A Question About Story Progression

Sorry, but I'm afraid that neither one of those is entirely correct.

1 - You can slow down romance generally by adjusting the Partnership Liking Gate upwards and the cooldown periods between breakups and new romantic partners. The speed of SP's Romance Manager can also be slowed down independently of the rest of the mod. These settings are all under NRaas > SP > General Options > Options: Romance. The Flirt Manager can be toned down a bit too, but flirts are not partners...they can lead in that direction of course, though.

Many players find that SP moves too quickly for them overall, not just limited to romance and careers. If that's the case, one might want to slow things down entirely with a single setting change. NRaas > SP > General Options > Adjust Speed (perhaps try Slow if the default Normal is getting carried away with everything.

For individual sims in town for whom you would like to stop the romance cycle because your sim would like to take some time to date and get to know them better without all the speedy competition, you could switch off (disallow) Romance on the other sim under Sim Options or designate them as an "arranged marriage" for your sim. If things don't work out, this can be easily undone. The arranged marriage option will undo itself if the sims are not actually compatible. Teens can be especially fickle though, and are susceptible to scenarios pushed by the game involving proms, certain photo booths, and having some really bad days also known as Mood Swings if you have Generations in play so keeping teen relationships stable can in some cases be challenging.

There are other steps that can be taken to fine tune things, but some of them will involve more advanced SP options and others will involve a different mod that we are not allowed to discuss here. We are free to discuss these things at NRaas all we want, though. :)

2 - Register does not control the Showtime careers. Register's purview is Role and Service Sims. The only Showtime slots that fall into the category it has a say about are the Magician, Singer, and Acrobat Service Sims that one can call up to have come over and entertain your guests at parties, but Service Sims like that are in a service pool waiting to be called up to perform their services and are in a different class from co-workers and residents.

Actually, nothing controls the homeless street performers in particular as it's the game itself that pushes sims into these slots whenever it feels like it. How to handle co-workers whom you would like to be more stable in their jobs depends on whether they are homeless NPCs spawned for the express purpose of being co-workers or if they are fellow residents with their own households presumably moving up (or down) the job ladder on their own in jobs they really like (that match their LTW, for example). One way that works in both instances is to set Allow Find Job on the Sim Options level to False once they are employed; that should at least keep the game from dragooning them into the Showtime slots or SP from "helping" them find work elsewhere. The homeless ones are trickier though and would tend to be more stable if they were given or added to households of their own.

Story Progression can have some weird outcomes. In one of my games where it was running from the very beginning, pretty much every couple divorced. Most of them have an active dating life, but they stay living alone. Combined with the mechanics that sims will move to a bigger house as soon as they can afford it, most of the SV houses, especially the large family homes, are occupied by singles, while the few households with kids are overstuffed, often even patchwork families anyway. I probably need to force some kind of "retirement home". I should probably also follow the suggestion to adjust those cooldown periods for breakups.

Those Showtime careers seem to be more of an issue in the university world, where the standard EA story progression is still active.

"KatyFernlily;c-17186215" wrote:
You can set magician, acrobat, etc. to 0 with Register. The op said their coworkers move on to become acrobats. Maybe that is an option to help stop them leaving their other jobs? (just guessing...)

Again, those Register settings are for the service pool. They affect the number of service sims in those slots who remain dormant until they are dispatched to our sims' houses to perform and entertain at parties when ordered up by phone, they are not controlling the career sims. If we set a service pool limit to 0, the service sims will be spawned anyway as the game thinks they are needed. For other examples, we can't really have a game without child care social workers or a grim reaper standing by to be summoned as needed.

It's like the difference between sims in the law enforcement career and the police service sim who brings your rebellious teen home for staying out after curfew or is called upon to help catch a burglar. Or the difference between sims working as mixologists (Role Sims in this case, actually assigned to and out tending bars) and the service sim mixologist who comes to your house when your order one up. Or the firefighter service sim. They are not the same sims, service sims don't have a "real" career and, as far as I know anyway, career sims do not leave their careers to join the homeless service pool.

Thank you for clarifying, igazor. I learn something new every day!

1. I think it might be under "general options" under the "flirt" section. https://www.nraas.net/community/StoryProgression-Interactions

2. You can use nraas Register mod to adjust Showtime careers - https://www.nraas.net/community/Register

You can set magician, acrobat, etc. to 0 with Register. The op said their coworkers move on to become acrobats. Maybe that is an option to help stop them leaving their other jobs? (just guessing...)