Like suddenly you're just doing the same thing over and over again.

I seem to do this with families alot. I completely focus on my couples having offspring and bringing in the next generation that I don't really take the time for them to actually live properly or do things that they might want to do rather than what I want them to do. It's because of this most of my sims wants/oppurtunies get ignored unless it benefits my game style.

It makes me wish fears were still in the game or that not completing a sims wishes would make them depressed. It would give me a little push to actually care a bit more about what my sims want instead of just what I want for them. Sort of looking at the smaller things more instead of just the bigger picture.

Anyone else get into a situation like this? Sometimes I do get away from this behaviour, but more often then not I feel like I'm too much in my comfort zone.....

I know exactly what you mean. I try to overcontrol my sims. :/ I'm trying not to. I'm letting the game pick their traits and doing their LTWs randomly. Usually when things get too monotonous for my sims I take them all out to the park and let them go wild or take them on vacation so I can focus my attention on one or two instead of the whole family.

what makes me mad is that I always end up doing the Musical career or just music sims in general. I'm yet to do a sim big in another trait.

Right now, I want to do an inventor sim, and I have her set up. But I find myself paying more attention to her musical brother. The legacy i'm olaying's 3rd generation has 5 kids (all adults) in age order

A Musical Guy, Married & Kid on the way
An Inventor Girl, a role i really don't know how to play
A Bookworm Girl, engaged, and cheats on him with old men. Sounds so fun to me, so I play her every few Sim days
An artistic / musical sim, he's kind of a hipster.
And another music sim. He follows his older brother and is in his band.

I just don't know who I should play for the long run. I really should play the inventor, and explore that part of Ambitions (which i just gotrecently) but i just don't know. Any advice, anyone?

At the minute I'm playing a couple where the mum wants a big family (same old same old) but the husband wants to reach the top of the investigator profession. So I've been focusing on it a lot too.

Swatme, go for the inventor. Just do it! If you really want to get away from a music sim then put the wheels in motion before you have the chance to go back on it.

Another thing I do a lot is that I'll base the traits I give a sim on how they look. Like if they end up looking like a tramp I'll give them the flirty trait....or if they look snobby I'll give them the trait snob. Likewise if they're wearing glasses I'm more tempted to give them Bookworm, Genius, Computer Whiz traits.

I think I should try and be a bit more random with how I assign traits in cas.

I usually fall into a family rut - I focus on sims having kids and bringing them up, then I do the same with their kids, and so on. Now, when I play on my legacy families, I try to do something different with every generation - the first one is all about family, then the next one might be career, next is a profession, then another profession, maybe one is a sim with commitment issues so I focus on getting them 10 girl/boyfriends, etc. Obviously each generation has at least one child but I try to cut back on the number of kids they have in order to let them actually LIVE instead of just raising children. I find it much more satisfying because then my game keeps changing from generation to generation.

I'm thinking my heir for the second generation might want to be a writer, so I'll mostly focus on that. Then when she becomes an adult she might have two kids.

I always have the habit of focusing on the next generation. I also always get connected to the parents and try to prolong their life as much as the game allows. Most of my families have a hell-lot of kids.

I know exactly what you mean. I always try to create this "picture-perfect" family every time. I've never experienced a divorce, an unexpected death (when this happens, I reload from my last saved game), I'm always trying to climb the career ladder with sim mom and sim dad even though they have enough or make enough money to support the family, etc...


It's time for a change....I'm just going to let them do what they want and I'll just sit back and watch lol.

My first generations of the Jarvis family has focused on the family (They have six kids)

However I think the second generation I'll be focusing more on career and will probably have two kids (three at the most) and they'll be more spaced out too. Poor mom of the jarvis family never caught a break with all those babies popping out in quick succession.

Suprisingly, I am doing really good in game right now. I ended up picking the bookworm. I call her Melvin, because of her stereotypical nerd look and personality, but her real name is Nichole. She ended up marrying a Young Adult, and her old hag lover died. She was upset, but it made it so that she was no longer cheating on her husband. She flirted a bit with some people at a party but all was well. She had one kid, and that's all I wanted to have, and then she died. She died via fire, at the graveyard, ironically, which was waay faraway from help. Like, I tried sending her to the nearest shower (a "hotel" in the middle of the island) and she didn't make it there. But I brought her back, and now she just had a ghost baby. So cool! I never before had playable ghost sims, so. Then back to her husband, he is doing the Architectural Design career, which is really fun!

I know I'm not in a rut this time around because I have the perfect scenario. The first (normal) child is going to be a ghost hunter! IRonic, but makes sense. I will slowly drift him away from his mom and the baby just for my own story telling purposes. Haha.

So yeah. I'm proud of myself drifting away from being too attached and playing too classical games. I am glad I finally had a sim cheat, got a ghost sim, and just generally were cruel to my sims at times.. It's more fun xD

Oh, to add though, there is one problem I am running in to very fast. There are WAAAY too many decendants of the same Legacy, because of there being 3 kids originally, then 5 kids + 4 others from the other second generation, and now the 5 kids are having a ball in bed having kids. This may seem confusing, I know, but basically there were too many kids last generation, and now they are all having kids. I may have to banish some of them from the world, find a way to kill them off, or just saturate the world with other families and kids. Story progression did have a few kids around the same time I had a ghost kid though, so that's good.

I'm running into the "too many kids from the legacy" thing. My third generation produced 4 children and each of the 4 children grew up and had three children. Add in the spare from gen 2 who had 2 kids herself. I know one of her children had one kid. Though I haven't looked lately. But I have story progression set up so that it prompts me to name any kid born into the neighborhood. I turned off other notifications so this is my way of keeping up with what's going on.

A long time ago I set my Awesome config to notify me of any story progression action. I hated it at first (SOOO annoying) but I actually have come to like it. I keep up on the town a lot better now, and know whos cheating on who. (At first I was torn to see the unused siblings cheating on their wives and husbands, but now I think it's hilarious). It also is helpful for knowing early on whether the kids will have any friends in highschool.

This prooves that Sims 3 is just not up to par with Sims 1 and 2. No wonder Will Wright left... (I'm still waiting for Sims 4 with fingers crossed)

Oh wow. XD I can't deal with it notifying me of all story progression actions. It drove me nuts. This reminds me I also have it prompt me to put in the new last name of married couples. And I have it notify me of anything to do with family. Though considering there's a lot of family between Emily and her spouse, I need to change that now.

Yeah i've felt that way before, but it never really bothered me, because I'm always excited for a new baby/ or babies in the family. My favorite aspect of all sims games are the children/ families. I'm a sucker for them Though i complain about how many kids my sims have i still love to play them, i grow fond of each and every one of them. Though to get myself out of the rut i recently fell into i made a whole other game just to have a drama filled town. One of my married sims decided to have an affair with the woman literally across the street.

Honestly it wouldn't take 2 minutes to get to her house. He ended up getting her pregnant right after his wife had a baby boy, and not too long after that his mistress had a son. Long story short the whole town was talking about it after it came to light that he'd had six kids with his mistress and only two with his wife, well now ex wife. He married his mistress not even a day after he broke up with her It's things like that gets me out of a rut pretty quick because it's so entertaining.