I find other ways to add drama like having my town struggling with a drought or an abnormally long cold hard winter and threats of running out of supplies to buy before spring arrives and shipments get through.I can also have long periods of nonstop rain and pretend there's a flooding threat or a bad heavy rainstorm is threatening flash flooding in the area.I might have one partmenr die shortly after the coupld had a baby for drama and have that surviving parent struggling to manage.
I have the children of broken arriages stay with the parent who is mst willing to take them if one wanted children and the other one didn't.

But... if Albany lost custody of the kids (even temporarily) to Goneril, that could really up the drama of the split-up.

Sugoisama, do you have a child support system set up? What are your family laws like?

It sounded from your 'What's happening . . .' thread post, like Albany really doesn't have the stay at home parent side of things down either. If there's any investigation into fitness to parent, he might loose the kids to Goneril no matter what she and he want to have happen.

I've never had that couple divorce, as a fortune/family pairing they're usually all over each other with boltage for me. However, things the courts (me, the player) assess are what the sims would admit to, what the courts would have reasonable non-player-power ways of knowing, and what relationships the kids have with the parents. And there's always the potential for corruption: a judge might lean favorably on the Capp side of any issue because, y'know, Capps, right?
So are there any friends or service sims who might be called on to testify about the family's relationships? Any judges that might take a bribe of some sort from Consort? (He's the one with the money, after all.) What are the kids' attitudes to their parents? Might some kids end up with each? What would happen if Miranda, say, went to Goneril, while the younger trio went to Albany? What if Consort sued for custody of one or more of them, or if Goneril and the children moved in with him temporarily or permanently?

The other thing I do is use Inge's summoner cat to do shared custody between separated parents, when appropriate: because I play with an extended lifespan mod (Almighty Hat's proportional aging) I generally have kids live with the primary custodial parent on weekdays and the secondary custodial parent on weekends, and I play rotations as 5/2.

I would have the children going to foster care sometimes when a couple breaks up if none of them had been really ready for children or nobody really wanted to have the children.It can happen that the couple had a few accidents with woohoo and got a few unplanned pregnancies and have a few children they weren't prepared for.I had a couple almost bankrupted from this once back in my early days playing before I hacked my game out and I was trying to find a way of giving that unplanned bay up for adoption and found nothing.

That is exactly what happened: considering Albany was unemployed the court (read: me) decided that the kids would be best off with Goneril, who not only had a stable job paying more than 1k every day, but also the fortune (from the genie) to get them a nice house. Albany moved into an apartment and will probably have some young townie lover living with him as a room-mate in the future.

This also (albeit accidentally) gave me an opportunity to establish another West-Veronaville custom, which is all children sharing a room. The pre-made houses all have one bedroom, and there's not a lot I can do to make more smaller rooms, plus the kids do (sort of) fit into one room, so there's not too much to complain about. Except for privacy, of course, but eh, details, details.

@sugosisama -That's a case where the unemployed sim moves into a subsidized rental in a trailer park apartment zoned lot that was one of my own custom built apartment lots and gets subsidized to stay at home and raise their children.I wouldn't have them go with a parent working full time if any are babies or toddlers because babies and toddlers are too young to be left home alone for an entire workday.

Subsizedd housing is available in my game though my own custom scratch built apartment lots in options ranging from rooms for rent in boarding houses to apartments,townhouses and condos or trailer units in trailer parks.These not only provide cheap affordable rental housing for my sims,but the subsidezed ones also allow newcomers to work on skilling before getting jobs and young parents with babies or toddlers to be stay at home parents and get subsidized for it until their child is old enough to attend school or not need to be fed.

TadOlson do you not use service sims at all, then? $1000+ a day will hire a nanny very nicely for when Goneril's at work. Even if you have a mod for pricier service sims, which I do, she comes to about $800 for a full shift, and if Miranda doesn't have an after school job she can hire the nanny and the nanny only work a half-shift.

@Sunbee -There can be service sims in my game though they would be CAS created playables and teens born in the game who've left home.I should upload some of my apartment lots without CC though career rewards placed on the lots would be fine since they're EA content though not usually unlocked.I've got subsidized apartment lots through having green energy sources placed on the lots.I might start with a CC -fre version of my trailer park with career reward items on the lot and recommend you downloaded it and installed it.I also use that trick on my residential lots and also have career rewards placed on those lots before sims move in and also place them on community lots for sims to earn money while out.I don't use any Mods to raise the service NPC prices and use one to eliminate rental deposits and cut rents in half.

