Thought it was time for another thread. Title should be obvious enough.

Oddly enough, despite enjoying breaking games as much as I can, I sort of feel guilty for not adhering to what the developers intended in the storylines. I feel guilty for a lot of irrational things anyways, so it's not particularly unique. If anyone can say anything that convinces my brain otherwise I'd be really, really, really happy.

Anyways, onto your stories.

I always run the Maxis Storylines.

If I want something new then I make a new hood to play in or download one.

I gave both Nina and Dina Caliente girlfriends, which in my opinion was far better than the Maxis storyline

I usually stick to the intended storylines as well, I almost always do the prompted events when starting a lot. Then I let the storylines go how they go. However I've been considering doing a hood with all three basegame neighborhoods and mixing them all up away from the original storyline. Don't know if I'll be capable of royallly screwing up the storyline without feel the need to follow it again

I follow my own storylines. I don't think I've followed a single one!

I don't know what makes you think there's such a thing as an "intended storyline."

When you make a game, you're making something for other people to play with, not writing a script for them to follow. As any good DM knows, no game plan survives first contact with the players, and that's exactly as it should be in a sandbox game. If a storyline is required, that's called "bad game design."The whole point is for us to swoop in and have fun with it our way.

Yes, there's some implied storylines. Most of them are, honestly, crap. They are loose to the point of sloppiness and rely on genre stereotypes even to understand the implications; nor can we be certain that the conclusions we draw about what was intended match what the developers had in mind. The memories, ages, and text are not synched at all. All the text boxes are easily rewritten. There's no text in the pre-existing story albums, which contain enigmatic pictures that don't always mesh well with the stories that we infer from the text. Look at the picture of Glarn with two babies at his feet and Glabe crying. This is usually interpreted as his giving birth to twins, Lola and Chloe - but he is visibly still pregnant, and when you open the Singles household, the girls aren't the same age.

If anybody had wanted us to play a certain way, they'd have been far more careful constructing the storylines in a way that demands less interpretation.

I know when I made Widespot I deliberately wrote biographies that could be read in more than one way and chose pictures that could be interpreted in more than one way. I worked a lot harder at consistency than the Maxis teams appear to have - but that was primarily so that the players would find themselves faced with at least one difficult problem in each household, for which the obvious solutions suggested by genre conventions had a serious flaw, where every choice would cause as many problems as it solved for more than one household. This entailed a lot of tight maneuvering and synching of households that the looser Maxis situations didn't require. I take great delight in the different ways different players choose to solve the problems I set.

I don't know any Maxis developers and can't speak for them; but I have no reason to think they'd feel any differently. The more different ways the storylines work out, the better we did our jobs, which was enabling the players to have fun with what we made.

I don't play Maxis households at all. My take on it was they set things up and left it up to the player. My way of playing is to delete all pre-made hoods and start my own, and I have no bad feelings doing that. My game, my way. Yours is to play Maxis families, how can you screw them up exactly? I've never seen anything set in stone saying 'thou must follow this'. So do whatever you want with them.

I had no idea what I was doing when I first started playing the game, so I sorta follow storylines??? But I think I just ruined everyones' lives out of cluelessness.

Either "not at all" or "totally" (depending on your point-of-view) as I just don't play them. Occasionally one will be abducted to test a property that's being prototyped in their 'hood, but I don't think using every toilet/shower/bed/door really counts as playing. Never been a fan of prescribed story/plot lines in games, as I'd much rather use my own imagination. In my world Hans and Chewy are a couple, and Leia is a junkie single mother with a penchant for picking up storm troopers for quicky one-nighters - in her drug addled mind, as they all look the same, she's in a stable, loving relationship.

I once resurrected Darren's wife, and they had triplets.

As for the Curious family, I married off one or two with their designated lovers, and from there they popped out babies to a house-full of simmies (alien and otherwise). There were probably at least 5-6 babies/toddlers/kids on the lot at one point, most of them aliens.

I never bothered much with the storylines, and I don't play around with the default families much nowadays. I find they're a bit restrictive.

I agree that there aren't so much storylines as open ended, vague scenarios. And the multiple way the community interprets those scenarios and characters is a testament for that.

Are the Caliente sisters materialistic gold-diggers or did Dina genuinely love Michael and Mortimer? Are they and/or Don Lothario involved with Bella's appearance? Are all three just after the Goth fortune and is Don's marriage to Cassandra part of some plan to get it? What's Nina's role in all of this? And what's up with the pictures about Nighat's favoritism towards her over Dina?

Is Lilith misunderstood or just a rich-kid goth wannabe? Is Angela a kiss-ass or does she merely cope with their toxic family life in a different way? Is their family life toxic to begin with?

etc. etc. etc. All up to interpretation, and where you take them form there is up fro grabs.

Maxis really designed those scenarios for the player to do whatever they like and I quite enjoy taking them into new directions whenever I play them. The only case where there is, theoretically, a story-line would be Veronaville, and even that's only if you want to re-enact the plot of Romeo and Juliet with them.

I bring back real Bella using SimPE. Dina and her gold-dig way never poisoned poor old Mortimer.

My CAS sims completely fucked up the Pleasantview storyline. Kars was never meant to be a thing. Candi and Cocoa were just supposed to be characters to play while I was sick and couldn't think of storylines.
Then the Risky Woohoo hit, and I let it come to term because my last save with the Brooklands, I terminated her Risky with Sanjay Ramaswami. Oops.

