Seeking suggestions in gameplay

Hi @MzBlueInTenze 

I also tend to play happily after ever.

Maybe you could start with a household of a few sims and assign them traits you don't normally use. Some of the negative traits. Slob, hot-headed, gloomy, high maintenance, evil, jealous, mean, etc.

@MzBlueInTenze I usually have happy Sims too.

But I wanted to test the new functions that arrived with For Rent, such as "Break in" and "Eavesdrop" so I created a Spy character based on Black Widow without the heroics lol. I put her in the Secret Agent career track and she's currently a Double Agent. I got her to sneak into Sim's homes and look through their stuff to find secrets. Once you have found something you can blackmail them in conversation. Their secret shame pops up in the Sim information panel in Relationships!

Playing rotationally is good for this. Evil sims can fall in love and have their own happily ever after, but the misery they cause those outside of their circle means that not everyone's life is smooth sailing simultaneously. The sims that have horrid things happen to them then have the option of working through their problems with the evil sim, distancing themselves with change of scenery, plotting some kind of one-off revenge to ruin the evil sim's happy ever after, or turning to the dark side and becoming the next villain of the story.

When you say 'playing rotationally,' are you talking about switching households every now and then? If that's what you mean, how often would you recommend switching?

I mean playing with every household I want to play with in one save simultaneously. Normally I like to do this with all the premades, plus Gallery premades added in to boost/refresh the population occasionally. E.G. all the new YA sims they added to CAS have fleshed out versions on the Gallery, and they have backstories indicating university, so I like to make them into uni students.

If you play with aging on and want everyone aging at the same rate, then pick a set number of days and stick to it. I have been trying to a week before switching, but with so many premade households to play with now I think I'm going to try with only 3 or 4 days when I restart my premade rotation, just so I can get through a rotation cycle faster. When choosing how many days to use look at the number of households you want to play, your calendar settings (days in the year) and if you'll get to play every household in every season at some point in their lives (if you want to, that is).You've also got to factor in new households as sims move out to go to uni, move in with partners not currently in the rotation or senior/accident-prone households die out.

If you play with aging off, you can play whoever, whenever and just age individuals/everyone up when you are ready to progress to the next stage of life for them all. You may end up with sim ages out of sync like this though.

I find that it's hard to play anything but happy ever after with sims 4, because they literary suck at being miserable! Someone insults them, they respond with asking about their hobbies. A stranger breaks into their home to have a bath, well you have to greet them politely before you can throw them out. Even when someone is misbehaving your sim can't really get angry unless you stage it. 

With that said, there have been instances when I've managed. In my one save, my sim fell in love and got pregnant, and then MCCC for some weird reason decided to give that sim a wife during the pregnancy. So here was my pregnant sim, in love, with a man who just married someone else! Well I decided to run with it and see what happens, and it was a roller-coaster. He got my sim pregnant with their second fairly soon after their first was born, while still being with his wife, then he got his wife pregnant with twins, then again with my sim... She finally asked him to leave his wife after the birth of their third child. He did, they were married, she took great care to include his twin daughters in their family, and then, after she had given him another two kids, he went and fell in love with a much younger co-worker. That's when she had enough, divorced him and kicked him out. I left him as an NPC after she kicked him out and he ended up having 11 children before he died (she married two more times to lovely men who just unfortunately died on her). 

But my best tip for playing misery, is to give sims a few traits that does not match and then play them as the trait dictates rather than what the game does. So if a sim is a hot-headed perfectionist, they will yell and be angry because dinner burned, or because someone got a B on an exam. If you play a sim acting badly several times, I find they are more likely to do so on their own as well. Also the high-maintenace trait is perfect for un-happy sims, they are angry or uncomfortable all the time. Letting mood-deaths be on is also a way to create unhappy sims, since the person they love can die at any moment.