I hope it's okay to revive this thread to ask for advice on a plot point.

In my Pleasantview, I had Darren and Cassandra adopt/foster the two children of Kaylynn Langerak and Daniel Pleasant (I didn't change family relationships, so the children still know who they are biologically related to). Now the children are starting to get older, and when they become teens, I want them to seek out their biological parents through adoption records, and their youngest daughter will probably choose to move in with one or both of her biological parents. I'm trying to decide which parents to bring back--they have both been out of play for a while: Daniel Pleasant, who is now an elder and abandoned Kaylynn; Kaylynn Langerak; or have Daniel and Kaylynn get back together. Mary-Sue, Daniel's ex-wife, is currently living with her daughter Angela and her son-in-law Dustin and meddling in their marriage. Lilith Pleasant is about to discover she is pregnant by Dirk, Darren's son, who is having an affair with Angela and isn't sure he wants to marry Lilith.

So which parent should come back:
a) Daniel
b) Kaylynn
c) Daniel and Kaylynn together

Thanks!

I vote for B, but then I've always hated Daniel.

I also vote B.

Daniel is very much an abandonner.

Go for drama!

The teen/ teens seek out both parents... who who they get along with better. Maybe have the teen feel like she can help 'save' Daniel ... maybe now in his golden years he realizes what he's missed out on seein as how none of this other children want anything to do with them.

I made a post about these recent events in another thread, but I am in a dilemma about where I want to go from here.

In short, John and teenage Lucy died in a fire. Lucy had a cute romance going on with Beau, who is now in aspiration failure, because of her death.

The dilemma is should I find a way to resurrect Lucy somehow before Beau goes to college and they can go together, or should I go the realistic approach and keep her dead? Maybe either have him brood for a few years, or just find a romantic prospect in college.

This can go many ways...

You have so many options!

In my game, Beau and Lucy were never close, but when his best friend, Alexander Goth, died unexpectedly in a fire while they were roomies in college, he spent the next few years becoming part of the secret society to bring him back.
Later, his wife (Elysse, the adopted daughter of Mary-Sue and wife Gretchen) starved to death while pregnant and he begged the Grim Reaper and saved her. Now he's pursuing a career in the Paranormal as he is convinced he has power over death.

As my game is generally less supernatural, I sometimes consider that rather than dead, Alexander was just in a coma that no one thought he could recover from - so if you want to save Lucy, maybe she's just "mostly dead".

I do enjoy the goal oriented, seeking to save love of his life, driven Beau.

It's sad about Lucy, but I think I would take the realistic approach. It could become part of Beau's story--can any girl measure up to his memory of Lucy?

I think you should think about what you could do with either situation, and choose whichever is more interesting. I'm a huge fan of unnecessary drama, so maybe I'd revive her, have Beau immediately marry her in fear of losing her again, then find out they aren't perfect for each other, and have a tense, affair-filled, loveless marriage. But if you want to play like a sane person, I'd say he should mourn her for quite a while, then maybe at uni move on. Of course, if he's still a teenager, he obviously must have a very dramatic and black mourning phase where he doesn't talk to anyone and makes it his entire character.

As much as it pains me to say this, I think I'll go the realistic route.

Beau will go through a rough patch in his life; his first love, the woman he had made many plans with, including marriage and babies, is gone now. He doesn't even have enough finds for a perfect resurrection, though he did have friends willing to lend money. There isn't even a Resurrect-O-Nomitron readily available, so I doubt she'd be resurrected in time. In addition, Lucy and Beau will have quite a large age gap, as she would be reset to the start of the teenage lifestage.

He's fallen into despair, but those close to him will have to keep reminding him that there will be light at the end of the tunnel. His mother, Brandi, and step-father, Darren, would know better than anyone in Pleasantview having lost their first loves, but they found each other.

I hope Beau finds love in the future and moves on. This boy needs a hug.

{{{hugs}}} to Beau and I hope he does find love again. I have a soft spot for all of the Broke boys (Brandi has never had a girl the third time when I've played Pleasantview and I usually name her third son Bobby). They and the Grunt boys are probably my favorite playables.