I brought Danielle Dreamer back, sent off the Pleasant-twins to college leaving the Dreamer- and Broke-guy behind so neither of them became a thing. Dirk dated one of my aliens instead. Don married Cassandra and is comfortable that way, and is just friends with his former lovers. Also, an inborn sim has completely out-Casanovad him anyway. Langerak moved in with the Pleasants and she and Mary-Sue became best friends (and lovers), while Daniel was eaten by a cowplant. Brandi became a ladymagnet.

If playing the Maxis Sims, I usually follow their storylines. The Sims are in those lives and I play them that way, but what comes out of their stories is different each time. In one 'hood Cassandra flirted with Don and was able to marry him, in another she was left by him at the altar, called the Dreamer father (she had a wish to talk to him) and autonomously kissed him. In one 'hood the Pleasant sisters became friends with eachother and their parents (after a disicion of their therapist=me), Dustin married Angela and moved into their house; in another 'hood it was all fighting among the Pleasant family.

But whatever happens, they mostly die of an illness before they reach old age.

I don't even read the storylines. I just do what I want. Bwah ha ha

I'm autistic, and a lot of pre-made storylines were completely lost on 11 year old me. I distinctly remember playing Olive Specter as a soft and kind old lady. Flowery wallpapers and all.

I've had issues with Don Lothario's cheating from starters, so I usually have Cassandra kick his butt and pursue a romance with Darren instead (though, admittedly, that does not really qualify as deviating from the developers' intentions).

I don't care much about changing the premades' stories nowadays, except for hooking plenty of them up with the same gender. The lack of non-straight premades in the Sims has always irked me.

I always swap Dirk and Dustin's relationships with the twins. I find Dirk is more academically focused rather than a "bad boy" like Dustin.

I bring Bella back all the time, too.

I don't per se violate the storylines. What I do is changing the backstory of the 'hoods as a whole, for instance by putting them into another era or add a power hungry empire from across the seas (sorry, Desiderata Valley...). The sims with their stories and motivations stay mostly the same, but since the stage is always different, they also react differently to it.

For example in my current Veronaville I made it a citystate ruled by three noble clans that always have been rivals, even before Patrizio's argument with Consort. Duels of honor were common, though outright assassinations only started with Patrizio and Consort. Patrizio and Contessa were in love and wanted to marry, but since one family is matrilineal and the other patrilineal the clans could not come to an agreement what surname they should take. So I have a somewhat different background now that doesn't even contradict their Maxis memories, just adds flavour to them. But it is my story now, whereas if I had kept the old one to the letter, I'd feel like playing fanfiction

I will read what Maxis story line is, but "never" follow it. I do my own thing, like no way did I let Don Lothario marry Cassandra. I turn Don into a Family Sims ( so his playing days are over lol )
Also in my game I put the "Real" Bella back with Old man Goth ( Not the Bella from Strange Town )

I take pleasure into turning the entire Maxis neighborhood up side down, and also adding new Characters by creating or downloading Sims.
Then there is the wonderful "Custom Hood" that you can create and do your own thing and make your own storyline. I love my Custom hood the most.

You can't screw them up in any way to feel guilty about. You can always make fresh premade hoods and do it over again. Sims live a zillion times. Between all the people who've played the game, how many lives do you think Don Lothario's had? Probably more than the total population of humanity! Nothing to feel guilty about if this particular instance was different than another.

I always pause when answering questions like this, about premades. For, me, it's more like how many times have you screwed up/messed with the preset storylines. I'm a serial hood-re-starter. There's just something appealing about starting fresh and using premades in new storylines. Then, when you add the glitches and restarts from those, I can't even count how many times I've "screwed up" the Maxis storylines. Just take Don--he has married Cassandra, Dina, and the evil head witch. I've made him a vampire, gotten him abducted while he was married to Dina and had a few alien kids. He's romanced twenty sims in some playthroughs, in one he was a knowledge sim. Once he even had a love child with Lilith--though I'm still mad about that playthrough. I let Don romance half the hood, including Lilith, whom he promptly dumped when he found out she was pregnant. Lilith, destitute because she ran away when she was young and didn't go to college, turned to an old friend: Dustin. I honestly don't remember how or what broke her up with Dirk. Anyway, Angela had dumped Dustin when she went off to college, thinking that he wasn't good enough for her and ended up with George McCarthy, I think. The cashier. Dustin meanwhile, was doing well and I had Lilith and him get together and even marry. But Lilith, despite being broken up with Don and married to Dustin, continued to roll wants to hook up with Don, allllll the time. Practically every time she rerolled her wants. Here I was, hooking her up with one of my favorite sims ever and she repaid me by rolling wants for the guy who cheated on her and left her? I mean, it was my fault he left, but still! So it was then I vowed never to put them together again. She doesn't deserve him.

That's a question, though. How many of you all carry over notions/preconceptions/grudges for certain sims even after you restart the hood? Daniel, for example, is always a cheater in my hoods and Dina, while she may not always marry Mortimer, will always try to marry for money (I think once I had her mistake the slob for Mr. Big. She did not like being surprised after the wedding, lol).

Well I strongly dislike Dina, her gold-digger ways and her Jerry Lewis smile..but dunno if you can count that as a grudge, it washowever reason enough to have her age up badly as an Elder so she didn't hang around to long haha. I 'm also not the biggest fan of Don and Nina and their lives more often than not end in misery.

This whole thread actually gives me the idea to basically turn the Caliente sisters into Patty and Selma from the Simpsons next time I restart Pleasantview...