How do you play?
Wasn't that the tag line for the Sims 3? Anyway, I was reading someone's comment on someone's friends, friends, friends journal (you know how it is) it got me thinking about the different personal ways you can play the Sims 2. So here is a run down of how I play, and I'd be really interested to see if others do the same, or something completely different, or nothing similar at all ;)
Aging:
I've always thought of a sim day as equaling a year. As I generally age sims up when the 'one day until their birthday' message appears, I work it out to be the toddler stage as being ages 2 - 4 and the child stage as being years 5 - 12.
The teenage years are a little more tricky, but as I have Inteen, I have the adult teen flavour pack installed which just makes so much more sense to me (as if you need to be a teenager for fifteen years - just because it seems like that long at the time lol). The adult perks (not going to school, full time work, moving out, marrying etc) kick in at around day 9, so for me that's equivalent to eighteen in which Aussies like me are legally declared adults (which is also as it's described at the website, I'm not being that clever). It's only at this point that the one sim day=one year thing gets out of whack as they are then 18-21 for another eight days or so lol. If I ever get back to sending my teens to Uni, I'd send them off then, otherwise, I consider they're spending those years just working, or what ever they're doing (Oh how I get sick of their post transition 'I didn't get to go to College' cry though).
So I consider the adult life stage ages 21 - 50. This goes upon the logic that beginning at 21 with 29 days left equals 50. If a sim has 13 days left, they're 37 years old. For Elders if they are 76 days old, well, they are 76 years old.
I never use the elixir of life and when I move in an NPC or Townie I age them to what I think their age should be depending on their partner's age, character etc.
Money:
I have hacks by dickhurt at MTS that means money costs food, driving cars costs money and there are no payouts when an elder dies. If an elder dies, I use giving gifts (with a armless statue for $5000 etc) or the family funds cheat to send the money where appropriate.
On top of that, because funerals costs money (as at least every second day time tv advertisement in Australia will tell you), I put an armless lady statue ($5000) in every adults sims inventory which will of course vanish when they die. If they can't afford it by the time they die, I'll generally add another statue to a relative's inventory as they've now been burdened with the costs. I'm cruelly realistic.
Private school costs money, it says so in the parent's memories lol. So that's another $10,000 ($5000 for primary, and another $5000 for senior school) worth of statues in the inventory.
If it's a family that is just continuously making money, I'll often put in another statue deducting $5000 grand for clothing. Because as I said, I'm realistic like that.
Jobs:
Because I don't send my teens to Uni, because I'm lazy, although I'm going to really try to change it for the sake of Repercussions, I let them pick jobs based on an what ever complex evaluation I decide to make based upon finances, social status, preference skill building, and who they know. I have a fantastic NCP career pack by TashaFaun (also at MTS)which means I literally have Sims that can max their skills and be earning $300 a day. Did I mention I was cruelly realistic?
I'm also a fan of some of the amazing custom content jobs, for example Jennifer Burb's bio says she use to want to be a soccer star but now focuses on being fashionable and stylish instead. Lucky for her, she is now working at a fashion magazine (foxyroxy27 at MTS).
Reproduction:
Part of Inteen (as I'm sure you know) has many options regarding WhooHoo (the term still makes me smile, it's just so...cute lol) and I love all of them for being realistic. Miscarriage, decreased fertility after a certain age, 2% chance of failure even while using safe WhooHoo (my friends seem to experience this a lot in RL) and silent pregnancy are all compulsory in my game.
As I'm so realistic in my game, I envision the fertility treatment as a trip to a herbalist or something similar and charge them (another statue in the inventory, the tray of orbs, which is about $850 if I remember) and likewise, if my sims haven't had any luck, and they want to go IVF, I use the "have a baby with" feature but charge them $3,500 (yes, another statue in the inventory!). I can't remember what cost I put on not having a baby (as opposed to miscarriage) but it, like in real life, occurs a charge.
And finally, the random comment on the friends of a friends of a friends page, mentioned that they change pregnant sim's fitness to fat. I was so impressed, that makes so much sense! And so depending on age and original fitness level I now do that to.
Will you take anything away from this post? Or am I just too brutal on my sims lol! As I said, I'd love to hear how you play :)