Oh, and one other thing I do during game play: I frequently pause the game to scan the entire area for any townies or other characters on the lot because you never know if the NPC you need is lurking nearby. This is especially relevant for my lovelorn teenage character, Jamie. If there are any teenagers (particularly girls) in the area he'll home in on them.
I actually came here to ask another question of you all! Getting to answer that one was just an added bonus
How frequently do you update your story? Do you stick to a strict schedule? And if you're a reader, what's the sweet spot for you? How often do you like to see new chapters appearing in your feed? I'm at this point currently that I'm rearing to just upload everything I have prepared and finish off one big chunk. (I'm currently editing chapter eighteen of twenty from part 1) But I don't want to be off-putting or overwhelm readers by putting too much out there too quickly. I know people are reading more than just my story, and my chapters are relatively long, so maybe it's wise to keep it on a weekly upload schedule, just so everyone has time to catch up. OR maybe I should just get it all out there and get it done.
Any thoughts on this?
I update as and when I can. I don't like to talk about my real, personal life as I want you all to think I'm some kind of has-been Hollywood scriptwriter called Kellogg J Kellogg but I can confess I am a married man with two children, a job and a home to attend to so the story writing has to come second to all those other things. I want to get a chapter done every week to 10 days but that's more of an aspiration than a target.
How frequently do you update your story? Do you stick to a strict schedule? And if you're a reader, what's the sweet spot for you? How often do you like to see new chapters appearing in your feed?
Right now I don’t have a schedule. As I gain experience I’m trying to do new content once a week. It’s been a struggle to figure it all out but I feel like I’m starting to understand the whole process. Once I get the lots and last details ready for my second story I’ll see if it’s possible to do a chapter of each every week or if it might be better to alternate weeks. My pre-New Years resolution is to get new content out weekly.
Do you ever try to make scenes that stretch the limits of what the game can handle? Have you ever had to give up/change scenes that just weren’t possible?
Hello, me again.
First of all, I share your pain @SnowBnuuy. Historical male cc is so difficult to find and not just historical either: I just want an unbroken male sweater with an open neck shirt underneath which has unrolled sleeves and the shirt part tucked in. Why does every shirt have to be untucked? Seriously, cc creators, there's enough male plaid or checked untucked open shirts with rolled up sleeves out there. We don't need any more. Oh, and we're fine with denim miniskirts as well...we've got plenty, more than plenty. And not all male sims need an endless supply of skin tight ripped jeans.
If any custom content creators are reading this and you like the 1960s I have a list of things that need creating for that decade, come and see me...I'll make it worth your time.
But back to the question. I try to work within the limits of the game but I have a few ideas I'd like to try depicting in the game. For starters, I want to send a character off to fight in Vietnam but that's going to be difficult to replicate...but not impossible. I'd also like Detective Action to get into more fights, car chases and have a gun pulled out on him without having to download some potentially game breaking cc. Again, there is a way I can "cheat" a screen cap using another game altogether.
But it's amazing what you can cheat with just the base game as it is.
@Kellogg_J_Kellogg It’s not that I have a problem with CC creators making modern CC, nor do I have a problem with checks and masc miniskirts; other simmers’ wants needs and interests don’t need to take a backseat for mine, but it’d still be wicked to have more historical stuff.
@Kellogg_J_Kellogg It’s not that I have a problem with CC creators making modern CC, nor do I have a problem with checks and masc miniskirts; other simmers’ wants needs and interests don’t need to take a backseat for mine, but it’d still be wicked to have more historical stuff.
i wasn't much of a cc user then curseforge came out i 've been downloding everyday which means you all are bad influences. lol
@Kellogg_J_Kellogg It’s not that I have a problem with CC creators making modern CC, nor do I have a problem with checks and masc miniskirts; other simmers’ wants needs and interests don’t need to take a backseat for mine, but it’d still be wicked to have more historical stuff.
lol, I didn't mean miniskirts for men...although I did once have an idea of setting a Sim story in a world where male and female roles, names and clothing were swapped because I wanted to see if CAS could handle that. I just meant there are a LOT of cc denim miniskirts for females out there. The market is saturated with them.
For the narrative storytellers out there – do you ever try to make scenes that stretch the limits of what the game can handle? Have you ever had to give up/change scenes that just weren’t possible? Special effects, environments, those kinds of things? I’ve noticed that TS4 can handle a fair bit of fun things (way more than TS3) even if the game itself wasn’t made with that in mind.
