A way to lock skills?
This might sound silly at first, but I was thinking about this from responding to something else and it occurred to me that I think it'd be nice to able to lock skills.
Like imagine you toggle a setting that makes it so that skills don't show up in the skills panel automatically from doing them one time, but instead they remain hidden and don't progress. With the setting active, you have to manually unlock each skill you want to level up (maybe through the phone or something).
You might be wondering, "Why in the name of all that is grilled cheese in this world would this matter?"
Well, for me, it actually is a distraction having skills unlock automatically. Played sims with autonomy on quickly end up with a skills panel that is an unsorted mess. The part of my brain that wants things to be "complete" gets this urge to complete every unlocked skill, but not only does that urge become overwhelming with so many of them sitting in there... it would destroy character uniqueness for me to max the same skills on all the same sims.
I think this skills thing, as mundane as it may seem, contributes (at least for me) to a perception of samey sims. If I could choose what skills my sim unlocks and works on, I could, for example, have a sim who is eternally inept at cooking, while another is a master chef. Or a sim who plays lots of video games, but never actually becomes skilled at them, while another is a video game master. This is fairly realistic anyway, as people in RL sometimes fail to improve at something much, despite doing it a lot.
With the current system, this is really difficult to actually do, particularly with the more commonly go-to skills, like cooking. You pretty much need to control the sim and stop them from using the skill. But that cuts out part of the gameplay options for managing their needs, which ends up meaning that you have to play a very specific way to get the desired result; you can kiss "go with the flow" goodbye, in other words.
Like imagine you toggle a setting that makes it so that skills don't show up in the skills panel automatically from doing them one time, but instead they remain hidden and don't progress. With the setting active, you have to manually unlock each skill you want to level up (maybe through the phone or something).
You might be wondering, "Why in the name of all that is grilled cheese in this world would this matter?"
Well, for me, it actually is a distraction having skills unlock automatically. Played sims with autonomy on quickly end up with a skills panel that is an unsorted mess. The part of my brain that wants things to be "complete" gets this urge to complete every unlocked skill, but not only does that urge become overwhelming with so many of them sitting in there... it would destroy character uniqueness for me to max the same skills on all the same sims.
I think this skills thing, as mundane as it may seem, contributes (at least for me) to a perception of samey sims. If I could choose what skills my sim unlocks and works on, I could, for example, have a sim who is eternally inept at cooking, while another is a master chef. Or a sim who plays lots of video games, but never actually becomes skilled at them, while another is a video game master. This is fairly realistic anyway, as people in RL sometimes fail to improve at something much, despite doing it a lot.
With the current system, this is really difficult to actually do, particularly with the more commonly go-to skills, like cooking. You pretty much need to control the sim and stop them from using the skill. But that cuts out part of the gameplay options for managing their needs, which ends up meaning that you have to play a very specific way to get the desired result; you can kiss "go with the flow" goodbye, in other words.
