I'm looking for ideas to create a handful of diverse families for my new 'hood.

The other day, I was reading through some of the threads on here, and I noticed that I seem to be in the minority when creating new neighborhoods. I tend to start with three or four families, which I thought seemed excessive - but then I saw people that start with 10+ families.

I'd like to have more fams, SO, what are your favorite types of families to play? Are there certain fallback scenarios you have? How do you get diverse families?

(blast - I'm now one of those annoying people who posts on every topic -_-; )

Anyway, I have really comprehensive notes for my games that break down the options for aspiration, children, marriage, pets and other variables into a set of numerical values (because I'm a weirdo.) Then I just use a random number generator and the rest, as they say, is history. I sometimes disagree with the numbers if I want a particular scenario - for example, in my last spin through create-a-family, I elected to add a dog to the single-sim family I'd made. I was faffing about and accidentally made him elderly, so in a brilliant twist of storytelling genius brought on by a combination of soulless number crunching and my own stupidity, I ended up with this awesome rebel chick who has an incontinent, elderly bulldog called Barney.

Look around you. What kinds of families live in your neighborhood? I bet there's divorces and blended families, same-sex couples, single parents, elderly parents helping their adult children bring their grandchildren through tough times, "sandwich generation" adults taking care of elderly parents and small children, the couple who adopt or act as foster parents to kids who don't look a thing like them, college students living in their parents' basements to save money.

Maybe there's a bunch of thrownaway kids circling the periphery of your safe middle-class world, bobbing up from a twilight economy of squats, trick-turning, and petty theft to gain the benefits of your church's Wednesday night soup kitchen and then fading away because they can't trust adults. Maybe there's a swinging single suddenly faced with an old friend, or an orphaned niece, or an unsuspected bastard child, who needs his help desperately. Maybe that couple that's been childless so long has gotten on fertility drugs and is about to have multiples. Maybe the widower on the corner is about to piss off his children by marrying a younger woman. Maybe the middle-aged couple is about to kick over the traces and divorce, leaving each other for new and improbable-looking partners, and the kids move back and forth between them. Maybe...

Also - dice, dice baby! Polyhedrals! Roll d4 for skin and hair color; roll d6 for aspiration, roll d8 for number of family members, roll d6 for lifestage (with 6 being a teen about to go to Uni, or a baby conceived/adopted immediately, depending on what works best with the other results).

I think Peni summed things up rather well. Personally though, I am the kind that usually start a neighborhood with as little as one family that is either a married couple, two friends that are destined to become lovers, or even a single sim. Then I expand that family through marriage, children, and the like until I have more families than I care to play. If I do want to mix things up, I use a random number generator to tell me how many people are in a family, set a number for each age, gender, and the like and then roll to see which number comes up. I also use the dice to choose turn ons, turn offs, aspiration, and other things.

If you want an integrated hood, make families based on what the hood will need to survive, grow, and eventually thrive. Do you have Seasons? If so, you might need a gardener or fisherman so make a family that lives near a lake or that has a large lot for a garden so that they can produce the hood's food. Want alot of children in the hood? Make a family that has a married Family couple and let them breed like rabbits.

And like Peni said, look at the families in your own town or even in books and movies if you live out in the middle of nowhere like I do. Make families based off of what you see around you, what you want to see around you, or even what you hope to never see around you. Also, break out of your comfort zone and make a family that you would never have wanted or tried to make before. It might seem strange to you to begin with, but those little simmies can surprise you. The ones you thought you would hate can turn into your favorite little pixels in the blink of an eye.

I create families of different cultures and classes. There are farming families (usually with lots of children- Family Asp), wealthy sims with small families (Fortune/Knowledge Asp), single wealthy sims who are rock stars, show business, modeling careers etc. (Romance/Fortune/Popularity), middle class families/singles of all types, and poverty sims (Romance/Pleasure). They live in their own part of town so the neighborhood is broken up into different sections with a family/single or two of each type in each one. This is to start with. Later, I add different cultures/ethnicities because I don't like all my sims to look alike and act alike. Some cultures keep to themselves and only marry within their culture, others integrate, some are polygamous, some are cults that live all together and follow a Leader, I assign supernaturals to different cultures. I like a lot of variety and this is the best way I have found to create it in my game.

