Things you weren't sure about at the time, but your game wouldn't be the same without

[NatteryakToad]

My sim Makayla cheated on her husband with townie Benjamin Long, leaving behind a three-year-old and twin two-year-olds. She knew that she was done with children completely, so I focussed on her and Benjamin's careers. However, that got boring, and I looked for ways to liven their lives up. A baby would be the obvious choice, but Makayla didn't want anymore children. In the end, I decided that Makayla would die in childbirth, as I was fairly bored with her.

I wasn't too sure about it at the time, but now I can't imagine my game without Kyle Benjamin Long-Tomlin. I love the relationship he and Benjamin have; when they had a buglar the first thing Benjamin did was run into Kyle's room, as if he was making sure he was okay.

What about you? Have you ever made a gameplay decision that you weren't sure about at the time, but now couldn't imagine your game without?

[julmoo]

First I thought it would be a good idea to create a CAS woman who has tons of alien babies to bring some fresh blood into the hood. Also I had a severe shortage of females <.<
So this woman had thirteen alien babies from three different pollination technicians. (I have default replacements and wanted to test them).

Then I thought "OH God why did I do this?" because I didn't want to mess my beautiful Sims' genetics up. But now after having two alien girls married into my families I must say, they're actually quite nice, I like them. They're beautiful in their own way and my hood dieing out because of inbreeding is delayed for another generation xD

I basically have two alien families living in an empty lot with only a telephone. The lot is somewhere far far away at the edge of the map and I don't interact with them as long as they haven't "married into" the hood. The aliens can't interact with their siblings too because I pretend they're still in outerspace.

Also they are like townies that I will eventually include into my game. This way I have customers for my businesses and no pesky townies.

[12353herbs]

For story purposes, i had vampire Jodie Larson's vampire husband executed, as she was 'unhappy' with the marriage. I wasn't so sure about it because, y'know, even sims with zero attraction can appear affectionate towards each other if you try hard enough. But it's played out nicely, and i think i would have been very bored had he lived. Plus, one of her subsequent husbands (she became a black widow :p) gave her a very pretty daughter :)

[ella_in_wonderland]

Admittedly, for the first few months I played the Sims 2 (I was like 12) I didn't know that couples could have babies in-game and fall pregnant. Thank Goodness I found out in time!!

[x-kisses-for-yooh-x]

Embracing free will! Up until literally a few months ago I had always had free will turned on but would pause the game whenever a sim was standing doing nothing so I could set a huge queue of actions so they wouldn't go off and just please themselves. Then for a while I just turned free will off completely! But recently I kind of let my sims do what they want and have got some pretty nice results from it! Gameplay is less boring and also a lot less stressful for me! :beer:

- Kisses x :bunny:

[jamini94]

When I first started playing sims 2, I used maxMotives and motherlode like crazy to support my huge families. Then I was talking to my friend and she said I should try playing without using cheats and I was like I couldn't possibly do that! :blink: How would my sims take care of their huge families? How would they advance in their jobs? But then one day I was making a new sim and I decided to try this radical way of playing on her. And I'll be the first to admit the game is so much more interesting and fun without using the cheats. :D

[Roseblossom90]

When I first started playing sims 2, I used maxMotives and motherlode like crazy to support my huge families. Then I was talking to my friend and she said I should try playing without using cheats and I was like I couldn't possibly do that! :blink: How would my sims take care of their huge families? How would they advance in their jobs? But then one day I was making a new sim and I decided to try this radical way of playing on her. And I'll be the first to admit the game is so much more interesting and fun without using the cheats. :D

I was the same way using cheats for money and careers as well as maxmotives. Although I got bored too easily doing that so I decided to let go of cheats except for maxmotives in dire emergencies. Now, I can't bear the thought of using motherlode or the career cheat...there simply is no fun in that.

[TychoH]

Things you weren't sure about at the time, but your game wouldn't be the same without.

That are the Sims that weren't planned to be born. One lot is full of those Sims, and that's one of my favourite lots. Another family was planned to have 4 kids. But those parents are my favourite Sims ever, and it's the last time I play them (I created them over 100 times, no joke), and they both want to have 10 kids, so I'll go for it. The mother is just 31 (I keep track of which day my Sims are born) and pregnant with child number 8.
I love them and their kids. They're such a happy family.

