue/finish them?

I do usually return to my old households... eventually. But not always for the best reasons. The most infamous case of this has to be the very first original family I created in TS4. I made the sims and their home, moved them in, gave everyone the jobs I wanted for them, and then... more or less forgot they existed, even though they play a huge part in my made-up lore of Oasis Springs. Then, I think it was last year, I found a beautiful house on the gallery that I wanted to play in, but didn't have anybody to live there, so I dug out that old family again and replaced their (crappy) original house with the one from the gallery. I ended up actually playing with them for a couple of sim days, but as I said, it was more for the house than the inhabitants. :p

"mightysprite;c-18214798" wrote:
@GrumpyGlowfish It sounds to me like you're having fun with the initial setup stage and there's nothing wrong with that :)

Are you sure there's nothing wrong with that? Because I do feel like an evil deity for constantly creating new sims and then abandoning them to fend for themselves. >:)

"Atreya33;c-18214844" wrote:
I am also a fan of setting up a story and then loosing interest. Those sims sometimes stay around as background characters for the sims I consider my main characters.

Yup, that's what automatically happens to my unplayed sims, too. Sometimes I meet them again in the most unexpected places (usually at university or in the Magic Realm).

"simgirl1010;c-18214870" wrote:
I'm not a storyteller so I just play my one family to complete goals. Switching the main focus between family members. For example the teen daughter of one of my original three sisters was the focus when High School Years released and the matriarch of the family was the focus for Realm of Magic.

That goal-oriented gameplay is exactly how I prefer to play as well, except I tend to rotate families rather than sticking with the same one for too long. I need interesting backstories to better connect with the households, though, because if you just gave me a couple of random sims that mean nothing to me, I wouldn't have fun playing with them. It's not always certain that the stories will play out the way I intended (with TS4, that usually involves a lot of playing pretend), and I never actually write them down or share them with others. Well, except for my YouTube series, but that's me working with a script rather than playing normally and seeing what happens.

"EnkiSchmidt;c-18214878" wrote:
You say nothing was finished, but your post reads as if you were looking back warmly rather than frustrated, so all is well? I keep my fingers crossed that you fulfill your resolution!

Thanks! The thing I'm looking at warmly is the big, interesting, diverse sim society I've created over the years, but my habit of creating and then abandoning them is not something I'm proud of. :D

"HavenRose;c-18214963" wrote:
I don't have that specific problem, but a related one. I've been having trouble getting started recently - the ideas aren't there, but the desire to play is.

Seems like we'd make a good team then.

I don't usually have planned stories, just concepts for households and how they will stand out in my world. But on that note, I do have some concepts for Sims that I haven't got around to creating. I usually spend hours in CAS so it's definitely time consuming.

But I do have some interesting tales that have played out in my game that I keep meaning to share on the forums, with many many screenshots (too many! @Simmingal I feel your pain! Lol,) but because of the need to use imgur just to post my pictures here, it just adds an extra tedious step that I don't want to do. ? I've got an exciting jungle excursion, an evolving Batuu story, a brief tale of the Pact between Mermaids and Sirens, and a dark tale of Bella's abduction into the Vampire world. There also seems to be an amusing Superhero story unfolding, so I might just have to look into that more.

But maybe one day I'll get around to posting about one of them.

I came up with a story for my sim self's twin teen step daughters. During the mean bug phase they kept insulting each other so much that they became despised to each other. The storyline i came up with was that their biological father buys the house across the street so one of them can live with him so both sisters can cool off. However, the mean bug was patched and now both twins are friends again and i ended up scrapping this story.

@GrumpyGlowfish I tend to do the same. But after some time & a couple of other stories I often pick them up again. It depends on the mood I am in. Do you start stories and then never continue/finish them?

@mightysprite and @GrumpyGlowfish I am a big fan of the initial set up too, I tend to get so many good ideas for back stories and getting things into place, but then I don't actually do much with my sims beyond that, unless I play a challenge that kind of forces me to