I never play a melee fighter if a magic user is a viable option. I find it much more satisfying to rain down fiery death.
I never ever play the big-gun tanky slow-strike type of characters or weapons. For example, no greatswords, shotguns, charge-up attacks, etc. I will always play dodgy, runny, plinky, fencery, nimbley types of characters/weapons/vehicles. I know that this leaves huge chunks of games and content unexplored, but it’s just not my bag, man.
I never explore the merchant/marketplace/auction segments of games or level up anything associated with them. I dump my loot pile at the first buyer, no questions asked about price.
Some of the books in skyrim are good and they are actually short. I have way more trouble with the codex in dragon age inquisition. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
I also don’t really craft. At the most I will modify found weapons. I rarely make my own.
I’m another hoarder. I absolutely will not use consumables unless I’m sure there’s a way to restock indefinitely, or the game has very clearly told me THIS IS THE LAST FIGHT. Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall were particularly bad for me in this regard. I pretty much absolutely would not use medkits, grenades, or summon tokens until the final mission, and even then I was miserly.
I want to chime in and say “Another hoarder here” but really…who DOESN’T hoard?
Stat attacks in Pokémon.
I just want to deal damage in battles, not spend the first two turns lowering the enemy’s defence or raising my attack.
I also almost always play the "good’ side. I feel guilty being an ass even in the game.
In RPG games with a party of NPCs I always just use the Auto Level option for the characters other than my own. I pretend they are their own person and don’t micromanage them.
I don’t replay games. Once I finish the story I have no desire to do it again. In fact I hate repeating stuff while I’m playing the first time. I am an obsessive Saver so I can always go back to a point that wasn’t too far back because I hate having to do something a second time.
I also avoid Crafting. I find it tedious.
I always play the Mage or Mage type class and since I don’t replay the game (see above) the Fighter or Rogue type class game experiences are completely lost on me.
As I have gotten older I sometimes find even combat starts to annoy me. I almost wish sometimes there was an Auto finish option that just skips the fight and leaves the characters how statistically the would have ended up based on the strength of the foe. I find I am more interested in just making the choices of what to do and experiencing the story. That may be why I have been playing those Tell Tale type games more lately and ended up bailing on the recent Dragon Age before finishing.
I’m another non-crafter.
I never play the multi-player portion of any game. Even games like Left 4 Dead I just play with the bots. If I want to interact with real people I go to the pub.
Two? Why so many? There’s an IOS game that has one: Tutorial Completed. I nailed it in under 5 minutes.
I don’t think it’s all that odd. I enjoy being around other people in real life, but that doesn’t mean I have any desire to attack them, or try to actively prevent them from accomplishing anything. (Ha! You only thought you could eat that burger you just paid for. Have at thee!)
I especially hate PvP when the outcome of a fight is purely mathematical, and if you get beat you have to start over from scratch. The moment you finish the tutorial (if there is one) you’re going to get wiped out by some snot-nosed middle schooler who thinks it’s über k007 to use faux gothic letters in his character name and swiped mommy’s credit card to buy $3000.00 worth of insta-builds.
While playing Dragon Age I often wondered who the hell read those things. And who are they paying to write something that no one will read?
I also play exclusively as good characters. To me that seems to be the default for the correct plot. I often have intentions to go back and replay as an evil character. Sometimes I try to do it but I have never had the motivation to play through again.
I also mean to go back and complete everything and find anything. I never do. I do try to finish all the side quests before the end.
I used to roleplay purely heroic, self-sacrificing (or lawful-good if you prefer) characters because usually that’s also coincidentally the path of maximum XP+loot rewards (which, IMO, is a dynamic that’s up its own ass. Evil play should by all rights get the most stuff because crime hella pays, but being good is its own moral reward).
These days however I tend to default towards a more cynical, mercenary-good character. I’ll be nice to people who look like they could really use a break or are actual victims of injustice beyond their own control, everybody else gets to pay up or fuck off. Yeah, yeah, big dragon, kidnapped princess, kingdom in peril, I get it chief, what I wanna know is : what have you done for *me *lately ?
I still won’t go out of my way to be a jerk though, or only for curiosity’s sake after saving, to know just how much of being a dick I could get away with. Like refusing to try and save Redcliffe in Dragon Age : Origins. I absolutely loved the fact that hearing the villagers’ plea and replying “undead hordes killing y’all every night ? Real bummer man. That’s not really why I’m here though sooo if you could kindly point me to the nearest exit ?” was a thing that you could do ; but I couldn’t really bring myself to go that route for realsies.