But if I didn't make the decision to don't create them anymore, they would be boring.

[Gazelove]

I started using hacks that I thought would make the game annoy me, ie things that make it ridiculously hard to play. Instead I ended up challenging myself to wrap a story around the struggles those "annoying" hacks create.

[sweetbaby160]

when I first started playing, I too was bad for using cheats: mainly motherlode & agingoff. then I discovered this site & the amazing challenge section, which opened up a whole new way of playing (letting the sims actually age & die, struggling for every simolean along the way LOL) which has made for a much richer & more satisfying gameplay. Before that, I remember having an entire neighborhood, filled with CAS sims who just kept breeding endlessly but would never hit elderhood. I was "afraid" to let them get old (Freud would have fun with that) or be poor, everyone had ridculously huge mansions, no jobs but a 50,000k monthly income. It got boring very quickly....

[Peni Griffin]

I thought of this thread last night when I was playing Billy Ghote.

I didn't want to create Billy. I wanted a grandmother/granddaughter household, Nannie and Billie Ghote, from Simdia; Nannie to be live-in housekeeper/nanny while the Munny boys were growing up, and Billie to match with Oliver Onions, then a teen. If I deleted the generation between them, the game changed Nannie into Billie's mother. So I made Billy specifically to be the worst kind of Romance sim, a balding, spade-bearded, middle-aged male chauvinist narcissist with a strong sense of entitlement and no sense of responsibility or respect for women. I moved them all into an apartment and immediately moved Billy out, abandoning his aged mother and teen daughter.

Then I had to find something to do with him. I needed a single adult like I needed a hole in my head, but I'd never played the sort of womanizing cad that most people experience early in their simming careers by playing Don Lothario. So I moved him into a tiny apartment and applied the same rule to him that I had to Bad News Beverly - no wants-locking, no consideration of consequences, skill only when directed to by wants, keep him platinum as much as possible. I didn't even bother recording his story. He just lived in his little apartment, got a music career job, and dated townies. The most interesting thing he did was seduce my wicked witch.

Then Billie went to college, and he called her every single day. I never intended her to make friends with him, and he still neglected his poor old mother disgracefully. But apparently, once there was no danger of being called on to support her, he started missing his little girl.

And then he dated Luz Iana. Luz was created in CAS as a single mother of two teens, a child, and a toddler, with her aged mother-in-law; her husband was deleted in CAS. They were a family of semi-legal simmigrants living in a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment downtown, with rules that didn't permit Luz to go after her LTW of becoming a business tycoon. Her oldest child, Lourdes, was Billie's housemate/college mentor, and Luz was struggling in the musical career track. She and her mother-in-law raised her three boys to be the most wonderfully gentlemanly lot of young fellows in the hood. She brought Billy home from work, and even though they only single-bolted, she had been so buried in financial and family considerations, she fell for him pretty hard. Billy of course was perfectly willing to exploit this; and since I had decided that Luz's missing husband had been abusive and philandering, I figured this tied in. Luz may raise wonderful boys, but she has crappy taste in men! It may even have been seeing their mama treated shabbily that motivated her sons to turn out so well. They didn't use birth control (not part of her base culture, not part of his character) and when Luz rolled a want to get engaged to him, I let her ask. He accepted because the relationship was high, and as it happened his lifestyle had drained his funds quite a bit - I never made him go to work if he didn't do it on his own.