I like to start with 3-4 families too, so don't worry about that. I personally like to give each family plenty of time to be played with during a rotation, and the more families, the shorter rotations you usually have simply because it would take to long to go through the whole neighborhood. But again, that might just be me.

As for creating sims, think about everyone you have ever met and their personalities. Shy, nerdy, geeky, dorky, rebel, kind, responsible older-sibling/protective, etc. Then choosing 1-2 personalities can help you get an idea of the sim you are going to create.



I know, I can be quite the annoyance. My brother tells me so every day! But what does he know? He hates The Sims! And so does my sister! They know nothing!

I used to play the Prosperity Challenge, and still use the general playstyle quite a bit, though without keeping to all the rules or scoring points. There was a system there for starting up a new neighborhood:

Roll a six-sided die for the number of families. (If you get just one, roll again.) For each family, roll for number of members, age, and gender. (If you get only children and toddlers in one family, roll again.) Then take a look at each family you got and figure out how they're related to each other. Roll for zodiac sign and aspiration. If you like, roll for skin, hair and eye color. If you want even more randomization, roll for which face template to start with for at least the elders/adults, play with facial features and the sliders a bit, then make their kids through the pacifier in CAS.

You can end up with much more interesting families this way. An elderly couple (knowledge and romance) raising their three grandsons, one teen, one child, and one toddler. Two teen girls struggling to take care of their twin toddler sisters. One elder with his three adult sons. Or the toughest one I ever rolled - teen boy, child girl, four toddlers. That one was a challenge! (It was before Seasons, so they were living on the lawn at first, except for cubicles for the cribs.)

Another option is to take the kind of families you'd typically create - or EAxis premade families - and give each one a twist. Do you make a lot of female family sims? Make the father family instead, and the mother fortune or knowledge. Swap the genders of every sim in the family, see how that changes things. If all your families are mom-and-dad-and-kids, make a same-sex couple, or same-sex teen romance. How about an elder female married to an adult male? Make an "ideal" family, then kill off one or both of the parents. Make a nuclear family, but the parents are elders and the kids are adults (and/or teens). Make a divorced couple - and maybe give custody to the father, without making the mother a bad parent. Make a family where the children are obviously not the biological offspring of the parents.

The sky's the limit, really. Let the ideas flow free.

I make families based on the need of my integrated hood. I started with about 8 couples and gradually added in five more for a total of 13. I don't dice roll to make my families different. I know who they will be and make them towards that. My repair man looks very different to my highschool teacher. I very rarely play single sims I find them boring, plus there is no one handy then to keep their aspiration up. In my medieval integrated hood my evil wizard lives alone, but at the moment at least I can't imagine him as a parent. I pitty any poor child he steals as a minion. First gen I'm all about breeding, so once the kids grow up there will be lots more families and places in the community for them, but first gen have to all or nearly all be breeding. I love seeing the genetics combine. So no old sims, they don't breed. Not that I dislike old sims, age is what happens for years of working hard. At that point you get some comfort and preferably your children doing most of the work. So to me diversity is what occurs latter, not first up. As soon as they are created my goals, apart from breeding, is for them to gain some skills and make items for their shops or gain in badges. I loaded up my medieval hood yesterday and made a new couple, the Chandlers who are the candle makers. So he is hard at work making enough candles to open up the business and she is busy gathering compost, tending the chickens and accidentally getting herself pregnant. I decided to use the empty fridge that I had downloaded from PBK and since they only had a peach tree and a hive and no other food I gave them lots of dates to keep motives up. Yeah they didn't have to get pregnant first time did they?! I love risky woohoo but sometimes it can be rather inconvenient. I wasn't planning on her being pregnant the first day. So I went with it and even rolled for random at the birth but only got one baby still, I was hoping for 3 or 4 babies, now that would have been different.

These are all really great ideas!

Do you guys ever get bored with Sims you construct randomly, though? I've never tried rolling dice for my Sims, even though I know some people do, because I'm a bit of a control freak. I feel like it might be fun, though, since I'm feeling a little bored with TS2 atm.