This question isn't directed towards me, but I think it's interesting, so ...
To make things better gameplay-wise, I've been trending towards using even more mods and building elaborate lots. Not cheating, per se, but adding more active careers and maybe pushing it in terms of how many Sims can be on a lot (trying 50-70 instead of 20 because I currently see CC deco Sims as crossing a personal line).
A small semi-related example: I built a café near my Sims' home for them. They can run it as simply a café , as a restaurant where they prepare everything, or as a bakery where they prepare some things, all through mods. There's also an upstairs space that can be used for lectures, book readings, cooking classes, a cooking show, again with mods, etc. I feel like I have lots of options even with something as simple as this because I can get a lot of slice-of-life gameplay out of it if I ever decide to use it. Randomly, I also put pianos everywhere for my piano-addicted Sim. I've posted pictures of the café before but it's under the spoiler for the curious.
Has your story ever gone in a direction you never thought it would?
This is question is making me think much more than I expected at first...
As it often happens, I have a quite different answer for when I play a legacy or I write a plot-driven story. In the former case, I tend to have a vague idea about what is going to happen in the following 10 chapters or so, but for the rest I'm constantly inspired both by what is happening in the game and by random thoughts I get at very random moments which make me visualize the following bit of the story. Thus, when I make a legacy I start with a general initial idea, which gets progressively implemented with more and more new ideas, which pile up until the story becomes completely different from how it started, and which I couldn't have predicted in advance. For example, in my first plan for the Miller Legacy I had in mind an ending around generation 3 already, but then playing and meeting the new generations of sims I kept getting ideas over ideas for filling all the generations of the canonical 10 generations challenge. Objectively it's impossible to plan a legacy from the beginning, as it's not possible to know how the protagonists of the generations following the first will be, and this is a big part of what makes a legacy funny to play for me. Thinking about it, the born of a new sim in the legacy (in particular if it's the heir) it's always the moment when I have the weirdest ideas about the following.
As for the plot-driven stories instead, I tend to make a rough draft of the whole story until the end, to try to avoid plot holes and make a better characterization of the characters. Then, when I actually start to play and write, I can get new ideas which move the story towards directions I wasn't expecting when I started. Most likely, this means adding a continuation of an extra story arc to a story I was planning to finish much sooner. Often I tend to discard these ideas because I think they would mess up too much in the following part of the story or that they are not so interesting after all, but a few times these ideas made it to the final version and I was quite happy about the results too.
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 8.18 posted on the 23th of April 2024*
Has your story ever gone in a direction you never thought it would?
This has me chuckling because...where do I start? XD (WARNING: Spoilers for all of the Magic Universe stories under the cut)
An Arcane Academy Challenge was never meant to lead to a backstory for Morgyn, nor was it meant to lead to me making a whole sequel for a fairly minor character because of something in his family backstory. Nor was that meant to lead to him having ties with the fae and joining with a fae to become a protective fae-lion spirit. Nor was all of that meant to a backstory 300 years in the past when the vampires and werewolves were still alive...I'm worse than big-name comic brands for giving everyone and their nan a whole story!
I know most likely asked many times, but not starting to search over 80 pages Plus opinions in these issues may change.
To most likely more towards gameplay driven story writers, Surprise deaths, fire, satelite, murphy bed, anything. Do you change the story and go with it or exit without saving?
My love, my love, my fearless love, I will not say goodbye..
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..
I know that there are many simmers that use TS4 as a guide that influences their story depending on what the game throws at them that day. I really like the wacky shenanigans that sometimes spring out of that! I don't do it myself, though. I have a very strong framework for what I want to do with my story and where I want the plot to go. The bigger story beats are heavily set in stone and won’t change no matter what.
But I also really enjoy rolling dice just to see what happens 😂 It’s a habit I’ve picked up from my D&D hobby and it’s made writing so much more enjoyable to me. I’ve rolled for a bunch of things including whether a character would succeed at sweet-talking someone, if they get spotted during an escape, how good they are at certain skills, even who they take a romantic interest in. It’s been loads of fun 🎲
There’s a chapter where one of my main characters. Arthur, gets pulled into a dare as a child and completely botches everything he tries to do. Everything that happened in that chapter was rolled for in advance. It’s still one of the most fun I’ve had writing a chapter, period. The poor guy. 🤣
Hosting D&D sessions on the side. Interested in playing through some fantasy-themed shenanigans? Send me a message 😘
Has your story ever gone in a direction you never thought it would?