He went ahead and moved in, which pooling of funds finally enabled them - at that point, Luz's mother-in-law had died and the Ianas consisted of her two youngest and the mother-in-law's Chihuahua - to buy a small house and move out to Drama Acres. I figured the fact that Luz's husband was defined in story as missing, not dead, constituted sufficient excuse not to go through with the marriage. The next-to-last Iana boy went to college. Luz got pregnant. And then, while he was out on a side date with a townie, Billy ran into his pregnant daughter and rolled a sudden want to marry Luz. At which point I wrote some dialog in which Billie scolded him for his behavior, the call he'd taken from some random townie earlier became notification that Lou Iana had been killed by a jealous husband, and I was off and running. Billy and Luz had a surprise wedding date (testing out a new wedding chapel community lot I'd just installed, which can't have had a thing to do with how this played out) in which he gained more aspiration points than he lost, and his character arc was well and truly launched. His side dating dropped off dramatically once he was married and his son William was born, though he certainly didn't cut it out. Luz turned elder, retired, and bought a small night club, which they run together. To my surprise, I found that dating - under the guise of "working gigs" - did seem to be good for business - not only did flirting with female customers when he was running the club by himself improve the business, but his date and outing rewards went a long way toward spiffing the place up without driving costs through the roof, and his longest dateless period ever coincided with a series of demotions that saw him busted all the way back to Record Store Clerk! When he started dating and going on outings again he started creeping back up the ranks.

His stepchildren call him The Sleazebag - since his stepdaughter is close friends with his daughter, who warned her about him when Luz first started seeing him, they know what he's like - but they've never caught him cheating and the fact is - he makes Luz happy. If she's home and awake and he has a date want he fills it with her. She was ecstatic when she got pregnant even though they weren't married and I hadn't given her a family secondary yet (she has it now and when she's at home, she rolls all Family wants; at work, she rolls almost all Fortune wants). He's a big help running the business and his job in the musician career track, where he's back up to Battle of the Bands judge and likely to stay there, since I'm not forcing him to skill, is an important part of the family budget. He's a good father to their child William and even taught him to study, though he draws the line at doing any sort of housework. Compared to her imaginary first husband, he's a paragon of conjugal virtue!

Last night, while he was on a side date with my homewrecker, Georgette Skirt, his fear panel rolled: Get rejected for flirt, get rejected for duet, Death of Luz. For the first time ever I used his single lock, and he now has a pervasive haunted dread of the day Luz dies. She's been an elder for a couple of weeks now and he turns elder in two days. I'm going to let his aspirations fade down a bit. I want him to really miss her when she goes. I want to see who he is by then. Because he's not the two-dimensional generic sleazebag I made in CAS anymore, by a long shot.

And I can't imagine where Luz would be without him!

[NatteryakToad]

I'd forgotten about this thread :-)

I created Kibwe, Kali and Cassidy Ibori because I was looking for a wife for Gavin Newson. The backstory was that Kibwe and Kali were twins who had fled some civil war ravaged country somewhere in Simafrica when they were still teenagers, after their parents deaths at the hands of rebels. Kibwe, although younger, was taken his position seriously as head of the household, and moved to Patience Island after Kali had been receiving some unwanted male attention in the first place they settled after leaving Simafrica, bringing his new wife Cassidy with them.

Kibwe and Cassidy represented two completely opposite cultures - he believed the man was the breadwinner, and the woman's role was to stay at home, keep house and raise lots of children whilst she believed men and women should be equals, and strongly wanted to persue a career. To start with, things worked out alright as Kali stayed at home and to raise an increasing number of nieces and nephews, whilst Kibwe and Cassidy both worked.

Meanwhile, Kibwe became friends with Gavin Newson, as there was no way he'd let his sister meet a man unless he was his friend first. After spending some time with Kali, Kibwe and Cassidy, Gavin asked Kibwe for Kali's hand in marriage, as Kibwe and Kali's cuture forbids dating. Instead, Gavin had to court Kali, with Kibwe as a chaperone. It was very interesting to try and build the relationship without any touching aloud - no kissing, no hugging, no holding hands, no backrubs, no flirts which involved physical contact. Eventually, he proposed to her (and I ignored the jumping-into-the-arms hug when she accepted), they got married and moved into the massive house that Ginger's fiance had bought for all of them, but that really is another story. They now have twin sons, Gabe and Gideon.

This is when things got difficult for Kibwe and Cassidy. My rule with Cassidy was that she was a headstrong woman and wouldn't be made to do anything she didn't want to. So, I'm not allowed to direct her to do anything she doesn't want to. Currently, their house is full of dirty dishes buzzing with flies, because Kali's not their to clean up, Kibwe'll be damned if he'll do "womens work", Cassidy doesn't want to and Kibwe's run out of influence points. We'll see how this one plays out. Their eldest daughter is still three days away from childhood, so it'll be a while before she's any help.

