The Art of Sims Storytelling
Hi guys! @CathyTea and I were talking, and we thought we'd try making a thread that would be focused solely on writing, especially Sims story writing. The writers' lounge thread is great for being ...
Forum Discussion
@AdamsEve1231 Out of curiosity, do you use a lot of mods, poses, and/or cc in your stories (i.e. a combination, only 1, or none)? How do they affect your stories and your gameplay? Is it important to your storytelling, or could you tell your stories without them? Why do you use it?
I have one mod in my Sims 4 game - one I was directed to here to solve the problem of the game generating the same basic family over and over.
In Sims 3 I used the chaos mod to start fires, because Valley needed a couple of big fires. I also very very very occasionally used cheats to get poses that were already in the game when I needed them. I also had a couple of hacks to speed up getting aspiration points because I needed some of the rewards for the story. That was it though. And there is only one piece of CC in Valley - the nightgown that Lilith wears at the Goth house.
Sims 2 was pretty much the same - I had that Batman box or whatever to get in-game animations on demand. I had more custom content for Sims 2 though. Which made it interesting when some of it somehow disappeared or got deleted or something and a pink fairy character later showed up bald and without her makeup and wings. I wrote her appearance change into the story. I said she had become a carrot addict, IIRC - my Sims 2 legacy was totally just for the lulz.
So basically I only use mods if I have to, on the rare occasion that I do poses it's just in-game animations when I want them instead of waiting for them to happen, and these days I don't use custom content at all. I'm full vanilla.
It's important because for me the main attraction of the Sims game as a storytelling tool is its limitations. It's like gutter guards on my imagination, right? No matter how I throw the ball, it's gonna make it down to the pins.
The entire plot of the first couple generations of the aforementioned Sims 2 legacy came from a screenshot of the founder talking on the phone with the globe speech bubble over her head and a Social Bunny visible behind her.
I just...gosh. I LOVE the game so much as a storytelling tool. I love coming up with explanations for everything that happens and developing characters based on their traits and using the game's environment to create so many stories, from wildly ridiculous stories about social bunnies taking over the world to finding a personal philosophy of existence in the Sunset Valley waterfall. I can do anything with this game, and I take pride in doing it vanilla.
I have one mod in my Sims 4 game - one I was directed to here to solve the problem of the game generating the same basic family over and over.
In Sims 3 I used the chaos mod to start fires, because Valley needed a couple of big fires. I also very very very occasionally used cheats to get poses that were already in the game when I needed them. I also had a couple of hacks to speed up getting aspiration points because I needed some of the rewards for the story. That was it though. And there is only one piece of CC in Valley - the nightgown that Lilith wears at the Goth house.
Sims 2 was pretty much the same - I had that Batman box or whatever to get in-game animations on demand. I had more custom content for Sims 2 though. Which made it interesting when some of it somehow disappeared or got deleted or something and a pink fairy character later showed up bald and without her makeup and wings. I wrote her appearance change into the story. I said she had become a carrot addict, IIRC - my Sims 2 legacy was totally just for the lulz.
So basically I only use mods if I have to, on the rare occasion that I do poses it's just in-game animations when I want them instead of waiting for them to happen, and these days I don't use custom content at all. I'm full vanilla.
It's important because for me the main attraction of the Sims game as a storytelling tool is its limitations. It's like gutter guards on my imagination, right? No matter how I throw the ball, it's gonna make it down to the pins.
The entire plot of the first couple generations of the aforementioned Sims 2 legacy came from a screenshot of the founder talking on the phone with the globe speech bubble over her head and a Social Bunny visible behind her.
I just...gosh. I LOVE the game so much as a storytelling tool. I love coming up with explanations for everything that happens and developing characters based on their traits and using the game's environment to create so many stories, from wildly ridiculous stories about social bunnies taking over the world to finding a personal philosophy of existence in the Sunset Valley waterfall. I can do anything with this game, and I take pride in doing it vanilla.
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