I have some boring families and judging from comments on the thread about playing hoods in rotation, others do too. Why is that? I have a couple of families that when it comes to their turn, I basically just fast-forward to age them in sync with the rest of the neighbourhood. I've tried adding some drama or zombies but that didn't seem to work. I thought perhaps the house wasn't right and moved them to another house but they're still boring. The family with vampire parents is particularly boring. If I don't direct the vampires, they will do one thing the whole night (eg staring at the grandfather clock or playing the synthesiser the whole time).
What do you think? What makes your boring families boring?

Dunno. I can find something to hook me with most every family, but maybe I'm just easily amused.

Maybe the question should be, what makes a family interesting?

For me the top thing that makes a family interesting is if they are struggling to just survive. I love playing my homeless family or my couple running a hog farm who had to dig up and sell rocks and things inside their living room in the middle of winter so they could have the money to adopt the twins from the orphanage. Next on my list are families who are having babies/toddlers, these are always interesting to me. Third would be families running a new businesses. Find what you find most interesting and try to make most follow that path.

I don't really care about drama, that can be interesting but is a side thing for me. My most boring families are those who are now just a couple with kids grown but no grandchildren whose business are all running smoothly. They have nice little homes and the highlight is inviting over friends for a board game night. *yawn* I don't find making drama for drama sake will make them interesting. I'm sure my game full of happy families, even if they are broke makes most people yawn, but its the way I like things, so whatever you do, do things the way that you like it.

Single Sims can stagnate, but it partly depends on my mindset going in. Going by bin sims, Julien Cookie is a prefect example. In a failed BACC playthrough, he ended up great to play running a restaurant, getting married to Jill Fig, and having a baby. In a recently unfortunately lost neighbourhood he was just moved into a house and more or less forgotten about except for a phone call or 2 for child sims. I had a small plan to start a series of events based on that landing him in what would have been my first Simlogical Prison. Never did though,other sims just captivated me more.

Hm challenge maybe? Having some goal to work towards helps too. I tried the letting sims tell me what they want thing I've seen other posters do, but if the sims don't really help with that it just gets boring. So yeah, having some goal in mind for at least one sim to work towards is a big part of what can captivate me, and without it households tend to be boring. Looking at you Roseland, seriously what am I supposed to do with you?

I think what often makes a family boring is when nobody in the household is anywhere close to a birthday, so there are no changes going on. Sims who are home all day can be boring, too - if they like studying I still enjoy playing them, but if they just keep rolling pathetic little wants, they get boring pretty fast.

I used to find the Tinkers boring, but in their latest incarnation they lost all their money (dice roll) and had to move to an apartment, and then neither of them could ever get a job (the dice again). They do get welfare, but they keep having babies, and Wanda keeps sneaking into the pet store when other Sims are buying pet collars and coming home with a new animal. One child refused pointblank to be potty trained and the cat never washes itself, so they're known throughout the hood as the Stinkers. Melody did okay, though: she worked really hard at college, graduated with honours, got a good job and married Tom Freshe (just to prove she isn't a Stinker!). In this case, taking away their money made them a lot less boring.

The key, I think, is for Sims to have a goal or a daily struggle to get by. It really helps if they have wants you can work on. If they have everything they need and are just going through the motions of daily life with trivial wants, that's when they get boring.

For me I guess it's usually when ever there is a long stretch without any thing new happening. Such as no births, birthdays or new relationships. Whenever I start playing a new sim once they have established a relationship, had children and completed any other goals I set for them and the children are all teens or close to teens, I start to lose interest in the family. Most of the time will crack and start a new family. But I have found that if I stay strong and work through it until the kids reach adulthood it really picks back up.
The good thing about pressing on with the same family is that I find my starting family always tend to be very similar, where as the kids from existing families have much more variety.This way I'm not playing essentially the same family over and over

I like my families to be very much like Jo's. It's not story drama that interests me. It's the struggle to survive that interests me most. Once my Sims have a hefty bank account I start to get bored. That's about the time I have them start some sort of business they have to struggle with. I love babies and toddlers, so stay at home moms are usually fun. Once the kids are grown and the old couple start to bore me, I generally have them adopt a couple of pets to either train and/or breed. I love pets as much as I love toddlers.

