Since I first started play from TS(1), I found that I would have an idea on my head of what the family I was going to play would be and I would play them towards that end but setting benchmarks quite randomly depending upon my own personal whims as I play. Then I would create another family with something else in mind but played by the same rules. If there was a Sim that I particularly liked, or a family, I would continue on after the benchmark had been met for them and start towards whatever I felt was the next one, but I'd usually start another Sim or family before I reached it.

So Family #1 might be a couple with a teenager and being poor, their aim is to marry their child off to someone 'wealthy'. The wealthy Sim could be a townie that upon marriage, I'd move them out and drop a 'motherlode' or two upon them to represent the child moving up the way they want. They might however, want their child to be well educated (or not?) along the way, so raising him/her a particular way might involve getting a good (or terrible) grade upon graduation, perhaps setting the kid up with prospective suitors, or the teen rebelling, etc., etc. But stage one might be reaching that graduation stage.

Family #2 might be a single male Sim who wants to get to the top of (in the older games) a medical professional who has a thing about blond mothers and wants to get as many blonds as he can pregnant. Stage one might be getting the first one pregnant while not falling for her (and by not falling for her, I mean 'Me not feeling sorry for her and have her marry him to make ME feel good - who hasn't felt for a Sim along the way sometime? Be honest) before moving onto the next blond <--- This one I made up just right this moment... It may just be on the cards for a future Sim?

Then I might make Family #3 and so on until I decide that is enough player made Sims and return to Family #1.

Currently I have:-
#1 Is Bob, my 'test' Sim to see how the new mechanics played and how romancing and jealousy worked. His goal was to woohoo two sisters. He is also an computer whiz and works in IT. As a working Sim, I have a non-working Sim, a female I had created in the CAS demo who is purely a house-mate-cum-border living off his earnings but doing chores and cooking in exchange and providing socialising when it gets down and no one else is about and he needs to stay home and get skills up or such.
First Goal+ Reached. Next!

#2 Is the House of Wayward Girls - the sisters I created for Bob's SimSocial experimentation. The older sister is a cook who writes in her spare time. The younger is a computer geek just like Bob who is living off her sisters earnings and paints an occasional painting but is working her way up to professional tourney gamer. One has several books published via both a publisher and by self-publishing, the other has just started to earn income from game tournaments.
First Goal+ Reached. Next!

#3 is the Lee Family. I put more thought into the Lees than the other off the top Sims. Both are geek, gloomy, and genius. Paul is the elder brother who is a computer whiz and I plan on him being big in that industry and making a fortune. Ling is the younger sister who wants a successful lineage who is currently stay at home who cooks and cleans, paints, and plays the violin. First goal was to get them both married.

Paul met a townie (I wanted random Sims for these goals in this family as the randoms aren't that bad in this game, most look really good) named Macy whose last name I cannot remember for the life of me. But I liked Macy's looks and so did Paul. The friendship took a bit of time as did the romance but it eventually came about. They became lovers and Macy eventually moved in with them. Not long after that, Paul proposed, time passed, and they married.
Goal 1.1 Reached. Onto Ling's goal.
(Side Note: Both started the game with the goofy/dopey walk style and not the best dress sense, so upon living with Macy, she got him better dressed and even 'perked' his walking style up to 'default')

Ling I determined suffered low self esteem and lived in the shadow of her techie brother, so she was a bit... jealous of what Paul had being insecure, slowly struck up a good solid friendship with Macy (who had an evil trait and would slip in an occasional mean interaction autonomously with Ling which constantly kept the young girl on the back foot and unsure of herself). Eventually lonely Ling who actually got a sad moodlet over her brother's happiness began flirting with Macy (I think Macy may have autonomously flirted with her first?) and after a long time of friendship and flirting while Paul was at work, Ling could take it no longer and kissed Macy who was quite receptive to the advance. Before long they were lovers.

Because Ling was so lacking in confidence, she had few friends, but seeing how much fun she was having with Macy, she soon made friends with Mrs Pancakes. When Ling continued to get upset with Macy being with Paul so much (though really, she was with Ling most of the time!), she started hitting on Pancakes and in a concerted effort quickly managed to bed Pancakes by days end! The two would woohoo a few more times, but Ling's heart really wasn't in it and she started to avoid Pancakes who came around everyday and still does, only to be left waiting at the door unless Paul is home or comes home from work and greets her, because that is what Paul is like.

