What have you learned about your game style

I learned early on that the gameplay itself in this game doesn't hold my interest for very long on its own. The next thing I learned is that the game can make a quite nice story creation tool if I'm willing to use generous doses of my own imagination in my play. And I do. After that, I learned that I'm not content just making one kind of story, so I have a number of saves for different kinds of tales, and I jump around between them; a form of rotation, but that term is a little more rigid-sounding than my more relaxed process (based on "whatever and whenever I feel like it"), which I learned suits my flights of fancy far better. :lol:

As for story construction itself, most of what I do involves varying levels of improvisation (in game terms, autonomous sim actions and occasional mini-games of my own devising to make periodic decisions or just to shake things up a bit), but I do have certain rules. They're not all the same for every sim or every household or every story in every save, but there are a few that are more "universal" (for my universe) in nature.

For example if I'm playing a vampire, newly turned ones typically aren't allowed to choose any powers at all; they must wait until they gain their first real rank, and even then they're only allowed to choose from the bottom tier. That pattern follows through the other ranks. Although they could technically gain the Vampire Creation power at the Minor Vampire rank, I don't allow them to actually take it until they're Prime rank or higher. Exceptions are made for those with two vampire parents (they gain some extra power points due to their lineage) or other special cases intended for specific story purposes. Only truly Elder Vampires (as in total time existed, not the Elder life stage) who have existed for at least 100 days more than a typical sim lifetime AND have completed the Master Vampire aspiration will be allowed to become the leader of an entire clan or any other social construct higher than a Familiar House (which itself can be founded with births, turned offspring, or both).

As for more "normal" kind of gameplay (by other people's standards, not my own, lol), I only have one typical legacy-style family now (for a while I rotated between up to 5 different ones) because I found through trial and error that, while I do enjoy the occasional slightly more rigid structure inherent in that kind of play, I can't take it in very large doses at one time. So it takes a very long time to develop the generations. I don't play by any legacy challenge rules, though; my rules are my own based on what I've learned I can live with.

And speaking of family play... the only other family play I do is when I need to do so for story purposes. Playing a family just for the sake of family play does very little for my personal enjoyment, so it's more typically a means to an end. I don't always play occult type stuff (usually vampires or spellcasters), either, because although I don't always get bored by such things, a laser-like focus on any one thing has a tendency to cause that thing to lose its luster for me if I overdo it. I find that it's like mental and creative exercise to give myself a break from one thing to do another for a while, and when I get back to the first thing my approach is fresher. :relaxed: