How my Legacy Works
De asked me about how I decide who goes to uni, who has however many kids, etc, so I thought I'd make a post everyone could/would see about it :)
First, take one random number generator where you can set parameters for what can come up.
Uni: Uni is currently set at a completely 50/50 chance to add to the dramaz, so anybody who randomises a 1 goes to university, anyone who gets a 2 doesn't. I only started doing this for generation 2, and I Rodney might change this rule. You know, because you could totally bribe Rodney into letting your kid into uni, even if he/she has totally been flunking. And because you can threaten people with witholding their children's education! Yay...!
Glasses and obesity: When I started the legacy I sought out some statistics on these kinds of things (I also looked up death rates, but those were waaay too minute, so we dropped that) - apparently I found out that 1 in 4 kids need glasses, and 1 in 5 children is overweight, so those are the probabilities we use to generate who's what. Of course, numbers of adults who are overweight or need glasses are far higher and we were originally going to do something with that, but we're lazy and we don't want everyone to have them, so we ditched that idea.
Children: Children are rather more complicated: first I randomise between 0 and 6 for all the children that are going to be born of the generation before. Now, for the children of the heir, you just take that number as it is, but you couldn't do that for all the spares as well, or my neighbourhood would be crippled by sheer quantity of extended Rymans by now. What we do instead, is divide numbers as sims get further away from the main line. Children of spares get their number halved (eg Seth should have had six children, but only got three), grandchildren of spares get their number divided by three, great-grandchildren by four... Once you get to seven you definitely aren't having any kids, but you'll probably have wound up marrying somebody closer to the line by then or your line will have died out already. This way, the (theoretically) most interesting sims have the most children and I don't have to spend loads of time concentrating on sims nobody knows and I'm not that bothered about (in reality I wind up being bothered about most of them anyway).
Several points about this:
- we round down, so 5/2 -> 2, not 3.
- where there's intermarriage, the higher number takes precedence, the other number is ignored.
- natural twins completely scupper this rule where you only want one (more) child *frowns at Johanna and Noah* (for me, natural twins where there should only be one child get exactly the same numbers)
- so, sometimes, does ACR *glares at Kimmy and Christian*
I randomise all of these things, as well as primary and secondary aspiration, well in advance. So for generation four I have a long list of numbers for 28 (at the moment) children. The only agency I have in the matter is whose child is born into which slot. So, if there's a sim I particularly like, I can make sure their child is born into a slot with more children, or with the same aspiration as their parent - and believe me, that's a complicated bargaining process when you want nearly everyone to have kids and somebody has to fill the 0 children slots.
So, from before a child is born, I know what aspirations they will have, how many kids they'll have, whether they'll be overweight or need glasses and (at the minute) whether they'll be going to university - all I don't know is their gender, appearance, personality and sexuality.
This actually allows me quite a lot of advance warning of where the plot could go.
Take generation 1:
First child: family, 5 children (makes sense)
Second: fortune, 2 children (makes sense)
Third: grilled cheese, 1 child (makes sense)
Fourth: family, 5 children (makes sense)
Fifth: family, 0 children (errrr... what?)
What happened with Terry was a possibility that occurred to me from before he'd even been born. There were other possibilities; he could have been gay and just not wanted to adopt (especially if he wasn't so nice), I could have had some deeply involved story about infertility, he could have just not been a child kind of person, he might have been too focused on an important family-friendly career in the police or whatever. But then he was so incredibly nice and he rolled the LTW to have 6 grandkids... There was definitely something wrong there, and, with such a randomly mean big sister, it just made sense.
Names: ...*sigh* Now to reveal what a massive geek I am.
I've done legacies before using a random name generator, but behindthename.com hadn't really worked out for me before because if you use their whole database you can get some really, really random ones and they just wouldn't fit within sibling groups when one name's a fantasy one, one's from Japan, one's from Brazil and another's Welsh. Plus they have a number of the same name but spelt different ways and... I probably could have used it, but meh.
Instead, I wanted names that I could still manage to pronounce and would generally fit together and with which I would have less wriggle room. Enter... Pokemon Sapphire! Yes, I have (and still occasionally play) Pokemon Blue, Yellow, Gold and Sapphire. But the latter two games give every single trainer you fight a name, and so I figured I could go through the game, writing down the names in order and then name my sims after them. There are still problems: a couple of times I've left a battle so quickly I forgot to write the name and I can't find it out afterwards, and, naturally, male trainers massively outnumber females, but we haven't hit that wall just yet, so we deal with it as we come to it.
Basically: Birch = Professor Birch, Roxanne is named after a gym leader who only uses rock pokemon, Briney is named after a sea captain, Brawly (Wally's son) is named after a gym leader who only uses the fighting type...
*Sigh* Yes, I'm a nerd... *hangs 20-year-old head in shame*
Anyway, we go through that list as each gender comes; if Marina had been male she would have been called Sean, if Sean had been female he would have been called Kimmy, and so on.