Here's some different family structures you can make that don't follow the old 'mother, father, and 2.5 kids' scenario

- Gradparent, two adult siblings, one child (grandchild)
- Single mother, teen daughter, child daughter
- Two Adult Brothers in a band together
- Newlyweds + Groom's brother living with them as a third wheel. Sister-in-law strives to be matchmaker and get him out of the house.
- Childless couple that tries adopting all strays that come along.
- A Single Father and three teen children (try and see if you can hook him up with the single mother and then all together, the families movie into one big house)
- Elder man and a younger 'gold-digger' wife (+ some of his children her age)

I have gotten bored with a few I randomly make, not families though - just singles. However singles I will ignore and then come back around and play when I have an idea for. Mostly having them throw themselves into a home business will be enough for be to get back to regularly playing them, or giving them a pet to look after. To get more ideas to stave off boredom, there's a stickied thread on this forum for Keeping the Game Interesting!

The only time I sometimes get bored with a family is when the kids are off at uni. Often their business is going well by then and life isn't a struggle of juggling shops and babies any longer. At that point I start rolling my die for a random event. I keep a list of those to use for such times. Most are funny things but a few are less so such as "A tornado destroys your house". In that case they will be moved to a new blank lot with a small amount of money and have to start over.

I always start with 15 families and then i use a list randomiser that chooses for me. So i put all my families name in a list and then randomise them to choose firstly who has grandparents so two get grandparents, 3 get grandads and 2 get grandmas. Then i randomise it again and 5 get parents, 5 get single dads and 5 get single mums. Then i randomise again and 3 get uncles and 2 get aunts. Then i randomise again 4 get a male child and 4 get a female child. Then i randomise once more and 3 get a male toddler and 3 get a female toddler. Then i put in all their first names and use that to determine what hair and eye colours they have and what star sign and aspiration.

If you're bored, you're doing something wrong. It's on you to keep yourself shook up and interested. Ask yourself questions like: Why is this sim boring? How is this sim different from sims that don't bore me? What kinds of things are fun for me? What have I never done?

If they're all boring you - go do something else for awhile. Learn to sew. Go birdwatching. Read all the Nebula nominees. Life is too full of interesting things to waste you leisure hours being bored. There's no shame in walking away from a hobby and picking it up again (or not), when the urge returns.

If you're interested in generating random families but don't want to do a lot of die-rolling, there's this: http://www.mangaroo.com/sims2/ Mangaroo designed it for the Prosperity Challenge, but it's a good way to generate random families with random characteristics.

Me, I usually start neighborhoods with single founders, anywhere from just one to five or six, not whole families. But when I do want a family for whatever reason, I will often use those randomizers to spit it/them out for me. Less thinking that way.

I move the bin Sims in - all of them -and play with all of them - as well as with my own 4 - 5 families - I also make 6 students and move them into a dorm into Uni - and when they graduate, they move back to the hood. I have a rich area, a more middle class area, a poor area and a farming area.

I started out with 18 fairly "diverse" families (or technically 20, but the other two are related to one of the other families) in my pre-modern hood, Withea Dale, but will add more at some point. After played for almost 2 month, Ive now 40 households. Sometimes, its a bit overwhelming to get through all of them, but never tedious because I love most of them.

As for myself, Im a perfectionist and love adding structure to the game and plan most details to the game. Like with Withea Dale. Its a hood inspired by the monarch goverment during the 17th centuary europe with a patriarch "oldfashioned" martial structure, where every family has a specific lifestyle and social classes and I take Finance, Aspiration, Hobbies, Genetics, Clothing, Career/Business etc into consideration when creating these families. Lifestyle such as Royality, Knights, Musicians/Singers, Artisitcs, A group of Politics, Business owners, Dancers, Scientists, Film producers/stars, Teachers, Nurses/Doctors, Cheifs, Crafters, Farmers, Athletics, Military, Sports, Cuisine, Mechanicals, Tailors, Gardeners, Pet farmers, Entertainers....even brothels and slaves. The list goes on.

Then I gave them personality, primary and secondary aspiration and apppearance to suit which along with their lifestyle are he biggest impact of what kind of sims they are. But what kind of life and scenarious they have, I just go with the flow, using their aspiration and personality as a guide....or randomly picking a scenario for them. Like, If a young husband have higher boltz with one of his female co-workers or classmates (they get married off at young age), I might give that a plot twists of affairs. A lazy heir might rebel against his families customs and cause some drama.

