Story Progression Settings

Did you look at this page: https://www.nraas.net/community/Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings
That's what I follow, and it works great.

Btw, it looks more complicated than it actually is. It's just very thorough to make sure you don't need to ask any follow-up questions.

Rotational Play as @Turjan linked to is essential for the way I play TS3, as it is for many others. SP gives us all the options we need to tailor progression to what we want to be allowed or disallowed and for whom. There is no way to do this otherwise. EA's story progression only offers an on/off switch and unwanted things will still tend to happen when it's in the off position thus making full rotational play almost impossible to manage. AwesomeMod does offer a third alternative, but with far fewer controls available than NRaas SP.

I would never try to play ALL of the households in a given world, most of mine are far too heavily populated for that to make sense to me. Hence the option to protect a caste (subset) of households from unwanted forms of progression while they are not actively played vs. the rest of the town doing whatever they want, within reason. Other players engage with more lightly populated worlds and have different takes on this.

Perhaps you could bring any more specific/advanced questions you have along the way about the Rotational settings to us at NRaas? Helping players find their way through the mods and how they can be leveraged is kind of what we are there for. :)

I like to use Sarah's settings (or most, I tweak to my own taste). It's very helpful to at least get a start on setting up mods..then tweak to your own liking. All credit to Sarah...and thanks again for your informative website!
https://simsarahsarah.tumblr.com/nraassettings

It should be noted that Sarah is one of my colleagues at NRaas, she does not have a presence on this forum. But she is always happy to answer any questions regarding her settings and how she plays. Either her option or mine on the Rotational Play page would be conducive to playing or somewhat controlling the entire town provided it has what we might call a sane number of residents -- I still think that actively playing upwards of 200 residents x the number of Traveler mod connected worlds (yet another way to expand gameplay) is not really a recipe for sanity. As slowly as I play, it would take something like twelve real time years to complete one full rotation that way, but of course we each have our own individual play styles and we don't all play connected homeworlds within the same game save.

I was just getting ready to start a thread and tag @igazor to ask this question about what I want to do. Background: I have never used a single mod in TS3 and only ONE mod in TS2 (friends not required to gain career promotions). So I'm a novice at mods who doesn't particularly like them.

Having said that, I've seen you mention many times here in these forums about how you have a mod(s) that let us TS2 lovers do rotational play in TS3. So here is what I want:

* Create my own town
* Create my own founding families
* Play those founding families rotationally, aging each family up 5 Sim days
* The families I'm not playing don't age, get promoted, have babies, move - just remain frozen until I play them again

Basically TS2 type play. Is this possible with your mods? Keep in mind I don't understand how mods work and had to have a good bit of help for my TS2 mod I finally got installed.

@Rhiannon58 - The tools to arrange Rotational Play are within NRaas StoryProgression. The first decision is whether there will be one group of sims in town who get played rotationally while the rest are left up to SP to move their lives forward, or whether every household in the entire town is to be under your control in turns. As I've already mentioned, I play the first way because my worlds have far too many households in them for me to want to ever play all of them.

So for the entire town, a modified version of the strategy outlined in Option One here, or perhaps consider Sarah's Option Two. Instead of doing up a custom caste for Rotational households, you could use the built-in Not Active caste to make the protections you choose to put into place while families are not being controlled happen more automatically upon switching households. Five sim days is a bit short for a rotation, I find that I lose momentum for longer-term goals when my rotations are shorter than two sim weeks. It also depends on how long the life spans are to be. In the mid to high hundreds or thousands, five sim days is almost nothing as a percentage of each sim's life. With shorter lifespans, the five sim day period is a more significant part of each sim's life. But that's more a matter of strategy and player preference than anything technical.
https://www.nraas.net/community/Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings

What you might want to do first though is experiment with SP, with its progression enabled, on default settings in a test game, so you get a sense of how the mod works without the Rotational Play element. This is all considered an intermediate to somewhat more advanced application of the mod's feature set. I would also say that SP is not the easiest mod to become accustomed to if one has never used mods before. You might want to consider starting with MasterController, which actually on its own doesn't do anything to or for the game other than provide its collections of menu commands on sims, lots, and City Hall for the player to use on demand as they wish. SP is more like set it up and then watch it take over and see what happens (or in the case of rotational control, what doesn't happen).

