Thought this would be a good way to try and ease my mind, so here goes nothing. Basically I'd love to hear any of your stories about stupid things you've actually done while playing. It could be something you did intentionally then looked back on to regret later, or something you did by mistake. If you did something in game and thought it was stupid and feel it's worth sharing I'd love to hear about it, no matter how major or how minor it was.

One of my memories that stands out happened with my very first witch. I thought that it would be fun casting a bunch of random spells, so I went with it. Once I got the fire spell I thought that would be fun to try causing some chaos. So I just started randomly casting it on other sims to see what happens, and I was kinda disappointed that you couldn't actually kill anyone. So then I discover you could cast it on the ground so I try casting it around, and of course that completely backfires. The fire gets out of hand and of course my witch gets caught up in the fire, and burns to death. After doing basically the exact same thing in the past with the Sims 2 you'd think I would have learned my lesson, but nope I didn't learn a thing. I guess I figured the spell wouldn't kill at all since casting it directly at someone didn't do much. Well now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

Honestly, I was considered making a thread like this myself a few days ago.

Recently, I was making houses and Sims for my world. I created a guy that was the typical suntanned, fit, blonde-blue-eyed surfer dude and made him a Lifeguard. While building his house, I decided that - since he's not only a bachelor but the world was (in my headcanon) very, very warm during summer - his main living location would be a basement. A basement with TV, bathroom, bedroom; everything he needed in the basement and only a small hallway to lead to the basement stairs. And a nice outside grilling location.

I built, I moved him in and checked a few things. Noticed the grill had no interaction except Nraas. Confused, I thought it was the grill and changed it to a different one. Same problem. I wondered if it was because I hadn't put a preparation counter next to it; same problem, despite a counter now, too. THEN my brain suddenly told me, "Uh, you forgot to add a FRIDGE". Oops... I added a fridge and, bam, grill could be used to cook food.

My defence, I barely ever use grills on private property, so...

The one I can think of at the moment is something I think I posted in another thread, but leaving a bored Daredevil Pyromaniac unattended while I was keeping an eye on my klepto so she wouldn't steal all the lights from the park again was not a good idea. Not having a smoke detector on the lot was even worse. At least as a Daredevil he was immune to burning himself up.
And speaking of burning up, taking pictures for a contest with 8 vampires all standing outside posing all day in broad daylight was another bad idea.... (I thought that making motives static would protect them.)

That reminds me of the town I had where most of the people were vampires. I mentioned this in another topic, but I remember trying to play guitar for tips outside the theater during the day and of course with half the town being vampires they all just starting dropping one by one. None of them died, but it was both funny and annoying at the same time. My poor sim trying to earn tips seemed to have to stop for every vampire that collapsed, and hardly earned any tips. Though I guess the game itself game me a tip, never play guitar in public during the day for a group of vampires.

One time I made seven clones of Nic Cage but made them have different personalities and occult states. Also, one was a dog.

They all formed a gang and started beating up nerds and shoving them into lockers, because I had Story Progression installed with the personality modules and I guess the mod thought they were a gang of thugs?

I also made myself a custom naming mod where I threw in some "names" as a joke, like Missingno, Optimus Prime, Death, and so on. The vast majority of the names in that mod were normal, but guess what started becoming the hot new baby name trend in my town.

I left my sims unattended. Bad things happen when sims are left unattended on free will.

Son-in-law starts flirting with mother-in-law in front of spouse.
Toddler shat itself, is starving and has cried itself to sleep on the floor (yes, toddlers can sleep on the floor!).
A mass of green fumes tells me that every counter and table slot in the kitchen has been occupied by dirty plates and bowls.
There are plates of autumn salad and bowls of Horrifying mac & cheese on the floor.
The garden plants are dying.
The bills are in front of the mailbox, a menacing yellow hue.
Every plumbing item in the house is leaking due to the witch practicing her Ice Blast.
The teen sim hasn't gone to school and is now grounded, so her performance keeps dropping.
The mother is playing the guitar and hasn't noticed the carpool. Her work performance is halfway into the red.

I left my sims unattended once, totally by accident. Household of four, all YAs, moving to a new house across town. Looked like the move-in animations were going to take a while, so fully convinced that the game would pause itself when finished I went off to make coffee or something.

It did not pause itself. I came running back in when I heard screams and strange noises maybe ten minutes later. They had moved in all right. One of them was stuck in between a bookcase and a wall, waving their arms and screaming. Never did figure out how they got there. One was huddled in a corner in a puddle of their own making, miserable and starving to death. The other two were trying to make a baby, which could have been very nice if they hadn't each supposedly been life partners of the first two geniuses. So that was just a lesson/reminder in how much my sims need me to guide them properly.

But somehow I suspect that @sweetdevil 's game ran for a bit longer than ten sim minutes without her supervision to get into the state described above. At least, I hope it did. :D

@igazor: oh yes, I left the game to make something to eat and came back to...well, that.
And it's truly mind boggling how Sims can get into certain spots but can't find the way back. Which got me thinking about why EA didn't make Sims able to walk over all the small fences, just the brick ones. If you want to trap a sim you can just build an ankle-high fence around them. Guess fences are TS3's answer to TS2's pool ladders

Throw in another stupid thing into the mix: playing guitar after waking a mummy. It bobbed its head to the music (after all, my sim was an excellent guitarist), then shimmied around the room after sim had stopped playing. Force-deleted the mummy, the opportunity was borked for ever...and I had saved after the sim started playing guitar

Whow. I knew Sims were kinda stupid. But THAT stupid? Good thing I never play with free will on...

