Any advice? also any mods. are welcome - I want a game changer :3

What do you mean, more 'uniqe' sims? I am going to assume you mean 'unique', but I am still confused what you mean by that.

[pedantry] A thing is either unique - dissimilar to all other things - or it's not. You can't have degrees of uniqueness any more than you can have degrees of the number one. [/pedantry]

Since we don't know what you're doing or what's important to you, so we can't answer the question. You say you want a game changer, which should mean you don't just want advice on creating distinctive-looking sims. But different playstyles emphasize different elements of the game. Do you want to elicit more unpredictable behavior? Play with rules that make sim society different from what the designers assumed? What?

What I mean is that no matter how much I tweak my Sims personality with the personality points... I still end up with kind of bland Sims. I want to know of a mod. or something that will help make my Sims more diverse.

I find that very tiny yet subtle changes can help.
Ex: Freckles, scars, skin tones, eyebrows, tatoos, push the sliders on the face to the edge, etc...
Download some of these things here and you'll be able to make suprisingly diffrent Sims.
As for mods, I'm not sure,
let me know though if you hear of anything

Ah, now for that you don't need a mod; you need to step up your game.

There's only so many combos of personality points you can get, and they're far from the only thing, or even the most important thing, governing your sims' behavior. It's all about interactions - personality points with aspiration, secondary aspiration, training, contingent circumstances, the other sims in their society, the various randomizers, and most importantly you, the player. 90% of what goes on in a game is going on in your head. Engage differently, and their individual personalities will start springing out at you.

The only wrong way to play is the way that bores you, so look at what you've been doing and ask youself what you can do differently. Are you automatically min-maxing aspirations and personalitiy points, so that all of your Virgos are Knowledge sims, all your Leos Popularity, and all your Pisces are Family? Mix it up. Make Family sims with no nice points, Romance sims with no social points, Knowledge sims with no neat points and ten playful. If you have Freetime, make primary/secondary combinations which you find counterintuitive. Or just roll dice for everything.

Are you always running single sims living alone? Run a big household. Heck, run a chaotic household - build a family with two elders, an adult, two teens, two children, and a toddler and stick them into a one-bedroom apartment. Nothing brings out the individuality in a sim like stress. Do something like the prosperity challenge, where your household and neighborhood makeups are determined by random die roll.

Do you micromanage them always and fulfill all their wants as soon as they come up? If you do, they'll roll the same wants over and over. The more a want is fulfilled, the more likely it is to roll again; the more a sim does an action, the more likely he is to do it again spontaneously. So do things to keep your hands off them. Run an asylum or ISBI, in which you only allow yourself to control one sim in the household. Take your hands off the reins and let them assert themselves. Fulfill a few fears to offset the wants.

Observe them. Listen to them. Don't get too caught up in the mechanics and treat them as little people, though you should always be ready to pull out and switch to mechanical mode in order to fix routing problems and deal with the limitations of the programming. Forget that they have no conscious life and interpret their behavior as if they did. View them as part of the community in which they are embedded, and understand them in their social context. You'll find that this Romance sim has daddy issues, that one is a selfish jerk, and this one here is just really highly sexed and can be tamed by the right partner. One Family sim is a sweet and gentle zephyr until somebody slights her kids, when she's an implacable trashcan-kicking poking slapping tornado; that one over there is a domineering autocrat whose children aren't allowed to have lives of their own; and the other one is the right partner to tame the third Romance sim. Some will insist on a one-bolt partners instead of the three-bolter you picked for them - let 'em have their way, and watch the boltage climb. Some will have a different sexual orientation than you expected. Some will be hapless losers and some will turn everything they touch to gold.

Are you unconsciously playing yourself over and over, making the same choices for them that you would make for yourself? Quit it. Get out of your own way. Ask yourself, not what you want or how you would do something, but what underlying motivation this sim has. What Would This Sim Really Do?

They're only bland if you play them blandly. You're the one training them.

^Wow... this could not have been more helpful ^_^. I tend to micromanage... my current family is three teen sims. I think I am going to try turning on the game when I go to bed and then when I wake up and see what they do...

I don't recommend that unless you think it's fun for sims to die. If so then by all means. I've just found that sims don't always last long without intervention.

I don't think that they will murder each other however I doubt the house will be clean when I go back on my pc -.-

No they won't murder each other they will probably die first of starvation and next by ghost fright if you leave it running over night.

^lol are my Sims really that helpless? :/

They're a bunch of twits. Lovable twits, but yes twits.

^lol... well I think I know what I am going to do next... A CHALLENGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, they'll just be dead if you leave them that long, and you won't have learned anything. You have to watch them as they free-range, both to rescue them from disaster (not all of which will be their fault - it can be hard to spot a routing problem until someone's path is blocked, and you may not realize that you've given them a house configuration which makes it impossible for them to cook but easy for them to get trapped in inaccessible corners till you've seen it in action) and to observe their behavior as it happens, not just in the results. Do that, and certain things will leap out at you. Jim is Jane's special little brother - she teases or ignores the rest, but Jim she spontaneously dances with, reads to, and tucks in. Joe and his best friend Jack just kissed each other good night although you've never made them flirt each other and they have no visible love tags - they're trying to tell you something!

Observe how they behave when you tell them to do things, too. They'll normally do the "who, me?" animation when you tell them to do something against their extreme personality points and the fist pump when you tell them to do something in accordance with it; but sometimes they'll throw in something idiosyncratic. I had a shy sim move in with her fiance and then had more urgent things to do than consummate the relationship for two days. They kept spontaneously relaxing on the bed and looking at me hopefully. When I finally told Jovita to Squeeze George to signal time to begin the Big Date, she clapped her little hands! I have a grouchy sim I hardly ever allow to do a negative interaction because he always wants to do them to inappropriate people; the first time I directed him at someone I think he should be allowed to torment, he looked at me, grinned, and rubbed his hands together evilly.