Thats how I create my families. I creating a backstory and decide what aspects are important in that partical hood and then just go with flow. Add more details as I play the hood.

Which families are my favorites? Almost ALL of them! They have each different goals and are important to keep the hood running.
When a family loose their "purpose" (ie no heir to continue their family business) or when I end up with too many kids, I just give put them in the corner of the hood and dont play them, only enter their lot when aging them up.

But I think its really depends how YOU prefer to play the game.
Random characteristics, Challenges, Inspiration from movies, books etc, there are so many ways to create custom hoods. I prefer going for the stragically route, using simbology as guide to give my sims different characters and lifestyle. While other sim players think rules are a pain in the neck and prefer to create the sims from wants, ltw or let the sims decide themself.

When playing the maxi hoods, what decisions did you made when playing those families? Let them choose themself? Randomly? Using their personality or Ltw as a guide? This might be a hint how you like to play them.

I will start by saying that I don't think I'm very imaginative. I do have a good imagination, but it definitely needs a starting point. I'm not good at pulling totally new ideas out of nowhere, and I suck at making decisions. However, I do love being surprised and having to be creative with what I am given, and I do like to do as much stuff as I can myself (massive contradictions, but there you go!) So if you're similar, my advice to you is:

Randomise, randomise, randomise! So fun. I use Hook's RandomStuff, and www.random.org predominantly. I have done various combinations of sim creation:

- Roll when creating a new family - 1-8 for the number of sims, then from that number I work out who will be who.

- Roll when creating each individual sim - does this sim have a partner? Children? Siblings? How many? Until I run out of space.

- Start with ages. Take the total number of sims you want and create that many random numbers from 1-70. I did this once with 100 sims. It was rad. For this one, I used the random number generator built into OpenOffice Calc. (Equivalent to Excel). I just pulled down 100 random numbers from 1-70. (To enable me to identify them, I started with a list of 100 female and 100 male names, alphabetised to remove duplicates, so at this point I was attaching numbers to a sim called "Amanda Adam" or something.)
Then, statistics time, baby! My next funnest thing ever. Literally, I'm getting excited just thinking about this. So, I looked up how many people have siblings and then gave everyone a percentage number. If they were under the percentage who have siblings, I replaced that number with a Y. If they were over it, I replaced it with an N. I added up all of the siblings and looked up how common different sized sibling groups are, then grouped them into groups roughly corresponding to those numbers based on their ages. In this field, I replaced the "Y" with the list of sims who were their siblings, using the temporary names for now.

I then looked up the stats on marriage, and divorce. I used the percentage method again to identify sims who were married (and made sure it was an even number). This time applying only to sims who are over 18, I marked them as married or single. I matched them up into couples based on age difference (Minimum age of younger partner: half older partner's age, plus seven) and not being related. After this I marked a certain number of couples as being about to split up.

Lastly I assigned parents to every child or sibling group with a member under 18, apart from a small number who were assigned to the orphanage. I did this based on a minimum age of 14 and a maximum age of 45 for parenthood in most cases, with 25-40 being the most common age of parents. At this time, I didn't worry about stepparents - I only gave them married, divorcing or single parents. But this immediately created a network of cousins, aunts, uncles etc because of course many sims had siblings. At this point, I actually drew out a family tree, because it was getting too confusing and identified (at this point) twelve separate family branches. Finally I assigned everybody a gender, although I think I did keep all of the parents heterosexual just for biology/genetics reasons (there are several gay families in my hood now, so fear not for equality!) In fact the family tree is here: http://www.familyecho.com/?p=CUNPH&...655211258464303

I really found, as I created each family and even each sim, that their personalities jumped out at me. They were all interesting, and even if one sim in particular was boring, he was made interesting by being someone else's brother, for example, or by having children who lived elsewhere with their mother. (And a totally single, lone sim was suddenly made more interesting by virtue of having no ties! In this hood, what a novelty.) I had to create reasons for all of the divorces, and I knew in advance, so I could create flawed marriages, which wasn't something I'd ever thought to do before. Plus, there were just so many different households that if I got bored I could easily skip to another one. I use the Lot Sync Timer to make sure that everyone's ages stay in line, so I can jump around between households to my heart's content. And everyone does get played eventually.

