"logion;c-17897781" wrote:
Agreed, some of my teens have done nothing but homework for almost seven years.
I've added mods to convert toddler skills to childhood skills, and child skills to adult skills. So my playstyle at this point is to ignore the kids other than telling them to do homework and make sure they don't die. Kids having only four aspirations that have very restrictive requirements isn't fun for me. Want your kid to be creative? They need to draw the following pictures, and play violin. Want an athletic kid? They need to spend a lot of time learning to type.
My wishlist for kids and teens:
More aspirations for kids.Active schools. Ideally, players could choose to never play school actively and not be penalized, or play every day of school.
Bring back private schools. I miss having my sims suck up to the headmaster of the private school to get my kids a slightly better education.
Home schooling. Make it possible for stay-at-home parents, retired elders, or just adults with flexible schedules, to teach kids at home. This also opens up the possibility of playing a boarding school.
After school events. Let my sims go to high school sports, or attend homecoming or prom. Give them after-school clubs that they can have actual club meeting rooms for in the school. (And if we're doing dances, fix dancing so dancing with another sim isn't just waving your arms in the same room as them; actually have couples dancing.)
More activities for kids and teens but especially kids. One of the reasons I tend to ignore kids is that there's so little for them to do. They play with mostly the same toys that toddlers play with. They have very few kid-to-kid special interactions. Throw in some backyard sports, playing catch, playing cops and robbers, doing stunts on bikes, playing D&D, building and playing in treehouses,
something that's not just relentlessly building skills in a particular way to meet an aspiration goal.
School lots. It would be okay if these were hidden lots, like the police station or the hospital, but I generally dislike that there are hidden lots. Any sim should be able to go visit any lot, especially for schools. Kids and teens should be able to try to sneak into school after hours to do pranks, or to go to club meetings, or whatever.
Make scouting (optionally) active. Let me follow the kids and teens when they go to scout meetings and treat it like an active career as well.
Revamped skill system. Kids shouldn't be restricted to learning only a couple of adults skills if they've obsessively maxed out their kid skills. I have friends who are buying their grade school aged kids stuff to teach them coding and robotics. Other kids learn how to cook, or martial arts, or how to dance. Most skills should be available for kids, and get rid of the whole motor/social/creative/mental business.
Delinquency. Remember back when your sims kids and teens could get picked up by the police if they went out after curfew? And how in The Sims 4 you can send a child alone to a different world because you needed them to play on a jungle gym while playful and they happened to be playful at 2 a.m.? Bring back consequences. Maybe have a curfew kids can't be out beyond without an adult or a reason for being out. If kids get in too much trouble at school--for pranks or fighting or smooching between classes or just getting caught skipping class--they can get expelled and then have to either get home schooled or study up on their own to take a GED test.
Right now, I've got two "schools" in my game. One is a school that I've classified as a library. It has a librarian on staff and no one else. It's mainly only useful as a meeting place for clubs. The other is a huge residential building, meant to be St. Trinian's, from that series of movies. Because it's just a residential building, it doesn't really function as a school. The sims there all go to regular school with the other sims. Eventually they'll grow up and move out and I'll have to make sure no random tray sims decide to just move in. So it's basically just a big house full of teens and children.