I don't usually include a lot of drama, cheating, sleeping around, etc in my game. Once I have a happy family, I can't imagine them cheating on one another. I don't care much for mean Sims, and I rarely make them in CAS (unless I've randomized their personality--something I plan to do more of in the future.) I think could allow my mean Sims to cheat because I won't have any problem allowing bad things to happen to them. In the past, many of my mean Sims have had trouble with fire, locking themselves in a room without any food or quirky swimming accidents where they can't seem to find the pool ladder.

Struggling to survive, having babies or pets, businesses, drama, all that stuff keeps me interested. A family gets boring if say it's only one Sim that isn't struggling or somehow involved in some drama. Or maybe if it's just a couple with nothing better to do. Francis J. Worthington III and his husband Tank Grunt (now Worthington) would be boring, they are the rich family, if it wasn't thanks to clicking random number of babies with the triplets and quads mod in Francis had alien quadruplets! They are currently toddlers...I think that household will be interesting for awhile. When they grow up and the household gets boring again I might add in a business (or several) and pets. Maybe some drama with Tank's dad who hates aliens and now Tank is step-daddy to 4 of them and loves them. Buzz has a lot of issues with Tank...so even though they are rich I can still make them interesting but too many rich sims and i'll quickly be bored.

I'm usually turned off from a family when I don't have any goals for them (have babbies, expand business, make enough money to get food on the table...)

Play style.

Waiting for things to happen is not mine. If there are no changes, changes have to be made!

Personally, interaction with sims and all families being involved in the community is the basis of my play style. So I would do one (or all) of the following:

Throw a party for friends (or co-workers); go on a huge group outing; quit their jobs to start a business; adopt a kid and a pet; move in some new roomies, let them teach/train other sims if they can - on community lots.

And while doing this, if the family falls out of sync with the rest of the community - so what? Use aging off if it bothers you.

As others have said, doing the same things over and over gets boring. For me, it's often couples who want to go on a million dates in a row. I made the mistake of giving Bailey Fortuna the "50 Dream Dates" LTW (he's secondary Pleasure), but of course he's not the only sim who ends up in that loop. It can just get so repetitive, and of course I had a sim get pregnant on the very first day of her honeymoon, so in order to keep her happy I kept up an unending string of dates... (I did count once her and her husband went home, but I don't remember the number of total "dream date" memories they'd accumulated during their honeymoon...pretty sure it was more than 20.) I do play with a rule that sims can't ask anyone on a date unless they want to, but it's not usually difficult to get 3LB or even 2LB couples to be rolling the wants pretty much constantly. I recently managed to drag Bailey and Fiona up from red energy to full green by sending them out for a night (and the following day!) on the town in lieu of sleeping. Who needs sleep when you can have multiple dream dates in a row?

But other than that, I don't really tend to get bored. I mostly just get stressed. More than one toddler at once and teens approaching college both give me stress. The Fortuna household actually has both! So the whole dream date marathon was actually a nice break from that for both me and of course the sim parents themselves.

But as others have said, goals help a lot with keeping things interesting. Sims benefit from something to work towards: completing a LTW, maxing a hobby or career, etc.

As I said in the Russian forum: there is no history, no legends - it will not be interesting to play! If you think of a little prehistory, it will be much more interesting to yurt with your characters! Or you can give a goal, a quest, then it will be much more interesting!
For me, the most interesting families are big families, with toodlers, supernatural beings, dramas, characters with aspiration to romance!

I don't know what it is, but some families I just get super bored of. As someone said, it's boring when there's no births or birthdays, but even when there is, some families just don't entertain me. These days, my own sims bore me so I play megahoods, but there are some families within that that I'm just super bored of. I think it's because I have too many similar families in a row or something - for example, a lot of families in DV are boring because they're all married with the average 2.4 kids. And while one family can be fun, multiple families in a row with the same dynamic is boring. Which is one of the reasons I enjoy downtown, because all my Sims there live super different lives. From a sleezy brothel owner to a family trying to make ends meet now that they're expecting their third child.