Anyway, through Macy, who knew Geoffrey Landgrabb, Ling (in a roleplaying sense) got Macy to invite him around one day and she began to form a relationship with him not knowing he was already married (read: for some reason, I the player thought he was the single son of the elder patriarch Landgrabbs, not the actual patriarch himself). So things progress because Ling's major trait was a family and for that, she wanted a traditional husband, not an illicit affair with her own sister-in-law! Imagine Lings surprise when after being lovers for quite some time that when she wanted to take it to the next step, she had to convince Geoff to leave his wife!! But convince him she did and they became engaged and eloped a couple of days later. Strangely enough, a very sad ex-Mrs Landgrabb would come and visit (probably to understand why he left her?) and Ling became her good friend and though she hates Geoff, the two women get along fine!
Goal 1.2+ Reached. Next!
(Side Note: Ling started the game with the goofy/dopey walk style and her dress sense was kind of poor, so Macy also instilled confidence in the young girl and too is better dressed and even 'perked' her walking style up to 'sexy'. Also, the ex-Mrs Landgrabb was watching a romantic movie and became flirty and when Ling joined her after having something to eat, was flirted autonomously with and now they seem to have a burgeoning romantic relationship - I am yet to decide if the ex is going to seduce [even though I have to initiate it through Ling - I can roleplay it that the older woman manipulated the younger into asking...] the new Mrs Landgrabb out of spite/revenge or if Ling will be tempted to go down the path herself out of some sort of insecure sympathy because Ling herself was the home wrecker? What do you reckon?

#4 is the Fellows/Bond household. Two CAS Demo Sims that I had made individually and joined in CAS as house mates on the weekend upon my granddaughter's request when I was showing her how the game worked - my daughter lets the two granddaughters play their own family in TS3.

Andrea Fellows wants a family but not particularly a husband, while John Bond (related to a certain other more famous Bond very distantly) is a renaissance Sim who wants to be a secret agent like his great uncle 54 times removed... John is clumsy, though in game it doesn't really seem to have much affect on anything? But he is also self assured and an active athletic type. I wish the clumsy would have had more comical effect though.

He's moving right along in his chosen career and is only just now starting to become a womaniser like his boy's own adventure uncle was. I want to get him to mid-level of his career when I will probably change it for aspiration reasons. In the long run however, he will end up an agent after the other aspirations are met.

Andrea of course wants a large family and technically is John's landlady. They have no interest in each other sexually and I have deemed her to be a b it of a cougar. Thanks to the inteen mod, she has been able to seduce the Yi boy, use him for her own purposes and successfully gotten herself pregnant and had a daughter, Since becoming pregnant, she has pretty much cast the boy aside and ignores his knocking at the front door concentrating simply upon her daughter and her painting.
When John is bringing in enough money and her paintings earn more and more, she hops to put another floor on top of her small home and she will try and find some other young man and cougar his arse off until she can have another child, and so on and so forth.

My next gaol for this family is building the extension without any kachings or motherlodes. Not sure if it is time to look back in on Bob after that and give him some real objective according to me in his life or to make and play another family? I'll decide when I am reach that point and then the cycle will begin with all of my Sim families again.

So that is my style of play; I play a family, I set ultimate goals and benchmarks, and I rotate through them before returning to the first family again. What is your's?

I like to consider myself a family player. I start off with a single sim usually and just see where it goes. I try to figure out what I'm going to do with each new member of the family when they're kids, but sometimes that doesn't always go to plan.
And whenever I get bored I just throw some drama in there. Like a death or an affair or someone getting turned into a vampire and murdering his entire family out of bloodlust. That kind of stuff.

I guess that would make me kind of a storyteller too, except I don't publish any of my stories anywhere, I just come up with drama after drama to put my sims through.

I play everyone in the neighborhood. I like to watch and see what they do on their own.

I'm very much a family and legacy player (a big reason why the lack of toddlers horrified me), and a storyteller, though most of my stories stay in my head.

In TS1 I was a builder. TS2 was a mind-boggling leap forward for the game, and I almost immediately picked up legacy and family play, and it stayed that way even after TS3's release. I switched to TS3, and legacy gameplay and storytelling remain a feature of my gameplay.

TS4 I just haven't been able to get into, and haven't even made it to the birth of generation 2. I did save my first sim, though, for posterity, and I do want to maintain her family line. This is probably silly, but I regret not keeping my first sims in 2 and 3.

Me too!! This is what I severely missed about the Sims 2 when 3 game along. There were too many families in 3 for me to keep up with to be honest. Personally, I really hated the worlds in 3 and I still do. I don't particularly like the worlds in 4 (the map view is so weird and the greyed out until you hover over crap has got to go) but I love that it's smaller and you can OPT OUT of having randoms move into the town! YES FINALLY EA! I like having control over my towns, lol. Sims 3 I still can't figure out how to STOP people from moving in unless I PUT THEM THERE. Anyone know a mod for this, that would be helpful..

