Characters as Sims

When I do this, I usually just do one or a few households. The gallery can help a lot to replace lots within one specific neighbourhood. I don't have the time or patience to change the rest of the world. That would make it too long before I can start playing them. So these sims will run into Bella goth, the caliente sisters and all the other townies.

I just see where the game takes them. So their lives are influenced by what the game has to offer in terms of gameplay (for example careers, hobbies aka skills,..) and (unfortunately) modern technology like phones and computers.
I also try to avoid cc.

I play two households and have around 20 households of extended family that my main families interact with. That leaves a lot of room for background characters and I like to fill it with my favorite fictional characters. I have cast members from The Golden Girls, Little House on the Prairie, Sex and the City, Frasier, Harry Potter, The Lucy Show, and more. Because I have little interaction with NPCs, and delete most of the premades, I like being able to recognize the Sims walking around.

I'm obsessed with my Detroit: Become Human themed save since fall 2018. Although it has evolved a lot since then, the core is still there.

Do you go all-out and make all the worlds themed - buildings, the sims, mod out phones etc if needed? Do you just stick to doing one world? Or do you just plop in one household of characters amongst all the 'normal' sims? (And, if you do that, do you make that one house themed?)

Characters? Definitely all out, but I didn't start that way. It was a slow process that started with the wish to give a single minor character, Daniel Phillips, a better ending. My other sims were to be OCs that fit the Detroit in 2038 setting.
Over time I added more and more characters from the Detroit game, first the cops, then Daniel's old family, until by now I have the most obscure Detroit characters running around and hardly play my OCs anymore. Out of my 200 favorited sims I play five households regularly, and others sporadically. These regulars are all Detroit canon characters.

Since they are an importent part of the Detroit lore, I heavily curate my police co-workers. Anybody who isn't a sim from DBH (or from the first batch of game-generated co-workers from 2018) gets deleted right on spawning. Career levels are fixed (with some wiggle room).

Buildings, nah. I grabbed what I could find in the gallery. The most I did was re-painting the walls of the ingame police station to reflect the color scheme of the Detroit Police Department. I also added a rooftop farm and an android store, but they look nothing like the originals.

How do you cope with modern items if your game is set in a different era (such as background buildings and cars)?

I usually don't have that problem, more like the opposite. The save being set in the near future, I can allow objects I wouldn't normally, like the infamous rocketship in the backyard, or use genetic engineering as an excuse to include mermaids and fantasy cc for pets.

For the longest time vampires were posing a problem, because the supernatural doesn't exist in the dbh setting. I retconned the vampires to burglars (if they broke in) or malfunctioning androids (if they visibly smoked in public). By now that has changed, the save now has lore to accommodate all packs.

Do you try and play out the characters as per their book/film (maybe even trying to get the correct gender of any kids if they have them) or do you play them however the game takes them?

The game certainly gets to make suggestions, but when in doubt I go with what feels the most in-character. When former enemies organically grow closer over a long time or when someone picks up an instrument, that's okay. But for romances I stick to my headcanons, regardless of where the game tries to send the sims. Shippers gonna ship, I guess...

One especially out of the left field development was when Daniel got the "Know your universities" notification. I interpreted that as the government offering him a scholarship and he chose to major in Psychology. Daniel now works as a teacher, what I think fits him, but without the game giving me that nudge I wouldn't have considered that career path.

Interesting reads. Thanks for your contributions @Atreya33 @simgirl1010 @EnkiSchmidt

I don't add characters very often. I just added the Ingalls family, since I am currently watching LHOTP, and I built their house and placed it in Glimmerbrook. Now I'm thinking it might be nice to have the Oleson family in there too.

Like you @simgirl1010 I think it is nice to have other sims wandering around who you recognize. I wish we had horses though, and a way to turn off modern society.

I guess that is one good thing for you @EnkiSchmidt if you have a future setting you can probably get away with anything.

I sometimes like to recreate characters and their homes, but I don't usually go all out or stick to canon. Instead I like to imagine my sims are from an alternative universe, i.e. the Sims universe and play out my own stories with them.

I mentioned this in a different thread just the other day. The only sim I ever based on an existing character is Hunter S. Thompson. He was a journalist/ author.

This is one of my favorite things to do! I generally just let them go wherever the game takes them. Like, it’s fun to see celebrities showing up at the punk club or dumpster diving. :lol:
But I do play them as real Sims with thoughts and feelings.

If I use characters from TV, movies and books, it's because they fit the theme I'm playing with my main characters. So, I just set them down in the existing world in a living environment that's appropriate, then turn them over to the game. For example, in my current save, I have the Addams family waiting in the wings to be placed. I just haven't figured out if they are in The Myst or outside in the human world, so they aren't there yet. I won't play them when I place them, though. They will just live there and become part of the town.

I was once playing a '60's themed game in Sims 3. My main family was a group of surfer dude brothers. I populated Isla Paradiso with characters from 60's TV shows and pop culture. I had The Addams Family, Gilligan's Island, The Beatles (living in a yellow submarine), I Dream of Jeannie, The Beach Boys, and a bunch of others. I then turned them over to the game. It was hysterical to see Morticia Addams running a food stall at the summer festival. She got her revenge, though. I'm pretty sure the Addams Family with house I downloaded from the exchange contained the bad cc that caused the "stretched baby" glitch in that save.

"elanorbreton;c-18011955" wrote:
Interesting reads. Thanks for your contributions @Atreya33 @simgirl1010 @EnkiSchmidt

I don't add characters very often. I just added the Ingalls family, since I am currently watching LHOTP, and I built their house and placed it in Glimmerbrook. Now I'm thinking it might be nice to have the Oleson family in there too.

Like you @simgirl1010 I think it is nice to have other sims wandering around who you recognize. I wish we had horses though, and a way to turn off modern society.

I guess that is one good thing for you @EnkiSchmidt if you have a future setting you can probably get away with anything.

Future settings can actually be really fragile, easily broken by introducing too much in too short a time. I found that this can be alleviated by lampshading too advanced ideas. At first the rooftop rocketship was fully acknowledged as weird, then that slowly normalized to "hey, if the police controls the airport and train stations, let's just steal the rocketship!". It's still something that sims from Sulani, Finchwick and even Strangerville take selfies in front of.

I don't do it often, usually they would be in the background if they make it past my gallery, though I would typically place them where I think they fit in. Things that don't exist in their world that are in game don't bother me I just ignore it, but one of my favorite book series that I've returned to focuses on a lot of her ancient warriors making it in the modern world so I also don't like depriving them of things.