At the risk of boring everyone to tears who has heard this all before, I was kind of a latecomer to TS3 and started my first game towards the end of 2011 with the base game, one EP, and one SP (no mods yet). It was not a very notable beginning, a single sim of my own design starting out in Sunset Valley in a modest home in what seemed like would be a challenging career, the Military. I made a lot of mistakes as a player back then as I was really just learning how to play, but managed to recover from all of them.
The thing is, no one ever told me that you were supposed to start over every so often, so I never did. That's still the same game I am playing today, over six years later, and that first sim is the great great (etc.) granddaddy of them all. I really have to load up a very early copy of this game one of these days and have sculptures made of my founder and his partner. All I have now are some horrible paintings of them that the grandkids made, some even more horrible blurry screenshots, and lots of stories to talk about when the family gets together. :)