And that is basically how the rules behind my legacy work. Unless you want to get into the rules of the universe, but I'm not sure I've fixed all of those yet, so we'll keep quiet about that for now... *shifty*
First, take one random number generator where you can set parameters for what can come up.
Uni: Uni is currently set at a completely 50/50 chance to add to the dramaz, so anybody who randomises a 1 goes to university, anyone who gets a 2 doesn't. I only started doing this for generation 2, and I Rodney might change this rule. You know, because you could totally bribe Rodney into letting your kid into uni, even if he/she has totally been flunking. And because you can threaten people with witholding their children's education! Yay...!
Glasses and obesity: When I started the legacy I sought out some statistics on these kinds of things (I also looked up death rates, but those were waaay too minute, so we dropped that) - apparently I found out that 1 in 4 kids need glasses, and 1 in 5 children is overweight, so those are the probabilities we use to generate who's what. Of course, numbers of adults who are overweight or need glasses are far higher and we were originally going to do something with that, but we're lazy and we don't want everyone to have them, so we ditched that idea.
Children: Children are rather more complicated: first I randomise between 0 and 6 for all the children that are going to be born of the generation before. Now, for the children of the heir, you just take that number as it is, but you couldn't do that for all the spares as well, or my neighbourhood would be crippled by sheer quantity of extended Rymans by now. What we do instead, is divide numbers as sims get further away from the main line. Children of spares get their number halved (eg Seth should have had six children, but only got three), grandchildren of spares get their number divided by three, great-grandchildren by four... Once you get to seven you definitely aren't having any kids, but you'll probably have wound up marrying somebody closer to the line by then or your line will have died out already. This way, the (theoretically) most interesting sims have the most children and I don't have to spend loads of time concentrating on sims nobody knows and I'm not that bothered about (in reality I wind up being bothered about most of them anyway).
Several points about this:
- we round down, so 5/2 -> 2, not 3.
- where there's intermarriage, the higher number takes precedence, the other number is ignored.
- natural twins completely scupper this rule where you only want one (more) child *frowns at Johanna and Noah* (for me, natural twins where there should only be one child get exactly the same numbers)
- so, sometimes, does ACR *glares at Kimmy and Christian*
I randomise all of these things, as well as primary and secondary aspiration, well in advance. So for generation four I have a long list of numbers for 28 (at the moment) children. The only agency I have in the matter is whose child is born into which slot. So, if there's a sim I particularly like, I can make sure their child is born into a slot with more children, or with the same aspiration as their parent - and believe me, that's a complicated bargaining process when you want nearly everyone to have kids and somebody has to fill the 0 children slots.
So, from before a child is born, I know what aspirations they will have, how many kids they'll have, whether they'll be overweight or need glasses and (at the minute) whether they'll be going to university - all I don't know is their gender, appearance, personality and sexuality.
This actually allows me quite a lot of advance warning of where the plot could go.
Take generation 1:
First child: family, 5 children (makes sense)
Second: fortune, 2 children (makes sense)
Third: grilled cheese, 1 child (makes sense)
Fourth: family, 5 children (makes sense)
Fifth: family, 0 children (errrr... what?)
What happened with Terry was a possibility that occurred to me from before he'd even been born. There were other possibilities; he could have been gay and just not wanted to adopt (especially if he wasn't so nice), I could have had some deeply involved story about infertility, he could have just not been a child kind of person, he might have been too focused on an important family-friendly career in the police or whatever. But then he was so incredibly nice and he rolled the LTW to have 6 grandkids... There was definitely something wrong there, and, with such a randomly mean big sister, it just made sense.
Names: ...*sigh* Now to reveal what a massive geek I am.
I've done legacies before using a random name generator, but behindthename.com hadn't really worked out for me before because if you use their whole database you can get some really, really random ones and they just wouldn't fit within sibling groups when one name's a fantasy one, one's from Japan, one's from Brazil and another's Welsh. Plus they have a number of the same name but spelt different ways and... I probably could have used it, but meh.
Instead, I wanted names that I could still manage to pronounce and would generally fit together and with which I would have less wriggle room. Enter... Pokemon Sapphire! Yes, I have (and still occasionally play) Pokemon Blue, Yellow, Gold and Sapphire. But the latter two games give every single trainer you fight a name, and so I figured I could go through the game, writing down the names in order and then name my sims after them. There are still problems: a couple of times I've left a battle so quickly I forgot to write the name and I can't find it out afterwards, and, naturally, male trainers massively outnumber females, but we haven't hit that wall just yet, so we deal with it as we come to it.
Basically: Birch = Professor Birch, Roxanne is named after a gym leader who only uses rock pokemon, Briney is named after a sea captain, Brawly (Wally's son) is named after a gym leader who only uses the fighting type...
*Sigh* Yes, I'm a nerd... *hangs 20-year-old head in shame*
Anyway, we go through that list as each gender comes; if Marina had been male she would have been called Sean, if Sean had been female he would have been called Kimmy, and so on.
And that is basically how the rules behind my legacy work. Unless you want to get into the rules of the universe, but I'm not sure I've fixed all of those yet, so we'll keep quiet about that for now... *shifty*