This has me chuckling because...where do I start? XD (WARNING: Spoilers for all of the Magic Universe stories under the cut)
An Arcane Academy Challenge was never meant to lead to a backstory for Morgyn, nor was it meant to lead to me making a whole sequel for a fairly minor character because of something in his family backstory. Nor was that meant to lead to him having ties with the fae and joining with a fae to become a protective fae-lion spirit. Nor was all of that meant to a backstory 300 years in the past when the vampires and werewolves were still alive...I'm worse than big-name comic brands for giving everyone and their nan a whole story!
There's something so lovely in that, though! Everyone deserves to have their story told.
Has your story ever gone in a direction you never thought it would?
This is question is making me think much more than I expected at first...
As it often happens, I have a quite different answer for when I play a legacy or I write a plot-driven story. In the former case, I tend to have a vague idea about what is going to happen in the following 10 chapters or so, but for the rest I'm constantly inspired both by what is happening in the game and by random thoughts I get at very random moments which make me visualize the following bit of the story. Thus, when I make a legacy I start with a general initial idea, which gets progressively implemented with more and more new ideas, which pile up until the story becomes completely different from how it started, and which I couldn't have predicted in advance. For example, in my first plan for the Miller Legacy I had in mind an ending around generation 3 already, but then playing and meeting the new generations of sims I kept getting ideas over ideas for filling all the generations of the canonical 10 generations challenge. Objectively it's impossible to plan a legacy from the beginning, as it's not possible to know how the protagonists of the generations following the first will be, and this is a big part of what makes a legacy funny to play for me. Thinking about it, the born of a new sim in the legacy (in particular if it's the heir) it's always the moment when I have the weirdest ideas about the following.
As for the plot-driven stories instead, I tend to make a rough draft of the whole story until the end, to try to avoid plot holes and make a better characterization of the characters. Then, when I actually start to play and write, I can get new ideas which move the story towards directions I wasn't expecting when I started. Most likely, this means adding a continuation of an extra story arc to a story I was planning to finish much sooner. Often I tend to discard these ideas because I think they would mess up too much in the following part of the story or that they are not so interesting after all, but a few times these ideas made it to the final version and I was quite happy about the results too.
I know exactly what you mean! In my Wordpress drafts, I've got certain bits and pieces for as I think of them, and sometimes they don't make it - but sometimes, they do, and I'm glad to have tucked them away for that certain time. But sometimes bits I'm sure I'll use get tossed away without a thought!
I know that there are many simmers that use TS4 as a guide that influences their story depending on what the game throws at them that day. I really like the wacky shenanigans that sometimes spring out of that! I don't do it myself, though. I have a very strong framework for what I want to do with my story and where I want the plot to go. The bigger story beats are heavily set in stone and won’t change no matter what.
But I also really enjoy rolling dice just to see what happens 😂 It’s a habit I’ve picked up from my D&D hobby and it’s made writing so much more enjoyable to me. I’ve rolled for a bunch of things including whether a character would succeed at sweet-talking someone, if they get spotted during an escape, how good they are at certain skills, even who they take a romantic interest in. It’s been loads of fun 🎲
There’s a chapter where one of my main characters. Arthur, gets pulled into a dare as a child and completely botches everything he tries to do. Everything that happened in that chapter was rolled for in advance. It’s still one of the most fun I’ve had writing a chapter, period. The poor guy. 🤣
I've never thought of rolling dice before! I also play D&D, but that sounds like such a great way to do things and make them a twist of fate!
I know most likely asked many times, but not starting to search over 80 pages Plus opinions in these issues may change.
To most likely more towards gameplay driven story writers, Surprise deaths, fire, satelite, murphy bed, anything. Do you change the story and go with it or exit without saving?
I tend to exit without saving, because most deaths in ToC are set in stone. My gods the amount of times that someone has randomly died of old age (until I was smart enough to turn aging off), died in a fire (Gawain keeps lighting all the darn fireplaces in the castle 😂) or died from too-much-emotion is ridiculous and highly entertaining at the same time. 😆
Hosting D&D sessions on the side. Interested in playing through some fantasy-themed shenanigans? Send me a message 😘
Surprise deaths, fire, satelite, murphy bed, anything. Do you change the story and go with it or exit without saving?