The drama reminds me of playing that town back when I was just starting out with the game though I ended up moving on to playing empty terrains and adding my own sims because playing an already loaded town seemed to be more confusing and I wanted to practice building my own community with my own stories.
I'll be very excited when I can finally see that kind of drama showing up in my BACC one day when it's a bigger town with multiple neighborhoods and a campus.It's a very small trading post with two couple living there on their homesteads now so I have to be very creative with stories and will play out the theme of settlers struggling to survive and to manage to grow successful crops on farms as others take up homesteads and also start farming the land.

When I read what had happened I cried for Lucy. And I cried for Beau. As John Donne nearly said, every Sim's death diminishes me, even when it's not in my game. "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls . . ."

Famously (or infamously) I've played so carefully, and with so many mods to protect my Sims, that I've never had a Sim die in my game. I've never seen the Grim Reaper in my game. And I'm in no hurry to meet him! But if and when I do lose a Sim in tragic circumstances (and I fear it's more likely to be "when" rather than "if") I think I'll probably go the "realistic" route, albeit unwillingly, and with tears. After all, I can't bring Real Life friends back, much though I'd love to. I suppose as a Christian (a bad one!) I have to believe in resurrection, but I really don't like the way it's done in The Sims. Maybe it's too much of a "game", when I feel it's really a matter of life and death. (Of course The Sims is both at once.) So, when I do finally lose a Sim that I love, I think I'll lay them to rest, reluctantly and with tears. And then, as in real life, I'll try to move on. And help my remaining Sims to move on too.

Actually that shouldn't be a problem. You can easily subtract (or add) Days Left with the Sim Manipulator, to put them back more or less where they were before. I'm pretty sure Imsimenator of the SimBlender can do the same too.

I've no experience teenagers coping with this sort of bereavement -- fortunately, at least where I live, teenage death is very rare. But I have seen older men, after a long and happy marriage, remarrying with what seems almost indecent haste. It's not a sign of lack of love for their recently departed spouse -- it's more an indication of how much they miss her. So don't be surprised if Beau seems to find new love quickly. It doesn't mean he's not grieving for Lucy. Rather it means her death has left a gap in his life that just has to be filled. Of course filling the shoes of the dead can be hard -- it needs a brave woman to take on the task. Did Lucy have a best friend? That's often where bereaved males find solace; they can grieve together for somebody they both loved.

For myself I've never regretted putting in Squinge's No More Fires mod. There were just far too many serious kitchen fires. I burn my Real Life food with great regularity, but I've never yet set the kitchen on fire. Far less killed myself. In the unmodded game there were far far more fires than in reality. You may not want to go down the No More Fires road, but I suggest you make a habit of placing a fire alarm and/or a sprinkler above every stove and fireplace. Your Sims will thank you for it.

Actually, you can send a teen to university at any time, so if you don't mind Resurrected Lucy going to college without having time to rebuild her relationships and skills that isn't a problem at all.

Despite Lucy losing her relationships to everyone except the one who resurrects her, rebuilding the relationship with Beau shouldn't be a big problem. When Spring Thyme, who died in a fire on the day before she would have gone to college, was resurrected by her sister, she not only lost her relationship with her high school sweetheart Tommy Ottomas, she was a different age stage - because I didn't resurrect her until Tommy had gone through a full grieving arc, met someone new, recovered, married, and had a child. I even changed his name to Tom to reflect the huge amount of maturation he had to do during that period. But losing her relationships did not cause Spring to lose her memories or her Wants and Fears History, and Tommy was all over both, so she almost immediately started rolling wants about him. I don't remember if they occurred before her family invited him and his wife over to see her - which they did almost immediately - so I don't know if those memories were spontaneous or needed a trigger, but she was far more likely to roll wants for Tom than for boys her own age - and her a Family sim! I never did get to finish playing that arc out and have no idea where it would have wound up. Spring was a Scorpio, so she might have been pretty ruthless about pursuing him once she finally finished growing up. We'll never know now.

One thing to be prepared for when sending teens with dead friends to college - the want tree does not exempt dead teens from the selection of teen friends students will roll "$Subject comes to college" wants for. Tom and her sisters rolled those wants for Spring till the day they graduated, which I found touching, and interpreted as indicating regular thoughts about how Spring was supposed to be there with them for these experiences.

Yeah, I cried for the pair, too. They're both young and in love.

I was playing with an idea in my head to have her resurrected and leave for college straight away with Beau. However, I thought about the narrative significance and came to the conclusion that this could be a time for growth for Beau.