With regards to children, the rule was no birth control, as its not part of Kibwe's culture, they would only woo-hoo when they both wanted to or Kibwe had an baby want, and Cassidy having a woo-hoo want meant she was agreeing to have another baby. Currently, they have five children: Zaire, Enoch, twins Armani and Ashanti, and Kenya.

At the time, I wasn't sure about creating Kibwe and Cassidy as well as Kali, as my hood is starting to become overpopulated, but now I can't imagine my game without all my Ibori's.

[Saturnfly]

It's OK to let sims die.

[DigitalSympathies]

I cannot live without inSIM. It may be risky for most people, but I have had zero issues with it. I can finally control community lots, etc, etc, without owning them. :) I was unsure cos of the warnings, but when I got it (years ago now), I haven't been able to play without it since.

[Darby]

I wasn't sure I liked ACR, when I first installed it. I think I had it briefly, had the thought that it was going to take some getting used to, then needed to reinstall my game for some reason (new computer, I think) and didn't reinstall ACR right away.

When I did reinstall it, having some idea of what to expect that time made it less jarring, and I've long stopped wondering if I like it. I LOVE it.

[JDacapo]

Campus BRATs. Lots and lots of Campus BRATs. And plantsims. Also Inteen - took it out for awhile after I found that it was doing weird things to Vidcund Curious, but now it's back in because I know how to prevent the teen-in-adult-body glitch. Had to take out the talk-lecture mod though since it isn't compatible with Inteen.

[mirjamsim2love]

I wasn't sure I liked ACR, when I first installed it. I think I had it briefly, had the thought that it was going to take some getting used to, then needed to reinstall my game for some reason (new computer, I think) and didn't reinstall ACR right away.

When I did reinstall it, having some idea of what to expect that time made it less jarring, and I've long stopped wondering if I like it. I LOVE it.
I second this.
Wasn't sure if I should start with mods/hacks, found out about ACR, pondered over it, decided I couldn't resist trying. I was happy with it immediately. I will never plan to take it out. I see a lot more free will romantic actions than without it and I like that a lot.

[The SimWhisperer]

When I first started playing The Sims, and learning how the game, I'd use Pleasantview as my testing hood. However, I always deleted the pre mades-before ever knowing that was bad, or thinking of making a custom neighbourhood myself! I had no attachments to the Goth's, seeing I never played them in Sims1. I didn't even remember the Pleasant's, I only remembered the Burb's. But, I didn't realise, it was the same family from Sims1. And of course, I had no knowledge of Brandi being a Newbie, again didn't really play the family.

Anyways, I saw a question about Brandi Broke, and what did people name her third baby. Which got me curious about the family. After re starting Pleasantview, I looked into the Caliente's, who lead to me to Don! Well, now I had to go see the Goth's- because I kept reading about Bella, and finally the Pleasant's and Dreamer's. Once I 'met' these characters, I started to play them, and realised I liked the pre mades, however I still wanted my own Sims incorporated into Pleasantview.

I then tried Strangetown...had to find 'Bella', you know! And discovered the Curious brothers! Those guys, plus the Singles, the Grunts, Olive & Ophelia, and sometimes the Smith's, is why I would play that neighbourhood again. I hate the Beakers! My point is, if I never got curious about Brandi Broke's baby, I think a) I wouldn't know who you people were talking about! And b) I would have missed out on some great characters and story lines, that I may have never made myself! :) I'm sure the other pre made hood's, are interesting too. I thought about trying BV, but I don't like apartments. So, I'd have to do major building, which I'm in no mood for, unless it's my own neighbourhood. Which, I currently doing right now. Because even though, I like pre mades, I need my own world to build sometimes. But, because, I tried pre mades. I became open-minded to Townie's, where some of them will have a part in my own Neighbourhood.

[Artimis]

When I started to write witch queen I was never sure if having it all take place on a sud hood instead of an entire hood but now I think I made the right although now I cannot get all the lots on to it so much so that some are now gone to make room for others.