How I Play/Blog
I've been playing this hood for a couple of years before I started blogging it, and now that I've been blogging a few months, too, I've got a better idea of how things are going to work here.
During my pre-blogging time, I adopted a number of things from other Sims blogs I read - giving sims actual ages, for example, and the idea of rounds in which each household are played in sequence, and rolling random events each round. And the idea of having sims who were playable from a game point of view, but non-playable from the player's point of view - with a role much the same as townies and only played as a household occasionally. All these things became a part of my play style, although in some cases I adapted them to suit my own game.
For example, the idea of playable and non-playable sims is kind of fluid in my hood. When I started playing rounds I realised that I actually have too many playable households to fit in a single round without taking forever... but I didn't want to make so many non playable as I would need to, to make the round workable. So I eventually came up with a solution of only playing about 2/3 of my playable households each round. There are some favourite households that will be played every round, and some who are definitely non-playable - usually, they're the ones living in a separate sub-hood, who I think of as having 'moved away'. There's a lot less of them now, btw, as I didn't recreate most of them in he remade hood, although there are a few still there, where I wanted to preserve family trees or whatever.
As for the rest of my households, whether or not they get played in a particular round or not depends on a few things - their storyline, how long since they've last been played, any major events coming up (like age-ups), ROS rolls, and just how I feel at the time :) . I've made it a kind of challenge to myself to include all of my households in the round somehow, so if someone isn't being played in a particular round, I'll try to have someone call them over to visit, go on an outing, whatever. This will continue in the blog, so you'll see most of the town, most rounds.
Which brings me to the blogging style part of this. One thing I have discovered, is that I write a LOT slower than I play! I don't want to get too far ahead in playing, and I don't want to slow down my gameplay too much, and I don't want the blog to move at a snail's pace, either (I'm aiming for two updates a week). I enjoy blogging, but I enjoy playing more, and I think I've figured out a way to make the two work together in a way that I'm happy with.
I've found that many gameplay-orientated blogs have one entry for each household, each round, whereas storytelling ones are more fluid. I'm somewhere in between the two, I've found, and my blog will reflect that. I'm not going to make a blog entry for every household I play, because sometimes there's not much happening and, as I said, I'm a slow writer - I don't want to spend time trying to get a story out of an uneventful play session when I could be using the time to focus on the interesting stuff.
Also, I'm not going to restrict myself to one entry per household because some stories take more - a storyline that takes place over months, for example, like one I did with Kyle in the beginning of the blog. I'd need to play/write about those households more than once in a two sim-year round. The concept of 'mini-update' seems to be completely lost on me... lol... everything turns out long :) Sometimes those major storylines might merge in with someone else's update, or with each other, but it won't be like 'so-and-so household update'. Instead, I'll be marking time by months, trying to have one or two updates for each sim-month. And, like the households that aren't played in each round, once you meet a sim or family in the blog, in future I'll try to have them appear somewhere each round, even if they don't get their own entry. If I do this well, you might not even realise who I skipped over :)
I guess the bottom line of all this is that, although I see myself as more gameplay-orientated, the blog will actually look more like a storytelling blog. And, of course, all this is subject to change, too - I'm really just starting here :) . Anyway, this is how it stands at the beginning of round 2025-26... time to see how it works out!
During my pre-blogging time, I adopted a number of things from other Sims blogs I read - giving sims actual ages, for example, and the idea of rounds in which each household are played in sequence, and rolling random events each round. And the idea of having sims who were playable from a game point of view, but non-playable from the player's point of view - with a role much the same as townies and only played as a household occasionally. All these things became a part of my play style, although in some cases I adapted them to suit my own game.
For example, the idea of playable and non-playable sims is kind of fluid in my hood. When I started playing rounds I realised that I actually have too many playable households to fit in a single round without taking forever... but I didn't want to make so many non playable as I would need to, to make the round workable. So I eventually came up with a solution of only playing about 2/3 of my playable households each round. There are some favourite households that will be played every round, and some who are definitely non-playable - usually, they're the ones living in a separate sub-hood, who I think of as having 'moved away'. There's a lot less of them now, btw, as I didn't recreate most of them in he remade hood, although there are a few still there, where I wanted to preserve family trees or whatever.
As for the rest of my households, whether or not they get played in a particular round or not depends on a few things - their storyline, how long since they've last been played, any major events coming up (like age-ups), ROS rolls, and just how I feel at the time :) . I've made it a kind of challenge to myself to include all of my households in the round somehow, so if someone isn't being played in a particular round, I'll try to have someone call them over to visit, go on an outing, whatever. This will continue in the blog, so you'll see most of the town, most rounds.
Which brings me to the blogging style part of this. One thing I have discovered, is that I write a LOT slower than I play! I don't want to get too far ahead in playing, and I don't want to slow down my gameplay too much, and I don't want the blog to move at a snail's pace, either (I'm aiming for two updates a week). I enjoy blogging, but I enjoy playing more, and I think I've figured out a way to make the two work together in a way that I'm happy with.
I've found that many gameplay-orientated blogs have one entry for each household, each round, whereas storytelling ones are more fluid. I'm somewhere in between the two, I've found, and my blog will reflect that. I'm not going to make a blog entry for every household I play, because sometimes there's not much happening and, as I said, I'm a slow writer - I don't want to spend time trying to get a story out of an uneventful play session when I could be using the time to focus on the interesting stuff.
Also, I'm not going to restrict myself to one entry per household because some stories take more - a storyline that takes place over months, for example, like one I did with Kyle in the beginning of the blog. I'd need to play/write about those households more than once in a two sim-year round. The concept of 'mini-update' seems to be completely lost on me... lol... everything turns out long :) Sometimes those major storylines might merge in with someone else's update, or with each other, but it won't be like 'so-and-so household update'. Instead, I'll be marking time by months, trying to have one or two updates for each sim-month. And, like the households that aren't played in each round, once you meet a sim or family in the blog, in future I'll try to have them appear somewhere each round, even if they don't get their own entry. If I do this well, you might not even realise who I skipped over :)
I guess the bottom line of all this is that, although I see myself as more gameplay-orientated, the blog will actually look more like a storytelling blog. And, of course, all this is subject to change, too - I'm really just starting here :) . Anyway, this is how it stands at the beginning of round 2025-26... time to see how it works out!