It depends on the context.
If that happens to one of my main characters I will always exit the game without saving. Otherwise, I try to protect my sims from that kind of sudden death by upgrading murphy beds and making sure their skills are high enough before they're allowed to repair electrical items and cook meals over fire.
If a side character were to suffer a sudden death, I'd probably let it happen, but now that I think about it, it rarely happens in my game.
Has your story ever gone in a direction you never thought it would?
It definitely has. The first time it did was within 10 minutes of starting the save. I didn't have any plans to include premade sims and before I knew it I had one in the main cast. My main character coming out as a lesbian was another unplanned element. I always had it in mind to let my characters surprise me and give me new storylines to consider.
Surprise deaths, fire, satelite, murphy bed, anything. Do you change the story and go with it or exit without saving?
It all depends on who it is. If it's one of my main characters, I'm definitely exiting without saving. Their dying is not part of the story. Everybody else is fair game.
Comments
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
I update as and when I can. I don't like to talk about my real, personal life as I want you all to think I'm some kind of has-been Hollywood scriptwriter called Kellogg J Kellogg but I can confess I am a married man with two children, a job and a home to attend to so the story writing has to come second to all those other things. I want to get a chapter done every week to 10 days but that's more of an aspiration than a target.
But I am Kellogg J Kellogg
Or maybe not.
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
Right now I don’t have a schedule. As I gain experience I’m trying to do new content once a week. It’s been a struggle to figure it all out but I feel like I’m starting to understand the whole process. Once I get the lots and last details ready for my second story I’ll see if it’s possible to do a chapter of each every week or if it might be better to alternate weeks. My pre-New Years resolution is to get new content out weekly.
Hello, me again.
First of all, I share your pain @SnowBnuuy. Historical male cc is so difficult to find and not just historical either: I just want an unbroken male sweater with an open neck shirt underneath which has unrolled sleeves and the shirt part tucked in. Why does every shirt have to be untucked? Seriously, cc creators, there's enough male plaid or checked untucked open shirts with rolled up sleeves out there. We don't need any more. Oh, and we're fine with denim miniskirts as well...we've got plenty, more than plenty. And not all male sims need an endless supply of skin tight ripped jeans.
If any custom content creators are reading this and you like the 1960s I have a list of things that need creating for that decade, come and see me...I'll make it worth your time.
But back to the question. I try to work within the limits of the game but I have a few ideas I'd like to try depicting in the game. For starters, I want to send a character off to fight in Vietnam but that's going to be difficult to replicate...but not impossible. I'd also like Detective Action to get into more fights, car chases and have a gun pulled out on him without having to download some potentially game breaking cc. Again, there is a way I can "cheat" a screen cap using another game altogether.
But it's amazing what you can cheat with just the base game as it is.
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
i wasn't much of a cc user then curseforge came out i 've been downloding everyday which means you all are bad influences. lol
Go down the rabbit hole of CC! Go down it and never come back out. One of us! Oooone of uuuuuus!
lol i did use mc laurens patients kept shooting across the room but that was it.i like the rabbit hole.
lol, I didn't mean miniskirts for men...although I did once have an idea of setting a Sim story in a world where male and female roles, names and clothing were swapped because I wanted to see if CAS could handle that. I just meant there are a LOT of cc denim miniskirts for females out there. The market is saturated with them.
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
To make things better gameplay-wise, I've been trending towards using even more mods and building elaborate lots. Not cheating, per se, but adding more active careers and maybe pushing it in terms of how many Sims can be on a lot (trying 50-70 instead of 20 because I currently see CC deco Sims as crossing a personal line).
A small semi-related example: I built a café near my Sims' home for them. They can run it as simply a café , as a restaurant where they prepare everything, or as a bakery where they prepare some things, all through mods. There's also an upstairs space that can be used for lectures, book readings, cooking classes, a cooking show, again with mods, etc. I feel like I have lots of options even with something as simple as this because I can get a lot of slice-of-life gameplay out of it if I ever decide to use it. Randomly, I also put pianos everywhere for my piano-addicted Sim. I've posted pictures of the café before but it's under the spoiler for the curious.
