Family Ideas?

you could do one o the many sims challenges or maybe try something different like a sim in a career you have never done or a gay sim maybe a runaway teen

Start with your single sim, as above and send them travelling if you want to but have them actually build their family in-game. Don't have too many children and have one of those children pegged for the legacy, basically to go on and do the same thing. Find and build a family. I rarely build families. I always start with a single sim. Personally I find this fun because otherwise, everything is pretty much done, you have so many sims that you can't really connect with any of them as a character and I personally find a lot of sims difficult to care for.

Also, make sure freewill is on high, that way after your sim has had their family, you can concentrate on your legacy sim.

Other tips, either randomise or mix traits, try all careers, give your sims a backstory, get a pet, give them hobbies and quirks and you should end up with sims that you actually care about for more than a few days. I imagine that if I just started with a fully made family and no back story, I'd have difficulty caring and would just abandon the family too after a few days. So my suggestion would be first and foremost, make yourself actually care about the game you're playing and that will make any scenario fun.

Can you try doing a wishacy? Make ONE sim and then let them choose who they want to be with, when they want kids, what field of interest they want.. I find it helps me get away from micromanaging into the same story over and over again. I randomise traits too for all offspring. Although if you're going to continue the wishacy apparently having the family-oriented trait is desirable.

I'd suggest getting at least university life expansion. It adds some fun aspects to it!

I also personally like to try and make it as a hobo or homeless person and sleep on the streets on benches and all of that and not have a house at all and give my sim pretty much no money. It is an interesting way to live :D

I play rotational style like in my Sims 2 game. I use NRaas mods and a few others to make my game the way that I want. So I can play all my different families and when I get tired or bored of one family I move on to a new house to play. Maybe you could try that!

I love Sims that like to garden and/or fish but if I did that over and over again I'd get really tired of it. I also start out with a single Sim and let them start their own lives and see where we go from there. I also like having different towns for changes of scenery to play in. One of my Sims is a male and still single and owns a farm-type set-up in a very rural town. He loves pets so of course wants to have several but that also means he's not someone I want to spend a lot of time focusing on a family with so I was thinking about having him adopt a child for inheriting the farm when he dies.

Another of my Sim families I set up along the guidelines of a Genetics Challenge way back when and they have a whole different lifestyle, except for the wife (my original Sim in that family) raises fruits and makes nectar while the husband pursued a science career. He was originally a workaholic but he later had a mid-life crisis and decided he'd had enough of that noise.

I also like to randomize traits because otherwise I'll probably end up playing the same kind of Sims all over again and getting tired of them.

thanks for all the suggestions everyone! :)

I like to be shipwrecked on an empty island with basic things and try to raise a family with a local native sim, which i create. Then there is always the option of getting rescued and everyone going to the city to try to live.

When I was running out of ideas I went to my badges page in the old Sims 3 forum and read through the things to do to get badges. I got lots of ideas that way.

I was always getting bored of playing one family so I modded my game out and play the entire town starting with one family in the town and add more gradually over time to the town and play in rotation like it's an open world version of TS2.I use a story progression Mod to make sure my town dosen't make changes to the inactives I don't want made until I do that myself.