I don't publish this sort of stuff either, this being the first I have really spoken to non-family or non-friends I know who also play. But my personal situation has changed due to health and lack of employment due to it so I find I have more time to spend wandering the forums and having heard snippets of what people have discovered in game, oddities they have had happened in game, and well, just snippets and not enough to paint any kind of whole story, though some have intimated how they play, I still thought I'd ask.

I am a family player as well. More than that I'd like to call myself a neighborhood player. I like to play each and every household in the neoghbourhood and play out intertwined storylines with them. This is why Sims 3 was so unsuited to my play style.

I don't usually start off with a single Sim and develop it from there. I usually employ the pre-mades (or at least some of them) and also create whole families in CAS until I have at least 8 very different families with whom I can follow 8 very different story lines (rich affluent family clan, poor single parent with 3-4 children, big happy family, alternative families, divorcees, new-age hippie farmers, rags-to-riches, riches-to-rags etc.) What I don't find very entertaining is playing Single Sims or "Roomies" type households of "trendy" YAs living together and their personalities clashing in wacky ways. I hate that period of my life in RL and am glad that it will be over soon now that I'm engaged, why should I want to play it?

Sims 2 was in the end suited better to that play style than Sims 4, but mainly because in the end it had 7 EPs all full of new possibilities. I can't wait to get more options (especially supernatural ones) in Sims 4!

Build a house the world will want. Or force a single or small family to test objects for me.

Not much going on... lol

I've probably spent more time in build mode than playing the game, so I'd say builder.

I'm also a chronic reloader, I guess I get bored of my sim's career/family/lifestyle easily, because I'm always rolling back to an early save or starting an entirely new game.

I love building houses for my family. I've got one main family, the one that I play with the most. I choose one child to be the next one in line to live in that house.
I liked how, in The Sims 3, with the Story Progression mod I could just leave other sims in the neighbourhood and they'd get married and have kids, get promotions, new jobs, stuff like that. I'm really missing that now. I do the DIY story progression, as described on SimsVIP , to get the neighbourhood going and hoping for a good story progression mod soon. Haven't found one yet...

I like to play manager/god, I set the conditions where Sims live then watch how they'd progress or fail. Mods like Master Controller, StoryProgression, AwesomeMod and any autonomy fine tuning or AI fix were indispensable for me in Sims 3.

Sims 4 is somewhat a mini version of Sims 3, but since it's faster and have better graphics I can play single households with many Sims living in it to get the same feel.

I play a house of 8 roommates, then pair them up and marry them off and send them out into their own houses. Each couple has 2 kids, and I watch all 8 kids grow up together and then marry them off.

My playstyle is a mix of rotational family play and self-imposed challenges. Next rotation I will have 13 households.
I always make up a backstory for the neighborhood and have all households participate in it. For example in my current savegame the backstory is that the two towns host a space program and serve as refuge for alien hybrids of all ages, so a lot of townies are in uniform or have green skin. Every playable who doesn´t have specific job goals will have worked as an astronaut sometime during his life. Being an astronaut is nothing out of the ordinary or to brag with, the space program is simply the biggest employer in the region.
I also love special households like ambassys, prisons, orphanages or factories with live-in apprentices. Sometimes they are included in the rotation and sometimes I use seperate saves for them.
I used to share my TS2 stories, but I´m careful about that now, since they weren´t that good and that discouraged me from continuing to play the neighborhoods.

I am getting into 4, but I too regret not saving my first sims in sims 2. I wrote this legacy about Oscar Meyer, and still think about that family alot, wish I still had em. So no it's not silly...well maybe it is, but I feel the same way!

I enjoy family/rotation/legacy style play.

I just try to stay far away from CAS and Build mode, I just find it boring, I just not creative enough and lack imagination, I just play some of the maxis-made families in rotation basically, it started dull, but after a while you really get attached to many of those sims.

Legacy. Rotational sometimes.

It depends. Sometimes I set up a neighborhood from scratch (can't wait for CAW...though I have a feeling there won't be one) and populate with just a few starter families and attempt to take over all the lots with their spawn, all while setting down a bunch of strict arbitrary rules they will follow or even a caste system. Sometimes I play one household and I leave all the other sims who move out from it alone. Sometimes I start with one sim and work on making every other sim related to them by blood, rotationally playing all their descendents.

In all types, I track the family tree. Not happy that EAxis's fairly rudimentary one is gone, at least it gave me a template.

I don't play premades. Typically in my first scenario in a new game, I let them live and maybe marry them in. After that, I start fresh by deleting them all.