- If all of that statistics stuff leaves you cold, and/or 100 sims is way too many to start with, I discovered another new technique of family building last night (Why yes, I do set up imaginary hoods I will never ever play quite regularly, why do you ask? )

On Random.org, go to the integer generator (under numbers). Choose the number of sims you want to start with - in this case, I had rolled 57. Still pretty high. So I created 57 numbers between 1 and 70 and put them into one column. I copied and pasted this into Notepad and noticed that I could fairly easily make some nice family groups from this, take this example (10 numbers between 1 and 50) 14, 12, 3, 3, 41, 17, 48, 24, 24, 39
You split it up into groups by how it appears. So: 14, 12, 3, 3, 41. A single parent with two teenagers and twin toddlers. 17, 48. A single parent (perhaps opposite gender to the first one!) with a teenager. 24, 24: A young couple, just married, or roommates, or twin adult siblings. 39: Single. Another potential love interest for family #1. (In my opinion, this isn't nearly enough sims to start a hood with because I'd need more variety, but of course you could carry on.)

So I did this with my 57 and then when I'd split them into groups I rearranged them into rough family types and ended up with this:

49/35, 67/62, 51/70, 36/27 (Couples)
18/1/55/49, 14/56/9/49, 47/12/57, 59/42/9/5, 15/13/40/40/12, 36/35/15(Couples with kids)
65/32/39/18/8, 28/45/15, 26/56/7/19, 64/12/34(Blended/extended families)
40, 57, 33/33/27 (Singles, house shares)
65/15/9, 26/65/10 (Single parents)

That's all I have on those sims for now, I don't know who they are or what they are called, but even doing that gets my brain spinning. Why are they living in those specific groups? What are their relationships like? Here are some thoughts I've had already just on this information:
- The 67/62 could be the parents of some of the 30-40-somethings.
- The family with an 18 year old and a 1 year old - whose is the baby? Perhaps it belongs to the teenager, but the parents are covering for her and pretending she is the sister, not mum.
- I think the two families 28/45/15 and 64/12/34 are either stepfamilies with a much older/younger new partner, or have adopted a child. Perhaps one of each.
- The two 33 year olds in the house share are the incredibly beautiful identical twin model daughters of somebody very rich and successful (the whole idea of the hood was for rich and/or famous sims to live in a ridiculously extravagant enclave.) and the 27 year old is a young romance sim who is absolutely ecstatic at his "luck" but continually frustrated as they have him firmly in the friend zone!
- The two 65 year olds in the last category are grandparents, one allowed their daughter to live with them when she found herself pregnant at 15 and she never really left, and the other is caring for their grandchildren because their son/daughter is a touring rockstar who parties a bit too hard. They probably get together and moan about their incompetent offspring

If you set up connections like this before you even start creating the hood, it also gives you leverage to do things like set up turn ons/offs, zodiac signs, personalities which aren't just random but are actually story related, and gives you a good base from which to draw future sims and their stories.

Yes, I think I might get bored if I randomised every little detail of a sim's life and ended up with a lot of sims I didn't care for. But using randomisation as a starting point definitely fuels my imagination rather than hinders it.

If you are bored in making your own hoods and Sims then you could try hoods made by players here at MTS. http://modthesims.info/browse.php?f...%20and%20Worlds

For me, any family that I have ever rolled bores me almost immediately. For me the fun part is not knowing what the family will be. Will risky woohoo give them more children? Will trips and quads kick in? What will this couples children look like? What genetics will they get? What will their personality be?
I enjoy seeing how others really love to do that though. So many play styles.

I like big cities so I play megahoods. In my latest hood I have all premade hoods as shopping districts. The only problem is most premade sims have careers and I love running businesses. I make CAS sims to run businesses. If it is an eatery, it is a family run eatery. If it is gift shop, I have a young couple running it. If it is a gym, I can get by with a bachelor or bachelorette. I may not get around to playing all premades but at least they are there to be customers in my businesses. And besides, someone has to be in that welcome wagon when my first sims move in.




I have to admit, in all the years I have played, I finally played the "Elder man and a younger 'gold-digger' wife" to death. With Mort and Dina, Mort and Nina, Mort and Brandi, Mort and whoever. I think in my new hood I will have an elder female with a boy toy. I wonder if Denise Jacquet would like a boy toy, this go around?