It is totally optional to play with mods or not in each ongoing game. The settings you put into place are also saved game/world specific. If you actually did want to use the same NRaas mod(s) and the same settings in a different ongoing game without having to set them all manually again, you could export the settings from the first game and import them into the next one. Players who always (or almost always) use the mods tend to have sets of exported settings all ready to use as that which makes sense in a crowded urban world might not so much in a sparsely populated rural one or a tropical island world. Or they might have a "minimalist" collection of settings that they use to test out new worlds they have never played before, or they prefer a different set of things happening or not happening in connected worlds within the same game like vacation destinations, Uni, and Oasis Landing.

Point is, the mod settings you put into place exist only within the saved game, within the world-specific nhd file.

The mods are also removable if you don't like them and the saved game can be played forward without them. Once a game that has seen, let's say StoryProgression, has been played and saved without the mod in place, the mod settings are erased going forward. There are a small number of things to be careful of when removing mods should this be necessary, such as yanking Traveler out when your sims are visiting a custom vacation world will result in them not being able to get back home, taking out a modded career/school while a sim is working/going to that school will leave them doing something undefined, etc. But none of these really apply to SP. If SP is removed from an ongoing save or if it's progression is disabled within its General Options, then either EA's story progression takes over or there will be no progression (to the limited extent that actually helps at all) as per the Game Options checkbox as if the mod had never been there.

Pregnancies are challenging to control when playing rotationally, but many of us see that as a welcome challenge. I take it you do not want your sims to become pregnant or impregnate others while they are not the active household. But you can allow them to be pregnant so that a pregnancy formed but that has not yet come to term when it's time to move to the next household can remain. The baby will be born when you aren't playing the household though as the pregnancy will continue to progress even if aging is off for that household unless you stall/pause the pregnancy (this is what I do) using MasterController. The MC Cheats module is required to pause pregnancies. There are other mods that can do this as well that are compatible with NRaas, such as CmarNYC's Pregnancy Controller mod from MTS. I haven't missed a birth among my many controlled households in years, and even then it was due to user error on my part -- I forgot at the time that MC Resetting the world, which I did for other reasons, removed the stalled state from one pregnancy so I just had to correct my mistake and replay a couple of sim days.

That comment in italics is meant to apply to the entire Pregnancy block of settings, not the one it immediately follows.

I believe the exception you want to set on Sim Options for a sim who has become pregnant while you are playing them, so that they stay pregnant after the household is no longer active, is Sim Options > Pregnancy: Allow Can Be Pregnant > True.

If the pregnancy is to be continued when the household becomes inactive, and it is not terminated, again MasterController is required to stall the pregnancy or else you will miss the birth. Unless you want the pregnancy to be terminated so that you do not miss the birth, because then there would be nothing to miss?

The other perhaps simpler way to approach this is just not rotate out of a household where any sims are pregnant; extend your rotation and wait for the birth(s) to happen. Pregnancies in my game are 7 sim days long so that would be really inconvenient for me if conception happened near the end of my rotation cycle, but I could see feeling differently if pregnancies were the standard 3 day length.

"Turjan;c-17270268" wrote:
Maybe, I can use this topic for a question I have. Where is the setting to keep SP from changing the traits of my rotation families around? Yeah, it's certainly funny when, within one play session, it takes a family and gives the first member "Slob", the second "Evil", and the third one "Dislikes Children". I laughed last time. It's getting old. None of those sims aged up or anything like that.

There are only three instances where sims' traits should be changing. One is if a sim has the Unstable trait (ITF), their other traits are subject to change. That's the nature of that trait.

The second is if they are sneaking in some Crazy Drinks (LN) on you when you aren't watching, but the effects of those beverages are supposed to be temporary. I don't think I've ever seen a sim order one from a LN bar autonomously though, they always seem to order generic drinks on their own.

The third is if you have SP set to Disallow traits on purpose by way of Sim, Household, Caste, or Town Options. Or if you have it set to Force specific traits on them (SP Extra add-on module for both of these options). But by default, none of this should be happening.

Okay, there is a fourth way. If your sims have empty trait slots, SP will fill them up for you when a sim becomes inactive as per its settings on General Options. But that's not changing existing traits, that's adding new ones to the empty slots.

Might any of these be matching up with what you are seeing happen?

@Turjan - Hmm. This still sounds strange.

A teenager with five traits (four base plus one social) has no empty slots. The Uni one doesn't count (unless you have sent them through Uni by way of the Traveler mod and they graduated?) and the fifth base one doesn't count because it doesn't yet exist for them. We can use MC to shove more traits on a sim than that which they have slots for, but that's the reverse of what you are describing.

I'm assuming you do not have a mod from another source in play that increases the number of sims' base trait slots? The only NRaas mod capable of doing so would be Retuner, but it would be virtually impossible to have done this by accident.