My favorite thing to do in Sims 4 is make up my own stories. But I feel like this breaks down into four major components that many people often seem to treat as separate things:
1) Creating characters. I love making sims in CAS and I have made hundreds and hundreds of them. Most of which are intended as background characters in the games I play rather than as sims I will be playing. Some will be main characters or side characters though. Packs that help with this: All of them. In order to be able to create a huge range of different characters with the appearance of different personalities, lifestyles, and life histories, I need a lot of options for clothing, hairstyles, and accessories, The more the better.
2) Creating sets. I love building, and I can easily spend hours or days working on one lot, but I am almost always building for a purpose. I have a scenario in mind that I want to take place in a particular setting. Once I've built the lot, how much I use it depends on how big of a role that location plays in the story. Packs that help with this: Again, all of them. See point one.
3) Creating stories. This may be casual and meandering, just playing with my main characters and seeing what develops, or it may involve elaborate planning and writing of SimLit. I have saves on both ends of that scale and nearly everything in between. Packs that help with this: obviously all of them, but in particular I find Get Together's club system an extremely useful tool. It allows me to have some control over the "walk-on" and "supporting" characters who are not in my active household. I can give two lots of the same lot type, for example, each a completely different feel by using the club system to influence who shows up there and what they do while they're there. I can also use it to make a specific sim show up at lots that my main character sim goes to, ensuring that they will cross paths in certain key places.
4) Taking screen shots. I take a lot of screen shots. I can easily take a hundred or more screen shots in one play session. I spend huge amounts of time with the game paused, moving the camera around to get exactly the angle I want, making minor adjustments to the scene to make it look the way I want. In my most extreme planned out SimLit saves, I'll replay certain story scenes over and over, screen-shooting them until I get what I need for the story. Packs that help with this: Pretty much all of them. Plus, for the more planned out stories, I use a lot of custom poses, most of which I make myself.