Aside from time markers (birthdays, etc) I find that personality conflicts and romantic drama do lend to some interesting times with the pixels. Boring is when they aren't doing anything to improve, or change their lives.

My most boring ones are happily married, with kids who do no wrong, and nobody is fighting with another. I have to see something in them to make them less boring. Sometimes I 'help' them out.

And sometimes they extend the courtesy by inventing their own drama. Maybe it's because they don't like being boring, either.

Having nothing for them to do - for me, that makes things boring so I make up some kind of long- (or short-) term aim for them so they can work towards it.

For me it's when there are too many kids, or too many people in the family that I have to micromanage every single thing. Or if I have a vampire household because they don't do much anymore and they constantly roll the same Freetime wants. It gets stale fast.

I don't know. Ask the Ramiswamis. No matter what story line I give them or what I make happen, they bore the crap out of me.

In general I don't find my sims boring, although there rotations that have been on occasion. If there's nothing happening, for example, a single person, not allowed by Council rules to marry. They tend to fall into a rut of going to work, coming home, skilling, crashing, going to work.....That gets old on a five-day rotation.

But, usually there are enough people in the household that something interesting is happening to someone.

And then there are the meta happenings in the neighborhood story that keep things interesting.

Except for the Ramiswamis. I honestly don't know what the problem is. In my communist hood, they have died, and Natasha Una was moved in to care for all their children. There had been a number of multiple births so there were quite a few of them, and one hidden one. Natasha was able to keep him hidden. But, even then, the family was just ......dull. They have only become interesting as they have gone their separate ways. But even then they are usually the last interesting person in whatever family they infiltrate.

In my Handmaid hood, they lived with Chester Gieke and moved out abruptly, but I can't remember why off the top of my head. They've yet to show up in my uber hood.

Hehe, I love the Ramaswamis, they were a lot of fun to me. Spending most of their money helped

They (surprise, surprise!) had twins, Sanjeev and Sachin, and Priya had to resign because they could not pay the nanny, and the nanny refused to come back after taking their bath.

So the tods had to go without bathing for a couple of days, for Priya used their last simoleons to start a pottery business at home.

Sanjay had to use his musical skills to perform at community centers and made some extra bucks. The twins both became fortune sims after that. Sanjay and Priya live in the retirement subhood now, have 6 grandchildren, have regular family reunions and Sanjay still performs at the concert hall

I think alot of people have boring sims because they either forget about; or their playstyle doesn't allowed much use of "the ripple effect".

I once had a female sim, grown children and widowed who was becoming kind of stagnant. I wont say boring because she really wasn't, she would show up on community lots when not played and do all sorts of social strengthening stuff on her own. Its just that there wasn't anything major going on that was propelling her forward. Then on day after an invited outing to a friend's childs birthday party she rolled a want for a new couch. That couch want alone came to be known as the rotation of 1,000 changes.

Why did she roll that want out of the blue? She's a family sim her wants as of late had all been family related wishes that wouldn't be fulfilled for awhile (new grandchild relative gets married) The couch seemed out of place really. Then I remembered she had just been to that birthday party. Maybe she was feeling that she needed something new in her life to stave off that emptiness of not having something new family wise. Or maybe she was feeling that after seeing that child grow up she was ready to accept that her empty nest was still stuck in the family era and it needed a redo more suited to just her style.

Whatever the internal reason off to the furniture store she went. And after buying that couch she rolled more wants for new stuff. OK so splurge time for her I guess. While browsing she socialized with some of her friends who also happened to be on the lot. Once done and back on her home lot it was the end of her rotation.

Now here's where it really picks up. The next house had a sim who happened to be on that furniture lot the same time the first sim was. This household in particular wasn't boring, but challenging because i had a sim in desperate need of a promotion but never seemed to want to skill for the needed points. Suddenly boom the rolled the ant to skill for it. It was as if seeing that first sim buy something new erupted a change in this sim to better themselves. And it went like that throughout the hood. Kids started rolling wants for A+ report cards. Romance sims wanted kids etc etc. By the time i finally got back to sim A who was the once with the couch want suddenly the whole hood had become one big "keeping up with the Jones". Throughout all this she had been to a couple of parties at other places and such so she had seen some of the changes happening in the hood. Not even halfway through her first day in the rotation she rolled a want to get married (one of those parties had been a golden anniversary). Now this stagnant sims had a bigger purpose all thanks to a couch.

