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Characters as Sims
elanorbreton
Posts: 14,549 Member
I am curious what players do when they add characters from books/tv/movies etc into their game.
- Do you go all-out and make all the worlds themed - buildings, the sims, mod out phones etc if needed? Do you just stick to doing one world? Or do you just plop in one household of characters amongst all the 'normal' sims? (And, if you do that, do you make that one house themed?)
- How do you cope with modern items if your game is set in a different era (such as background buildings and cars)?
- Do you try and play out the characters as per their book/film (maybe even trying to get the correct gender of any kids if they have them) or do you play them however the game takes them?
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I just see where the game takes them. So their lives are influenced by what the game has to offer in terms of gameplay (for example careers, hobbies aka skills,..) and (unfortunately) modern technology like phones and computers.
I also try to avoid cc.
Do you go all-out and make all the worlds themed - buildings, the sims, mod out phones etc if needed? Do you just stick to doing one world? Or do you just plop in one household of characters amongst all the 'normal' sims? (And, if you do that, do you make that one house themed?)
Characters? Definitely all out, but I didn't start that way. It was a slow process that started with the wish to give a single minor character, Daniel Phillips, a better ending. My other sims were to be OCs that fit the Detroit in 2038 setting.
Over time I added more and more characters from the Detroit game, first the cops, then Daniel's old family, until by now I have the most obscure Detroit characters running around and hardly play my OCs anymore. Out of my 200 favorited sims I play five households regularly, and others sporadically. These regulars are all Detroit canon characters.
Since they are an importent part of the Detroit lore, I heavily curate my police co-workers. Anybody who isn't a sim from DBH (or from the first batch of game-generated co-workers from 2018) gets deleted right on spawning. Career levels are fixed (with some wiggle room).
Buildings, nah. I grabbed what I could find in the gallery. The most I did was re-painting the walls of the ingame police station to reflect the color scheme of the Detroit Police Department. I also added a rooftop farm and an android store, but they look nothing like the originals.
How do you cope with modern items if your game is set in a different era (such as background buildings and cars)?
I usually don't have that problem, more like the opposite. The save being set in the near future, I can allow objects I wouldn't normally, like the infamous rocketship in the backyard, or use genetic engineering as an excuse to include mermaids and fantasy cc for pets.
For the longest time vampires were posing a problem, because the supernatural doesn't exist in the dbh setting. I retconned the vampires to burglars (if they broke in) or malfunctioning androids (if they visibly smoked in public). By now that has changed, the save now has lore to accommodate all packs.
Do you try and play out the characters as per their book/film (maybe even trying to get the correct gender of any kids if they have them) or do you play them however the game takes them?
The game certainly gets to make suggestions, but when in doubt I go with what feels the most in-character. When former enemies organically grow closer over a long time or when someone picks up an instrument, that's okay. But for romances I stick to my headcanons, regardless of where the game tries to send the sims. Shippers gonna ship, I guess...
One especially out of the left field development was when Daniel got the "Know your universities" notification. I interpreted that as the government offering him a scholarship and he chose to major in Psychology. Daniel now works as a teacher, what I think fits him, but without the game giving me that nudge I wouldn't have considered that career path.
I don't add characters very often. I just added the Ingalls family, since I am currently watching LHOTP, and I built their house and placed it in Glimmerbrook. Now I'm thinking it might be nice to have the Oleson family in there too.
Like you @simgirl1010 I think it is nice to have other sims wandering around who you recognize. I wish we had horses though, and a way to turn off modern society.
I guess that is one good thing for you @EnkiSchmidt if you have a future setting you can probably get away with anything.
I mentioned this in a different thread just the other day. The only sim I ever based on an existing character is Hunter S. Thompson. He was a journalist/ author.
He lives in Strangerville. If you don't know who Hunter S. Thompson was you probably won't get it.
But I do play them as real Sims with thoughts and feelings.
I was once playing a '60's themed game in Sims 3. My main family was a group of surfer dude brothers. I populated Isla Paradiso with characters from 60's TV shows and pop culture. I had The Addams Family, Gilligan's Island, The Beatles (living in a yellow submarine), I Dream of Jeannie, The Beach Boys, and a bunch of others. I then turned them over to the game. It was hysterical to see Morticia Addams running a food stall at the summer festival. She got her revenge, though. I'm pretty sure the Addams Family with house I downloaded from the exchange contained the bad cc that caused the "stretched baby" glitch in that save.
Tales From The Myst
The Blue Moon Jukebox
Future settings can actually be really fragile, easily broken by introducing too much in too short a time. I found that this can be alleviated by lampshading too advanced ideas. At first the rooftop rocketship was fully acknowledged as weird, then that slowly normalized to "hey, if the police controls the airport and train stations, let's just steal the rocketship!". It's still something that sims from Sulani, Finchwick and even Strangerville take selfies in front of.
All the sims err'day
I started with just one household in my first save (I still have the tray files sitting around somewhere). Soon, I added another one, paired everyone else up and ended up with four. In my current save, I decided to make the other important characters too, whether I particularly liked them or not, then added some less important characters, and now I’m seriously considering Simmifying some minor recurring characters and one-shot villains from early in the series, even if they have exactly two spoonfuls of canon characterisation between them for me to work with and I have to invent everything else myself. (What have I done? XD)
If we had more room in San Myshuno, or the more modern neighbourhood in Mt. Komorebi, or even another city world, I’d probably keep most of my Sims there, but we don’t, so I just have to put them wherever they’ll fit. I’ll definitely try TwistedMexi’s Create-a-World when it’s stable.
I’ve recreated a few buildings from the series. Yugi’s grandfather’s game shop is the most obvious one (and the most challenging so far - that roof 😫), but I’ve also built my interpretations of some of the other characters’ houses based on the few times we actually see them. If it’s a larger building (e.g. the Kaiba mansion), I‘ll check the gallery first to see if anyone else has built it - but most of the time, no one has. Apparently, every other Yu-Gi-Oh fan/Simmer on the planet is about as confident in their ability to build Pegasus’ castle as I am in mine. 🤣
The point I’m up to right now is about two years after the end of the series (Yugi and his friends are about 20 now), and since there’s no epilogue, I have complete freedom to do what I want with the characters’ lives. It’s roughly 50% headcanons, 10% limitations and 40% “hey, why not?” (*glances at all the aliens I’m saving for later*).
When it comes to shipping, I usually decide who’s going to get together in advance if there aren’t OCs or townies involved, and I’m not above using cheats if they autonomously do something that could mess up my plot. 😈 I might just let something happen if it’s in character, though.