What do you do in the Sims 3?

@ImmyQuokka Hi. I have several saves with ongoing stories all at one time. I don't do challenges as I don't like rules. :grin:
I create stories with my sims, even the one that is in a legacy style save have mysteries to solve or life challenges that befall them. My most recent story is here if you are interested in reading it.

I prefer building over playing.

I start and stop challenges all the time. LOL

I practice my building skills. Every so often I come up with something nice, but I mostly rely on my fellow Simmers to share their interesting builds.

Other times I also just have a "chill" game where I don't do much but let the SIM chose how they want to live their life.

I have multiple saves going on, each set in a different world. Like, i have one in sunset valley, one in starlight shores, and so on. I do play challenges, which mainly consists of me trying to achieve the lifetime wish i choose for my sims, and some of them are indeed challenging. I have recently started building too! I rarely tried to put that much effort into my builds before despite playing for years. That is because i started playing this game when i was like 12, and designing anything other than a box seemed waaay to hard for little me. I mean, it still kinda is for grown me as well, but at least i am having more fun trying nowadays :D

I have multiple save files where I just have the sims live their lives. I mainly focus on family play, so there are children in all my save files. Even on the couple saves I have where I just have a single sim focusing on one career, they have at least one child and are single parents. I just can't resist making my sims have babies and raising children!

I play my simself's family, and when I feel creative I make short stories or screenshots with poses I make myself. I have never done challenges. :smile:

I do a little bit of everything in this game. I have ideas about each world, what the environment, pace and lifestyles of those worlds looks and feels like. Because of this, I spend a good deal of time building homes, businesses and community lots to try to bring my vision to life. It is a lot of work, but each build is tailored to reflect the personality of the Sims and the overall lifestyle of the world in which they occupy.

Because I play with each household individually before putting them in a combined game (save) which is played on rotation. I have a huge amount of save files (which are kept on an external drive. I switch save files depending on who I feel like working with that day). So, I literally have a save file for each resident in each of my worlds.

I do not do challenges, legacies or any other pre-planned type of game play. Nor do I create stories with my Sims. Instead, I watch them as they develop, documenting events with screenshots and video as they progress. Basically, I allow my Sims to live and let their stories unfold to tell itself.

I've got multiple save files in different worlds. Most of my gameplay is quite freeform, it's really just me and my Sims exploring the vast array of content the game has to offer. I've tried several different skills and careers, and still am very far away from having "done it all". In fact, I just got the Supernatural expansion not long ago, and my next venture will be into playing with supernatural Sims :)

As far as creative expression goes, I mostly create Sims. I've got a huge ongoing project where I create Sims from Sims 4 in Sims 3. The closest I've ever gotten to a challenge in that respect would be creating them without using custom sliders!

I was a “fanfiction” writer before I ever came to the Sims 3, which meant that I used to craft my environment and character interactions with words instead of pictures (so my writing tends into the word-count of tomes - between 80K to 120K words a work and at least 8K to 10K words a chapter. I used to write fan fiction for a military lawyer TV show called JAG which necessitated a lot of research into the characters and created a OC (original character) that complemented the main characters in the story but did not overshadow the other characters.

My Sims 3 characters that I created feature in narrative stories and can be sometimes utilized like “actors playing a role” for a particular scene or sometimes when a nasty case of writer’s block hits, I end up having to do a “freeplay” which pretty much means I just play the game without any direction. In any case, I enjoy apocalyptic fics so a lot of my narratives revolve around that.

Occasionally my id (if you are familiar with psychology terms) just happens to beg to be let out to play so I appease it by utilizing mods to zap Sims who don’t do what I tell them to do and I do have an unholy fascination with det-packs and meteors which makes life for the sims (the ones I do not favor using) a living hell (with the sole exception of two sims, River McIrish and Bebe Hart who rank amongst the EA created sims in the favored circle of this Watcher.

There is no “right way” or “wrong way” to play the Sims - it’s all in what you like to do. I just enjoy telling stories and use my Sims in a way that can best convey what story I want to narrate.

I've been using a main save game (play folder) since spring 2018. As I've played, I've split my save in three playthroughs. I'm playing my current playthrough in more of an RPG style, which I've titled as "A Quest Ahead", and I have a set of connected regions, developed within the previous playthroughs, via NRaas Traveler that I've been playing in a more or so linear fashion.

In the current playthrough, certain sims have storylines associated with them. I also have a sim version of myself within the playthrough.