Alot of you have said sims gets boring after they achieve their goals. Maybe it's time to rethink instead of seeing it as a checkmark on a to do list for this sim it's time to ask why these sims roll the wants in the first place.

A household can only be as exciting as the player allows it to be. Case in point, I always play with free will ON, and have no trouble saving the game even if something tragic and/or unexpected happens that completely changes the dynamics of things. I also stopped using televisions and vehicles in my game, as they are useless for my style of play. Watching my sims watch television was boring to me, and also meant they were not free to do other things, whether guided by me or autonomously.

Finding something unique about each household and/or giving them a purpose in the neighborhood can help keep boredom at bay as well.

@SingleClawDesign Your hood sounds like one of those plain colorless and basically boring towns in a movie. Everyone does the same old things, off to work, clean the house and just settling for the same old same old. Suddenly a new family moves in and things begin to change and color is slowly filling in their lives.

For me, I dislike drama, there's enough in the real world as it is. I don't make my sims rich or poor, my sims have just what they need and I just ignore the money. They still continue to make money in all sorts of ways. It isn't really the money that counts, it's the activities they do that make it more interesting for me. One of my favorite bin sims is Julian Cooke, changing his aspiration to family, getting a different job, a makeover actually giving him some interests points, since his are very low and a CAS sim, who became the love of his life, made him a lot of fun to play. Once sims aged to elder and the rest of the family had moved on, I did find them boring. I had no idea what to do with them until I realized there was plenty of opportunities for them. They went on dates, vacations, visited a lot of community lots and just had a blast until their time was up. I usually have a decent array of community lots with all sorts of activities. Besides all the regular dining out, shopping and such, they could go on dates, fishing, take 'classes' in pottery, sewing, write a novel, etc.. Do all the things they couldn't fit in because they had no time while working and raising families. If a household is boring, do something different with them that isn't the norm for the rest of the hood, change their clothing styles to something totally different and re-invent who they are. (:

Sorry, had to quit reading after they had twins. Too busy wiping tears of laughter from my eyes.

"Your hood sounds like one of those plain colorless and basically boring towns in a movie. Everyone does the same old things, off to work, clean the house and just settling for the same old same old. Suddenly a new family moves in and things begin to change and color is slowly filling in their lives."

Far from it. While my hoods represent quintessential americana on the exteriors the insides are vastly different. Every family has skeletons in their closets just waiting to dance on the front lawn on halloween night. I just prefer to approach things from a psychological standpoint when it comes to sims. There has to be intent and reasons behind the wants they roll to make their personalities and stories more believable in context and in the greater hood picture. That's why I have no such thing as boring sims because no matter how plain jane a sim may seem when it comes to a daily routine there's always something lurking in the background (personal or hood wise) just waiting to push them in a new direction.

Before I had my desktop take a shyt on me I was about to embark on a family where the husband was cheating on the wife and i just had their kitchen sink break and explode and i was going to use the exploding sink as a physical metaphor for the wife's take on their current situation and whether repairing it was an option or not (the wife has high mechanical and the husband has none so him trying to fix it as we all no just makes it break more and take twice as long)

Now i'm stuck on a lappie with wins 10 and contemplating on how best to gets sims on here.

@SingleClawDesigns that is an awesome story :D

Usually a sim becomes boring when I have no idea what to do with them or don't have a good handle on who they are. A few of the premades fall into that, because their biographies don't give me much of a hook to work with. If they also don't seem to have much of a personality, that just adds to the blandness. I never know what to do with Ajay Loner. Or Sanjay. Priya, on the other hand, has a tendency to go straight to annoying me because she insists on coming home with other playables. And once she starts doing that she just. keeps. coming. Uuuuugh... go away, Priya. Let my sims bring home someone different.

I need goals for my babies. And I like randomness and shaking things up, as well.

The most boring families to me are the single Sims, who I usually give a pet to. Just seems so lonely by yourself