Yes, Shimrod made a story progression mod to not allow Sims to move out of the TS3 worlds as well as other versions found at this link:
http://simsasylum.com/tfm/index.php...nd-no-mermaids/
One does have to sign up on that site to see and download things, and it is free, just like here on MTS.

Back on topic, I really like rotational style play and have been forever grateful for Twallan's Story progression mod for making that possible in TS3. I also love challenges. What I most find myself doing is playing families who love to garden and have a bunch of children. I also enjoy building houses and making Sims, so I would say that I enjoy about every aspect there is of Simming due to the fact that I can use my creativity in playing and have fun playing households full of all the different Sims I've created. I also really like to remodel the in game houses and work over the in game Sims so they look better to me. I've actually been able to more enjoy playing the in-game towns and Sims after having done so.

I usually have a general direction each family is going and also like to allow for the Sims themselves to occasionally direct the pathway. I remember in Sims 2, I had made a family of 4 or 5 brothers that lived in a big blue house. One of them was dating Agnes Crumplebottom, that I'd remade by extracting her from the in-game files with Sim PE from Peter and Inge and reworking her to make her look a bit different from just the in-game face. I had decided that one of the brothers would try to woo and marry her. What happened was a hilarious surprise to me though. While the first brother was on one of the dates with her, Agnes could not stop talking about one of the other brothers that lived in that house. Apparently, she had a crush on a completely different brother than the one I was planning on her hooking up with. As one can imagine, that date did not go well, and after the Sim returned home with Agnes, I had the other brother wooing her that she had the crush on, and they fell madly in love and got married and had funny, cute little boys that looked a bit like monkeys. It was so much fun seeing how the offspring of Sims would come out in Sims 2.

I enjoy setting different goals for different families, however, my Sims usually have a good amount of children, and the family aspect of it is the most important one to me.

I take a family approach, typically. Never liked rotational or single Sims. Kids are too important to me. My favorite family in The Sims 3 ended up having eight and a half (long story) children, so...

I usually start out making Sims based on people I know to "test" how the game works. Sometimes the Sims live alone and eventually marry, other times I add a spouse and let them start a family. There are never any children or elders from the beginning. If I feel my enthusiasm waning, this is when I start downloading Sims made by other people. Then I take Sims based off cartoon/TV/whatever characters and have them do wacky things. This was my pattern with Sims 2 and 3.

I still have fond memories of the Fraggle Rock family I made in Sims 2. Good times

I guess I'm more of a family/legacy style player. I don't think I've ever made it to 10 generations though. If I did it was in S2 or I got really close to it. I'm super picky about my sims and every thing that has to do with them too so I'll spend over an hour just getting that first sim perfectly how I want them. Then I'll spend hours building their house and furnishing it down to the very last detail before I even start playing. I especially got obsessive with how everything was in S3 since I could see the whole world all the time and at one point even customized an entire world and went house by house and filled it up with families I created and then created the sim I actually wanted to play and then started playing. Then when it's time for them to start a family I create someone for them and move them in nearby and then send my sim off to find them and woo them and go from there.

I tend to be very skill driven too in that I don't really care about their wants/whims. I have a specific path for them to go down and I follow that and just focus on the skills surrounding that goal.

So far in this game I'm only slightly attached to my current family. I've made it to adulthood and they had babies and they've gone into childhood but I just tell them to do their homework when they get home and then I just ignoring them and focusing on the two adults. I don't feel a connection to the kids in this game. I didn't realize how big of a deal toddlers being gone was until I realized I hadn't really controlled the kids in 3 or 4 sim days. Usually I would focus on the adults and then when the kid came around I would end up focusing more of my time on them and begin leveling up their skills as toddlers and then even more so through childhood and teenage years and by the time they were adults they were pretty much maxed out on all their skills because they had all that extra time. Now their skills don't even roll over from childhood to teenage which is just ridiculous. It's kinda jacking with my game style.

I still remember one of my families from S2 as well. In fact, my avatar was my main sim from that family up until about a week ago. I still remember the toddler sitting on the floor holding on to the big dog around the neck kinda rocking it and making all kinds of toddler noises. It was so cute and sweet and I totally miss the little things like that.

I usually start with a single female sim and see where it goes from there :P

I love the concept! How can you say you aren't good at story telling, that was a great story!

Of course, if you don't feel you are, it is not for anyone else to pressure. I like the back story aspect too and have done it in a sense - all my self-created Sims came from somewhere and are in Willow Creek for a reason. Townies were always there just as you might imagine from moving to a new town or city, but when my own Sims get to know them, the townies' back story develops from there.

I think I rotate playing my Sims as their compact little fish-bowl lives get predictable or over-played so I move on, reach a set goal, and eventually come back to them in order to keep it fresh in my own mind.