What is the easiest way to play rotational gameplay?

I think by Sim week? When you send one active family to bed on the Saturday night, swap over to the next so you’re sort-of doing Sunday morning to Saturday night.
I used to put aging on for active, but not played. With the aging for non-active (townies etc) only on during the first family of the rotation. Does that even make sense?

I also keep a notebook where I write a lot of the goings on down and keep track of what week it is.

For me, it's aging active family only, with NPC aging on, and a regular rotation schedule, sim time. I used to give them each a week, starting on Sunday at around six am, but now its four weeks so they can have all four seasons, starting with the first day of spring. The upside is that I spend more time each family and get more accomplished, the downside is that it takes forever to get through all the households.

It depends on the family for me, sometimes I play a week or so and only switch for special events, or play a few days then rotate and repeat. You might want to try out a few things to see what is best for you.

When I play rotationally I play each family for a week. Sunday to Sunday

I struggled to do this before but now with Seasons I do one full year on each family with the intention of ageing the family up at the end of the year (all ageing is turned off). I leave the adults for two years and will probably do the same for elders. I change the length of the seasons depending on which family it is. If it's a family I really love or I have a lot planned for their story, I'll have longer seasons. If it's a family where I just need to have them do smaller things because they are a part of another sim's story, or maybe their kids will be important later on, then I'll just have one week per season. I am playing a lot of families in this save, almost all the premades, so I am doing it in batches of who is related to each other through story, then I'll move onto another batch. Although, if I get bored with the current batch, I may go to another at the end of the year so that I don't interrupt anything. Since I'm ageing them up manually, it doesn't really matter either way. So for example, I'm currently playing the Bjergsens (max seasons length), the Landgraabs (min season length), the Villareals (middle season length) and the Munches (min season length), because these families are all linked together in my story. But after I finish playing the Landgraabs (still need to play the Villareals and the Munches), I'm going to try another unrelated family because I'm getting a little bored of this particular story (I get bored easily). I want everyone's ages to make sense before totally moving on with my timeline, though, so I will definitely come back to this batch and make sure everyone across the worlds will be at the correct ages before kickstarting a family's next phase. I want to be able to appropriately pair off the child and teen sims when they get older. Hope that makes sense.

At the beginning of each year, I change all the holidays to match that family. So when I was playing the Bjergsens, I imagined that they were Swedish. I gave them European themed holidays, including Midsummer and Midsummer's Eve. I have given the Landgraab's American themed holidays. (I don't think about how far away America is from Europe when coming up with my stories though lol. There just aren't enough premade teens for that!) I also have part of the summer (or the entire season if it's only a week long) off for the sims so that they can do fun summer things like being lazy at the pool or going on holiday.

I start in Autumn, because most of the households I'm focusing on have kids and the school year starts in September. It makes the most sense for me personally!

I have these goals set out for each family and if they don't complete them before the year is up, then I move on with the story anyway and work that into it. So if you have a child who is supposed to be a complete overachiever but they don't make it? Maybe they have weird feelings about that in their teens, which might affect the story you give them. I think the seasons helps me stick to this because without them, I would just continue playing. But now it makes sense to age them up at the end because otherwise I'll end up going over into another year!

I use MCCC to help with keeping the relationships I've gained but have been culled, and to manually cull unnecessary ones. I will use it for the families I really don't care for to age them up at the end of each cycle and boost them in their careers. For example, I don't care for the Specter family but I will age them up so that Alexander Goth can date and marry Olivia later. I'll also use it for killing sims when I want them to die for story purposes because I don't really enjoy killing sims off, so I'll just do it in one action and pretend it was from something else lol. I keep track of the main things that happen in an excel file just to make sure I remember what's going on since I'll probably forget once I finally get back to the Bjergsens. I switch to the next family right after midnight when it's Autumn again.

So far this method is working out really well for me and feels the most organic, so for me this is the "easiest" way of playing rotationally because it keeps me interested since each family experience is unique! My main problem with rotational play is that I could never stay focused and grew bored since there was no real feeling of time progressing.

I used to play Sunday to Sunday, but then realized at least in my game I was ruining the weekend for my sims. Because I knew I'd be switching families on Sundays, I stopped taking them on weekend camping trips or to the parks, so now my rotational play is Monday to Monday. Auto Aging off with any played families, on with the rest of the Sim world.

I play with aging only on active household with npc aging on. I don't have a schedule. I just switch/age up when it feels right to me.

I play aging off and I play one family one real life day. If there is something I want to accomplish then I play that family one extra day. I do this because I have only so much time to play and I want to play all my sims. I used to in sims 3 play my game and every so often quit the game and make a new family as I was bored with just playing one family. Now with the one day I get to play a different family every day and it keeps the boredom down for me. I also let them have a lot of free will so with this way I do not control the families so much.
oh and if I do not like the family or the direction the game is going I can take out that one family and it does not spoil my game.

God, I wish I knew. I have thirteen households now, and honestly? I don't know what the fuck I'm doing lol.

I have aging on, but put very, VERY long using MCCC--I just got fed up beiing stressed out about it. Now I know I have plenty of time, and I can spend basically much time as I feel I need to with each household, and then just cycle through and it takes however long as it takes. I usually spend more time with bigger households--I would say, on average, I probably spend 1 day per sim with each household--so, a two sim household I may only be with 2-3 days, but a full 8 sim household I might spend a full week or more with.

I also tend to prioritize shorter age groups, so my sequence might get disrupted by the addition of new sim to a ousehold or someone eging up. Generally, my priority tends to be: households with children first, then one with toddlers, then teens, then babies, then all adult sims households, then lastly all adult vampire households (since they don't age anyway).

My biggest advice is just to do whatever feels right to ou, and whatever is least stressful and more fun. Like, I was freaking out, trying to get through all the households on shorter lifespans, and like, it's a game? It's supposed to be fun? So if aging off is what you need to do, or making the lifespans long, or whatever else, just do it and don't stress out lol.

I think you’ll find rotational play really fun, it rounds out your neighbourhoods by knowing all the stories of other households around the town. I play they same way as @NRowe :

"NRowe;c-16609152" wrote:
I think by Sim week? When you send one active family to bed on the Saturday night, swap over to the next so you’re sort-of doing Sunday morning to Saturday night.
I used to put aging on for active, but not played. With the aging for non-active (townies etc) only on during the first family of the rotation. Does that even make sense?

I also keep a notebook where I write a lot of the goings on down and keep track of what week it is.

I think the bolded part is very important if you have ageing on for your active household (and off for played) and you want the townies to age at the same rate as your played households. If you keep the townie aging on all the time, they will age up super fast and die before you know it.