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
Has your story ever gone in a direction you never thought it would?
Daughters of Hesperia
It happens to me constantly....
I am often inspired by random events in the game. I love it when it happens.
This is question is making me think much more than I expected at first...
As it often happens, I have a quite different answer for when I play a legacy or I write a plot-driven story. In the former case, I tend to have a vague idea about what is going to happen in the following 10 chapters or so, but for the rest I'm constantly inspired both by what is happening in the game and by random thoughts I get at very random moments which make me visualize the following bit of the story. Thus, when I make a legacy I start with a general initial idea, which gets progressively implemented with more and more new ideas, which pile up until the story becomes completely different from how it started, and which I couldn't have predicted in advance. For example, in my first plan for the Miller Legacy I had in mind an ending around generation 3 already, but then playing and meeting the new generations of sims I kept getting ideas over ideas for filling all the generations of the canonical 10 generations challenge. Objectively it's impossible to plan a legacy from the beginning, as it's not possible to know how the protagonists of the generations following the first will be, and this is a big part of what makes a legacy funny to play for me. Thinking about it, the born of a new sim in the legacy (in particular if it's the heir) it's always the moment when I have the weirdest ideas about the following.
As for the plot-driven stories instead, I tend to make a rough draft of the whole story until the end, to try to avoid plot holes and make a better characterization of the characters. Then, when I actually start to play and write, I can get new ideas which move the story towards directions I wasn't expecting when I started. Most likely, this means adding a continuation of an extra story arc to a story I was planning to finish much sooner. Often I tend to discard these ideas because I think they would mess up too much in the following part of the story or that they are not so interesting after all, but a few times these ideas made it to the final version and I was quite happy about the results too.
This has me chuckling because...where do I start? XD (WARNING: Spoilers for all of the Magic Universe stories under the cut)
To most likely more towards gameplay driven story writers,
Surprise deaths, fire, satelite, murphy bed, anything. Do you change the story and go with it or exit without saving?
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..
I know that there are many simmers that use TS4 as a guide that influences their story depending on what the game throws at them that day. I really like the wacky shenanigans that sometimes spring out of that! I don't do it myself, though. I have a very strong framework for what I want to do with my story and where I want the plot to go. The bigger story beats are heavily set in stone and won’t change no matter what.
But I also really enjoy rolling dice just to see what happens 😂 It’s a habit I’ve picked up from my D&D hobby and it’s made writing so much more enjoyable to me. I’ve rolled for a bunch of things including whether a character would succeed at sweet-talking someone, if they get spotted during an escape, how good they are at certain skills, even who they take a romantic interest in. It’s been loads of fun 🎲
There's something so lovely in that, though! Everyone deserves to have their story told.
Sometimes it really is like that, I guess! Glad to see I'm not the only one.
I know exactly what you mean! In my Wordpress drafts, I've got certain bits and pieces for as I think of them, and sometimes they don't make it - but sometimes, they do, and I'm glad to have tucked them away for that certain time. But sometimes bits I'm sure I'll use get tossed away without a thought!
Daughters of Hesperia
I've never thought of rolling dice before! I also play D&D, but that sounds like such a great way to do things and make them a twist of fate!
Daughters of Hesperia
I tend to exit without saving, because most deaths in ToC are set in stone. My gods the amount of times that someone has randomly died of old age (until I was smart enough to turn aging off), died in a fire (Gawain keeps lighting all the darn fireplaces in the castle 😂) or died from too-much-emotion is ridiculous and highly entertaining at the same time. 😆
If that happens to one of my main characters I will always exit the game without saving. Otherwise, I try to protect my sims from that kind of sudden death by upgrading murphy beds and making sure their skills are high enough before they're allowed to repair electrical items and cook meals over fire.
If a side character were to suffer a sudden death, I'd probably let it happen, but now that I think about it, it rarely happens in my game.
I usually change my direction so many times while I am creating a story, that I can never remember where I originally thought I was going.
It definitely has. The first time it did was within 10 minutes of starting the save. I didn't have any plans to include premade sims and before I knew it I had one in the main cast. My main character coming out as a lesbian was another unplanned element. I always had it in mind to let my characters surprise me and give me new storylines to consider.
It all depends on who it is. If it's one of my main characters, I'm definitely exiting without saving. Their dying is not part of the story. Everybody else is fair game.