Just today I had a teen visitor stop up a commode and immediately set to fixing it. This might be training, because I played that her father called broken plumbing "learning opportunities" and the household has a you-broke-it-you-fix-it policy; but so far spontaneous repair is unique to Gracie. Completely out of left field. Once you relax the reins a bit, not too much, you'll find sims you thought were bland surprising you constantly.

TBH, not all sims are twits. Sometimes when things are chaotic and everyone has red needs, I turn the game off and go back later, but yesterday I decided not to and just to leave them to it.
Toddlers were bathed, fed and put to bed by the dad who had extremely red energy. He fell asleep standing up, his young daughter stood there laughing at him and the next day he died on the way to the toilet from either starvation or pneumonia.

Okay yeah, they're twits.

I dunno about them being complete twits. I played an ISBI with more than 50 sims in a house and only about 5 died, mostly due to pregnancy tanking their needs.

Hey! That's me - are you saying that knowledge sims are supposed to be neat and not playful?

I find that some sims with the same aspiration will play differently, as Peni said. In my neighborhood, Gideon Terry and Vy Hong are both family sims. I raised both from a young age, meaning I picked these aspirations myself depending on what I thought their early personalities were reflecting. Gideon seems to have taken on the role in stride, forever looking after his younger siblings and striving after a family of his own. He's always the one who will hold the babies, play with the children, take out the trash. I call him "my little homemaker" (which just goes to show this isn't always a woman's job!). Vy however, maybe because her set of twins is second-youngest of four sets, and the last wasn't born until she was a teen, hasn't shown much of this kind of personality. She seems more of what one would think a pleasure sim or popularity sim to be. Her personality differs from Gideon's in that she wouldn't rather spend all her time either at work or watching younger siblings (even after they were born). However, due to her being the only one left in the family without a career LTW, she wound up being the only one without a job, so became the designated babysitter (which she hasn't gotten to test yet because she hasn't gotten to be alone with the twins, now toddlers, yet.)

I'm saying that many people fall into stereotypical ruts when assigning aspirations.

I admit I do fall victim into the whole "boring suburban wife, husband and 3 kids" sims lifestyle. Every sims family falls into the same trap because I can't stop my OCD nature...everything needs to be just right and I control their every move. I need to back off and see what happens...sometimes i fear that they willl make the wrong choices though!

"Wrong" choices are where stories start. And are frequently, in the long run, the right ones!

Except, of course, if you're having fun playing "boring" families. Do you call them boring because you're bored? Or because you think we would? If the former - don't play a game that bores you. There's gobs of other things to do in this world, and if you can't play differently, and don't like how you play, it's time to move on. If the latter - who cares what we think of your sims? We're not playing your game!

In this game at least, it is true that Do as thou wilt is the whole of the law.

This is a great thread; so much inciteful information about Simming. I think Peni could teach a college course in "The Philosophy of Simming" This will help my game a great deal. Thanks!

Hey, if somebody'll pay me to do it, I'd be happy to!

Let me tell you a story.

I once had a sim named Rudolph Krovstein.

He was a confirmed bachelor living alone for most of his life. He was a bisexual, cokeheaded, Romance sim. He rose up to the ranks of his Slacker career with speed. Soon he was a very bored Professional Party Guest. So he pulled his pants down and spreaded the love. He had slept with about twelve men and women before he blew it. It was probably the wrong place to kiss that man, but he did, and got a large amount of his lovers pissed at him. In distraught, he took a bunch of coke and took a swim in the pool. He suffered a cardiac arrest and drowned.

A year later, a woman who did not witness the event rolled the want to resurrect him. So she did. As zombie. Rudy was horrified, but she was perfectly okay with the situation. She adopted a kitten, and spent most of the time making googly eyes at the zombie. Rudy did not share the affection, and made it open by sleeping with an old boyfriend. She kicked him out, and he became homeless for a while. Homeless as in I moved into a residental area designed to look like a park along with a crazy homeless guy. Later, a college drop out moved in and became Rudy's playtoy in more ways than one.

He got a hold of a dezombification potion and became a sim again. He moved out, left behind the girl he seduced, and became comfortable in a new home. He continued to party and sleep around aimlessly. Then he met Dustin Broke.

Dustin moved in as a room mate after he graduated with honors, and Rudy found him to be quite attractive. He took him to the clothing store to get him some new threads, and snuck into the booth while Dustin was changing. He turned the kissless virgin to simply kissless. They developed a crush on each other, though Dustin still preferred the ladies. Dustin began to hit on Rudy's maid, Lucy Hanby, and she responded positively. Rudolph got jealous, but ignored his deviant desires in preference of letting his dear friend be happy. When Dustin moved out to marry Lucy, he was sad, but drowned his sorrows in pleasure.

Then the neighborhood crashed. He had slept with a total of twenty two people, including a robot. I didn't have ACR when any of this happened.

And that's how you make a sim interesting.

Last edited by Fivey : 14th May 2012 at 11:59 PM.

^ Ah, it's stories like that which remind me not to get so stuck on the mechanics. My sexist bodyshop skills and obsessive download sprees certainly don't help, but I end up making a single female adult and get bored looking for a spouse quite often. My thing is playing with genetics, but I like diversity so there are lots of gay, bi, and a few trans sims in my game, makes it harder to find my simmies a mate.

That's definitely one reason to give plain old storytelling a shot. Every now and then you do get lucky with points distribution and end up with a sim that's horribly unlucky or some such, which makes storytelling easier, but if you cheat your brain [not necessarily the console], it gives you more to work with.