Legacy Challenges vs Legacy Narratives: which do you prefer?

I like a combo.

There are some that I like to do, especially if I'm bored. I've come up with my own rules for legacies. Maybe one day I'll consistently write a story. LOL

Don't know, I'll just do whatever I want without thinking it's this or that, but... I'm definately not doing challenges and rules set out or made by others, and the thought of logging points to much in my game currently does not appeal to me. That doesn't mean I can't have goals and things for my sims to achieve, even things that are a little besides what goes on in game, but they are more perhaps like story telling elements.

My sims are also not on a leash, definately not. I allow them to roam free as much as possible, because I don't really want to be the one to decide what their story is going to be like.. Of course, I do to varying degrees decide their personality traits and select life time wishes for them, but sometimes I also just roll the dice on their traits, and then replace the ones I don't like. ;) I will, as much as possible, only direct a sim to do something if they already have a wish for it.

So.. if I've created four sims sort of randomly, and these sims at one point gets a wish to start or join a band, well... that's what they'll do. ;) Then they'll be 'trapped' in that life with the goals that come with it until they want to quit the band for whatever reason.. (hopefully not...)

My long term goal is really to just play with generations and see what come out of it, but I find myself sometimes making stories out of things anyway, because suddenly.. oops, here's a story, but I don't sit out and try to start writing a story before I've even played the game. The stories, or the ideas for them, usually show up afterwards based on something that happened in game, and I still try to allow them as much freedom as possible within that story.. :P

I love a legacy style family. The highest generation I have ever gotten before it went wonky was 7 generations. I try to have each generation fulfill their LTW. Sometimes...they don't...sometimes, they are sacrificed. >:)

For gameplay, I guess I prefer more of a legacy-style narrative in the sense that I like to follow one family through the generations, and the legacy challenge and its variants are a good source for inspiration on what to do with that family, but I've never been particularly serious about point-collecting.

As far as story writing is concerned, the legacies I read tend to fall into one of three gameplay styles:

1. Letting the Sims do what they want, basically just playing the game normally, documenting what goes down and then making a story out of it. This style includes 'true' legacies, which follow the Pinstar rules and aim to collect points. The best story I've ever read in this style had an author with a great sense of humour who fully leaned into the wackiness of the game and used that to provide witty and entertaining commentary throughout.
2. Essentially creative writing using Sims to illustrate the story, where the narrative is pre-planned and possibly even pre-written and the game is just used to provide the visuals. Usually the visually gorgeous ones with ReShade effects and tonnes of poses fall into this category. I don't think I'd ever have the patience for this style of storytelling myself, but one of my all-time favourites is done in this style.
3. A mix of the above two, where the author might have an idea in their head about how the story should go, but they allow in-game events to influence the course of the narrative. This is my preference and the style my own legacy story is written in, since while I like interesting plots and developed characters, I also like playing the game itself too much to just use it for screenshots.

Taking into consideration what @fibijean pointed out, her third gameplay style matches what I like to do. I have an idea in mind, but since I focus on fullfilling wishes, I tend to let the game dictate the results.

I'm also terrible at limiting my gameplay to rules that someone else wrote.