I don't play with mods to protect my sims from disasters, as I find it interesting when spontaneous death occurs. It's rare anyway unless I force it for narrative purposes, and since with my Pleasantview I'm letting the pieces fall where they may, allowing my sims to create the story themselves, I've found that less death occurs, unless it's old age.

So this was a sad, yet welcome, spice. I doubt that made any sense.

It's never fun to watch a favourite sim die, and then see how that affects the rest of the sims.

People play the game in different ways, which is what makes this board fun and interesting. Every simmer has a different approach; some hate tradegy and go out of their way to prevent it, others welcome it, some just play and see what happens, and some just make big family trees. There are more ways to play than listed, such as challenges and legacies.

I don't really find the age gap a major issue, just trying to find a way to justify my decision. If I was going to resurrect her, I was going to just send her straight away with Beau, thus making them the same age. However, I thought about funds (they didn't have enough) and the world bhilding, if you will. There wasn't a Resurrect-O-Nomitron on hand and it's not realistic, which was how I was playing Pleasantview, before I added a certain subhood...

Since this dilemma, I had added Strangetown so that I had a logical reason (in my mind) to add La Fiesta Tech, just so that Alexander had a chance to get with Stella Terrano. It's gone well, two bolts, and they're in love. This makes me wonder... I have aliens running around, but I rule out resurrection?

I've begun playing ping pong in my mind, as to what I should do. Half of me wants to keep her dead for narrative purposes, combined with trying to keep death permanent as in real life (that's never the case in my custom 'hood, my favourite sims always get revived), and another part of me wants to cheer Beau up, but at the same time it's not like in real life a watcher is going to bring your loved ones back, because you cried enough, even though that would be nice.

What rules do people have concerning resurrection? Maybe that could give me some ideas.

Aliens and resurrection have nothing to do with one another. Logically, if there's intelligent life on one planet, there could be on another. Death, on the other hand, is the shadow of life.

My own rule is, What's the most interesting thing that could happen here?

My rules (or guidelines) concerning resurrection:

I play Strangetown and Pleasantview separately. Pleasantview is strictly realistic: no supernatural creatures, no pleading with the Grim Reaper, no resurrection. In Pleasantview, dead is dead, and dealing with death becomes part of the characters' stories.

In Strangetown, anything goes, but it generally has to align with the characters' wants and personalities and make sense for the story. My last Strangetown playthrough, Vidcund died; I had Pascal resurrect him because someone in the household had a want for him to be resurrected (Lazlo) and because it made sense that Pascal would pursue the Paranormal career and get the bone phone, since he was already a knowledge Sim in the science career; he basically just switched departments. In my current playthrough, Olive is a witch and has the bone phone because she knows the Grim Reaper personally. Nervous died (like the very first time I opened the Beaker house), and since she had a want to resurrect him, that worked out nicely; he "lives" with her now, although he's pretty much immortal unless he moves out of her house, as is she. This hasn't happened yet, but if someone did want a loved one to be resurrected, they would have to suck up to Olive to make that happen and pay for it in some way (unless they were in a position to pursue the Paranormal career themselves). So resurrection is possible, but it's not easy, which I think is how it should be. Magic should have a price of some kind.

I do have one steadfast rule about resurrection, which is that elders who die a natural death cannot be resurrected. They have gone on to what I hope is a better place, where there are hula dancers, beautiful sunsets, and endless mai tais.

While begging for a Sim's life is always allowed in my game, resurrection definitely has a different story arch.

I mentioned above that the only time I've allowed it so far was when Beau resurrected Alexander. Both were at University when the fire destroyed their shared house, and Beau succeeded in becoming part of the secret society and using Alexander's own money to bring back his friend. Narratively, Alexander is reported as being in a coma and Beau brought him back, rather than being fully dead.
Also, as a result, Alexander underwent a personality change. He rerolled with aspiration (now pleasure), and got a random personality. It definitely affected his responsibilities as heir, where he's more concerned with fun, and always annoyed about having to make important decisions. Usually, he talks to his step-mother Dina to decide what's best, and he and his husband Jerry have a live-in housekeeper to manage the day-to-day and child rearing.

Beau is now on the paranormal career path; he's going to start some kind of cult which may involve resurrection, but again on a short term timeline.

So my rules are:
1 - resurrected sims have an aspiration change
2 - resurrected sims have a personality change
3 - sims can only be resurrected within a time limit of 10 days (or one season in my game)
4 - sims have to have access to $10 000 to pay the Grim Reaper - I do not want Zombies!!