What bad habits are you guilty of? Input from both readers and writers/developers is very welcome

I understand that a thread dedicated to unveiling and dissecting our inner faults may lead to uncomfortable revalations, perhaps the judgement of others as well. However i believe that if done right it can foster a much greater sense of belonging to which all of us may partake, they say that understanding breeds acceptance, so lets get to understanding one another shall we? :slight_smile:

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Wait … are we talking about bad reading/writing habits (like getting stuck in a genre rut or procrastination), or analyzing our deep-seated character defects? Because the former is a good topic, but the latter … I think I’d rather not.

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Yeah, I’m not exactly eager to air my dirty laundry on the internet, myself. No offense to anybody, but beyond your username and how you post here, I don’t know a thing about any of you, and am not interested in just casually handing out my personal business to a bunch of, effectively, strangers.

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My bad habit is that I always second-guess myself after making a decision.

(Now whichever way the conversation goes, I’m good!)

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Well, while I have plenty of faults, I prefer to focus on games when chatting in public. I’d suggest concentrating on that side of things to keep more to the overall forum topic, and perhaps heading to the “why are you (feeling emotion)” thread if a particular habit is causing woes.

A bad habit of mine is that I have far too many unplayed games in my collection where I haven’t played enough of them. When I do play them, I generally can’t bring myself to be mean to characters or do “evil” paths. So when I’m writing ruthless routes I keep in mind a friend who loves playing those paths in games and think “what would he really like to do at this point?”

When writing, I’m appalling at remembering characters’ eye colours even after literally listing them in a document for reference.

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It goes against the grain for me too. And yes, this is coming from the person whose last beta report for Royal Affairs pointed out a couple of choices in which none of the options suited my character due to the fact that my character is kind of an ass. :joy:

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A bad habit of mine is that I have far too many unplayed games in my collection where I haven’t played enough of them.

I’m incredibly guilty of this, I have quite the collection of untouched titles sitting in my library. I just bought Night Road on sale and I opened it, got a few pages in then just felt like writing so I dropped it. (In my defense, any game lacking a clear guide or visual indicators feels a lot harder to play for me).

I generally can’t bring myself to be mean to characters or do “evil” paths. So when I’m writing ruthless routes I keep in mind a friend who loves playing those paths in games and think “what would he really like to do at this point?”

O h m y g o r s h – I am exactly the same. I love the capacity for a player to be evil but I literally can’t be evil myself. I always end up feeling so guilty if a character has a negative or hurt response then I regret all my words and deeds. I don’t think I can ever do a massacring Sidestep playthrough. :sob:

When writing, I’m appalling at remembering characters’ eye colours even after literally listing them in a document for reference.

My memory in terms of my own characters’ appearances is god awful until I have drawn them. It’s like they exist in a vague void that I have to manually pull them out of, and only when I directly look at my own art can I concretely identify their appearance.

Response to @lokis_hairgel :
Ace sugar parents u n i t e-- I just wish save functions were in the damn games by default!! Steam not having saves is frankly tragic

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My major character flaw is playing a story on the app and not liking how my stats or relationship changed with a certain choice, so I restart the book (regardless of how far into it I am) and get distracted by attempting to click the same choices I had before— leading to me losing interest in the game and deciding to try again another day, which I don’t.

I have so many paid and half played titles at this point that I’m living life like an asexual sugar daddy.

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My bad habit is that I always tend to go for the meanest ROs (first). I also seek out the Red Flag ROs because they are Red Flag ROs. I also repeatedly wonder quietly to myself why this one terrible NPC (usually the main villain) is not romanceable.

I’m terribly unimaginative when it comes to naming my MCs. Unless a custom name heavily appeals to me, they will be called Ava Granger (female), Ben Thompson (male), or Ash Williams (nb/trans). No, I don’t particularly care if the name doesn’t match the time, country, or universe the game is set in.

If there’s a solution for in-game riddles, I will look it up unless the thing is super easy to figure out. Excuse me, I’m lazy and I already overthink enough stupid stuff IRL. I also really dislike micro-managing in-game tasks unless the writer gives me an easy way out of them without suffering a disadvantage.

The guiltiest habit: Sometimes I am too impatient and my stupid fingers lock in a choice before I’ve finished reading the game text. This has often led me to make the most disastrous of decisions. For example, leaving my Snakefriend Vanja to die in a burning building in Social Services of the Doomed.

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As a writer, one of my worst habits is that I tend to very easily fall into rabbit holes when plotting things out, and so I never get any actual writing done.

Like, I get an idea for a WIP, then I start making the worldbuilding so the universe its set in makes sense. But then I keep adding worldbuilding details, and I keep adding potential choices and paths and only 3 ROs? That’s too little, gotta add more, and then woops, I just created a whole-ass conlang for this universe.

But meanwhile my writing folder remains empty, and then I just end up switching focus to something else without actually having started on the story itself.

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hmm you know how developers(in IF and RPG’s) put a lot of work, time and effort into making their games replayable with all these interesting choices, story routes and wonderful endings?

Well 99% of the time despite what i tell myself ill always decide on a single set of MC,choices, romance and story decisions and ill never deviate from them no matter how many times i replay a game. At best ill change my characters build in an rpg or skill set in an IF but everything else is more or less set in stone and might as well be a universal fact. Water is wet, fire is hot and these are the only choices ill ever make in this game the end. :laughing:

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Faults without getting too personal? Easy peasy.

When i buy a title from Hosted/Choice i binge play the title like 50 times. But, even after years i still find it hard doing the antagonistic choices. Cause i dont wanna hurt the characters feelings. :weary:

When i write, ill put in so much detail in certain scenes that i have to go back and erase a bunch of it cause it ends up as just fluff.

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On the forums? I’d say I’m guilty of, when discussing a game, only pointing out the flaws. For me its hard to say why I think a game is good, other than “good vibes” while its much easier to say what didn’t vibe with me.

When playing games? Lots of bad habits. I buy games on sale that I never play because “maybe I will someday” and “I enjoy cog so may as well support them”. Sometimes if I don’t feel like playing the entire game again for a specific scene, I code dive. I replay the same game multiple times, making the exact same choices.

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Scope creep.

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As a writer, I’ll come up with a story idea and spend too much time thinking about it even though I have no intention of adding another project to my plate

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In terms of writing? That’s easy–sitting down and writing in a daze for hours and hours and hours without a break, which is murder on my back and neck, and then I can’t emerge from the sea of words and be normal in front of people for a while after.

In terms of life itself, it’s probably getting way too obsessed with tracking down out of print add-ons to games that I’ve gotten into. This month it’s first edition Summoner Wars, alas, and not the bits that are easily found. Only the decks that are impossible to find now…

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mood

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Putting TOO MANY GODAMN BRANCHES! It just happens… :sob: I can’t help myself.

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I remember playing New Vegas and once ripped a teddy bear in half in front of a little slave girl because I thought it would be funsies. It felt horrible.

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As a writer, my ultimate bad habit is that when I start feeling burned out with one project, I jump to another to make sure I still hit a daily wordcount target. This means I now have two WiPs around the 125k mark, one at 170k, and another at 270k, but nothing actually finished yet. Am I going to change this in 2023? Unlikely!

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