I always play with free will on, but I actually don't let it kick in most of the time. Sure there are times where I sit back and just watch, but then they start doing stupid things and I have to step in and get things under control.

Example of a stupid scenario I've come across:
Husband - What my baby is hungry? Nah, it's guitar time!
Wife - Honey the baby is crying... oh you're playing the guitar I have to watch!

And hey guess who doesn't have a guitar anymore!

It took forever to find a mermaid after I spent a long time getting up my sim's scuba diving skill, which I finally did and therefore turned my sim to a mermaid after getting the mermaidic kelp, so long story short, I ended up sending her to college, have her slam the snack machines(I had no idea about the possibility of death) Had her die, and realized I hadn't saved since I moved my sim in :3 I almost cried...

Going too long without saving is one of the dumbest things anyone can do in my opinion, and yeah I've done that way too many times so don't feel bad. I'll just get in a mood where I don't wanna stop playing for any reason, then forget to save only to have something happen that I'd regret and I'd wanna reload. Of course when your previous save was quite a long time ago it's no fun having to repeat things again.

I have a game that's 4 of the different supernatural types forming a band and moving to Bridgeport from their respective hometowns. The alien, the witch, and the werewolf all got nice, sensible lifetime wishes as they were growing up. For the fairy, I decided to give Greener Gardens (gardening 10 + use bloom successfully 100 times) a try- I hate using bloom because there's always the possibility of lowering your plants quality but she's from Riverview, I can just go to the public garden.

I get her to about 85 on her count before she turns in to a YA...

...and forget that moving to a new city will reset that count.

I plant a "what's this?" garden and use Bloom on my unidentified seeds. It makes it faster to find out what the heck they were, and I'm generally not really worried about plant quality from anything below a Special seed if I'm not just starting out. I was just growing it to see what I had found, and I've probably already got something just as good or better if I'm growing a real garden. (And once I've got Perfect copies of all the Special seeds, even they can be zapped with impunity. Keep zapping the same plant over and over until your fairy runs out of magic or the plant goes barren, then sell the produce and dispose of the plant. Then lock the fairy out of the real garden unless she is supervised, or she will bloom everything in there, too.

(And speaking of fairies, I'm beginning to wonder if it was a bad idea to hit Dori Hart with a potion to turn her into one. I thought she had a good personality to be a fairy, but Story Progression has her enjoying it a bit too much....)

Learned it the hard way when my fairy was only going to the university...

That reminds me: Sending a sim on vacation while he was working on the Possession is Nine Tenths LTW....

At least with Edit Town I could send him to the Art Museum and then replace what he stole with even more expensive things. (Until EA "fixed" it and made you need to be invited onto the community lot before you could pilfer from it.)

On the Sims 2 Castaway for the Wii (you'll never understand! ) I spent hours trying to get my sim to be friends with a chimp, but the chimp kept running away and my sim kept running away as well, even though they are friends. So I decided to waste one of my bananas on befriending Bob (the chimp) as chimps can get your sims resources they cannot harvest themselves if you are friends with them. He still refused to interact with my sim. Annoyed, I decided to have my sim go to sleep. Then did I realise that the shelter was on fire.

@TheKleptomaniac No idea why, but that reminds me of something I had happen once. My ghost sim was preparing ambrosia so I could turn her back to normal, and things were working out just fine. Her daughter (who was also a ghost) just happened to be in the kitchen doing her school work at the table, and almost as soon as the ambrosia was finished and set down on the counter the daughter walked up and grabbed it. Well at least one ghost was cured, but then I was stuck gathering the stuff to make some more ambrosia after that. I guess you could classify that as something stupid for not having the mother take it, though I really didn't expect the daughter to just rush in and snag it so quickly.

The very first sim I played, I didn't know that Sims also, like, die. So I was devastated when Grim came to collect her and the game had the audacity to ask me to -gasp- select another family or create another sim.

Especially because she was a self-sim.

She spent her whole life reading, painting and playing computer games. No regrets.

The next Sim I stuffed with Ambrosia once every two days because I lost track of the days and was afraid she'd die too.

I had no idea sims could die either the first time I played and I had hit the button on my computer that turns Fraps on, I kid you not, you could hear the shock in my voice when a visiting sim for some reason wouldn't eat and then the grim reaper showed up. I used to have the video I captured on Youtube but I think it got taken down for copyright reasons. I must not have patched the game at that point because now whenever visiting Sims get too hungry they just warp off of the lot, so I guess that was patched away at some point.

Yeah I know I should have read the instructions, but after watching a couple LGR videos and figuring the game should be simple compared to Sim City 2000 I figured I could just wing it, I was surprised by a lot things on that first play through

Not sure if this counts, but I left to go make mashed potatoes. That was my mistake.
How does this relate to the Sims, you may ask?
I didn't pause the game. I got back and my sims were having hardcore sex (I have the mod where its animated, too, yikes) and the social worker came and took my baby. I got him back using cheats, but it was really crazy. I am usually not this careless with my game, but I was hungry and thought I paused it.
Shame on me.

...did the Social Worker catch them in the act, too? And gave that as another reason why the baby was taken away?

A stupid thing to do in game is to use Consort's landslide project mod to wrongly scale sims' heads by putting the wrong values. The mod works fine, it's the user (me) that's wrong. The result was both amusing and creepy and it's not something I'd like to repeat.

Now this is twice in two months I've gotten to use this quote.

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
--Douglas Adams

Your sims are posing for Easter Island Statues!

(Ok, I don't want to do it to -everybody- but can that be done to just one sim? )