Even better, the consequences for choosing to do this are straightforward and pretty much what you’d expect: the village is destroyed, everyone in it dies, and all of the quests, items, and interactions you’d get from the village after saving it are permanently lost.
In systems where you actually have to score alignment points to unlock abilities, you really don’t get to choose not to be an asshole too often if you take that route, and quite often that choice isn’t even properly evil or even selfish, it’s just petty and dickish. I can’t stand to do a dickhead playthrough of Jade Empire. There is just no good reason to be such a shit all the time. I would argue that Bioware has gotten better about it, but overall it’s as though they don’t understand that being the asshole should feel like being a hero. For example, my Paragon Shepard always punched that damned reporter. Feels good.
Multiplayer, unless playing a strictly multiplayer-only game.
I’m slow and methodical to begin with, add in that I’m probably watching TV or doing something else while playing, and multiplayer is frustrating for both me and whomever is on the other side of the connection.
Even in MMOs that I’ve played, I avoid PVP.
It was all the more annoying in Jade Empire that they went out of their way, both when hyping the game and in the tutorial section of the game that “nonono, Closed Fist is not about evil and it’s not being petty, it has a valid philosophical underpinning, it’s about teaching people to stand up and deal with their own shit themselves yadda yadda yadda”.
In the actual game though, I can think of perhaps two quests where the Closed Fist resolution actually follows that goal : the Zither of Discord - where a CF guy tricks you into dealing with a demon for him and you can trick him right back which should teach him A Valuable Lesson. If he didn’t kind of, yanno, die by demon in the process. Still, teaching ! - and refusing to free a slave girl but tossing her a knife instead to let her free and avenge herself which is absolutely about the CF philosophy.
So those quests were cool.
The rest is all petty dickery though. Like, you can choose to permanently fuck up the dam of the first act’s village. What purpose does that serve ? All of the village’s problems are due to the dam being open ; it’s clearly stated that the village will not survive that state of affairs so long. I could see a CF point to be made about “y’all should fix your own damn dam”, but sabotaging it to prevent that from ever being possible again ? Yeah, I’m sure they’ll all have learned a lesson in self-reliance when they starve to death !
The female reporter in the last one? I was nice and wound up banging her. Felt better. 
For just the PvE part of the game this works well. Stat boosting actually makes the game a little too easy in my opinion. If you play competitively at all however, many status attacks are very useful. Notable are abnormal status conditions. A burn halves the victim’s attack making them almost useless. Paralysis cuts their speed to 1/4 and occasionally they can’t move at all. If you can use these against pokemon that rely on these stats you can permanently incapacitate them with a single move. It works even better if you use a pokemon with the Prankster ability as it makes all their status moves go first. You can’t usually win a game on status alone however, and there are many ways to counter it. That’s one of the best things about pokemon, no single strategy is the best.
Something I never seem to be able to do is play casually. I always end up trying to optimize my character to be as good as physically possible.
Good example of an exception to my “no collectibles” rule: the Maiamais in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. They were easy to come by during normal gameplay, usually quick to collect, and you got an item upgrade for every ten you collected. The same goes for the heart pieces. That’s how you do collectibles right.
Don’t give me some pointless token that I’ll look at once and promptly forget. Give me a gameplay advantage.
No, you’re thinking of the on-board reporter who looks like Maggie Gylenhaal but is actually Jessica Chabot. She’s nice and totatally bangable
He’s talking about Sahin-boo-boo-ramma-lllama-ding-dong-al-jalani. Although if you manage not to punch her in ME3 she actually gives you more galaxy defender points as your disposal
About the only things I can think of that I flat out don’t do is grind, or replay games once I’ve finished them.
I used to be willing to endure a certain level of grinding to solve a game / get good enough to compete in multiplayer, but now that I have kids, I have neither the time nor the inclination to spend my limited videogaming time in some sort of dumb-ass grind to get experience or weaponry.
Also… in most of them, once I’ve finished the game all the way through, 90% of my interest is gone. I suppose it’s a variant of the grinding concept- I could go back through and do the same shit over again a little differently (or a lot), but ultimately it’s the same stuff I already did.
Crafting is one of those things I’ve done in the past, but with very limited aims and goals, usually with the intent of doing something that can’t be done with in-game items. For example, in Ultima Online in about 1998, I had a tailor character that made forest green cloaks and stuff, so that my actual character could roll around more or less camouflaged.