When I started playing Sims again, I looked up on the 'net how to do various stuff that I'd either forgotten or never knew. A bunch of people all said "Oh, the EA story progression sucks! You gotta get Nraas!" So, okay, I did. But it's starting to seem like same ole same ole. I'm wondering what, if anything, would happen if I disabled Nraas and started using EA?

Hi there - NRaas Story Progression is a huge mod with many different levels for play options. It is nothing like EA's orby any means the same ole/same ole.
Have you had the opportunity to see the Available Interactions and FAQ as well as the modules available for even more options?

You might want to consider posting what you are trying to accomplish using NRaas SP. Or better yet, post over at NRaas Chatterbox where the mod lives. We'd be happy to help you get started using SP. Free membersihip is required to post NRass

Playing with vanilla EA story progression all of the below could happen:
- the households that you created with care and detailed backstory, suddenly disappears from the neighborhood without a trace while you play with another family. The moment when you realize that EA SP made them move out of the town and you would never ever see them again...
- non-active solo sims get randomly married to sims that they never liked before, other non-active solo sims get random babies as adoption; after you think that it might be a rare mistunderstanding, the next day the solo sim gets a second adopted random baby. Even if they have the Dislike Children trait.
- the precious gem, the rare trophy or other kind of valuable object that you collected into your sim's inventory, all disappears without a trace when you switch to play with another family.
When I started to play the base game in 2009 and these phenomena unleashed, I wanted to quit playing TS3 entirely - only the mods (at that time it was Awesomemod) prevented me from abandoning the game.

simply put: it's not a "progression" neither a "story" - it's just RND on the run. Cheapest and simplest solution they have.
But the funny part is:
@Florflora2
"non-active solo sims get randomly married to sims that they never liked before, other non-active solo sims get random babies as adoption; after you think that it might be a rare mistunderstanding, the next day the solo sim gets a second adopted random baby. Even if they have the Dislike Children trait."

that it's quite realistic

I have always used EA but I play totally legacy style and not rotational. I control my family and do not really care about what is going on in nonplayed households. EA's is fine for me.

It depends on what the player wants.

EA's philosophy behind story progression seems to be that inactive residents around town, even the ones you have played or created yourself or have raised and moved out of your own household, are totally expendable and exist solely for the convenience and amusement of your actively being played sims. They will get all kinds of random stuff thrust upon them, and they will be removed from the game permanently (culled) whenever the game "thinks" (sometimes correctly, often not) that the population of the world is out of balance. New households will be brought in to help keep things fresh and interesting, again for the actively being played household. Whether any new sims generated this way really are "fresh" or "interesting" is a matter of opinion, but that's the idea anyway.

And that's only when it works correctly. What many players find is that after a generation or two, if it takes that long, EA's progression gets stuck and tends to empty their worlds out, doesn't let anyone else have babies or adopt, and stops moving new sims in, until finally you end up with Ghost Town Syndrome or something approaching that.

Some players can forgive the rest of the town existing solely for the benefit of the active household bit, if these players only want to concentrate on their actives and don't really care that everything else happening in town is not controllable and doesn't make any logical sense. And some players don't mind the malfunctions because they only want to play one generation or progress their own household just so far as a challenge, then abandon that game and start a new one or move their sims to a new (to them) world and begin again.

But many of us want more than that. We want to play, if not the entire town, at least subsets of it of varying sizes. And we prefer that things going on all around our own sims make some kind of logical sense. Or, by way of player controls, are totally chaotic and make no sense at all. Or things should only make sense on even or odd numbered days. But at least with the mods we have control over these things. This is where NRaas StoryProgression and, in a very different way for those who prefer it but with less customization available, AwesomeMod's StoryMode come in.

I rather like NRAAS Story progression better, once you spend the time and the hair to understand it and find your way around.

First, I turn off the annoying hyphenated names. Playing with that on is a nightmare. Say you start with Smith, Jones, and Adams as families. I was getting the "Smith-Jones", "Smith-Adams", "Adams-Smith" and "Jones-Smith" families confused. Then they get divorced and remarried. That's when I gave up on it.

The other thing to do is limit the stories to sims that you know - default is everyone. So you hear that Timmy Smith-Jones is now level 1 on athletic skill - a message that buries the "your house is on fire" message. Just friends, blood and maybe enemies - you know, like in real life. Only in real life your siblings don't even tell you when your favorite uncle dies. Sims are better people than us. There are no exploding Subway sims either. (Is there a mod for that?)

I sometimes turn off immigration, but that never works. It's hidden too. You'd be tempted to look under immigration. Nope! General->Lots->immigration is where it's at.

I like the caste system. I created a "Fairy TYAE" caste where they simply don't age once they hit teenager unless they do a birthday cake. You can stop ghosts from aging. A vampire caste that is only friends with vampires. A 1950s style "Homemaker" caste (I play a past world) where married women sims are forced to stay home from MOST jobs... etc.

my current favorite aspect of nraas story progression is the ability to stop my sims from advancing in their career (there are still some things that can advance career progression anyway but for that I just use mastercontroller to set it back to zero before the end of the work day). since I play with epic lifespans it's annoying to have my sims reaching the top of their career in like two weeks or whatever. plus one of my current sims is a doctor and it was fun to actually get a chance to play a few sim weeks with him working the night shift.

I'm also a fan of being able to give kids and teens summer vacation that's pretty cool.

I haven't really looked at the caste system yet but I now feel like I should because it sounds awesome!

I had to give up on Nraas Story Progression the first time around because it was badly affecting performance, which was no great shakes to start with. I tried disabling some features, but it didn't seem to make much difference. Now that I have switched to a computer that seems to handle the game far better (not only does it look better, there is none of the lagging and freezing I suffered with on the other machine) I might give it another try.

Up till recently I've mostly played with aging off, but now that I am playing some saves with it on I've begun to get concerned that, as mentioned above, EA Story Progression seems to have stopped working. The older generation in Sunset Valley are dying off, and the last time I checked no babies had been born. I mind the time when it seemed like my sims couldn't visit another household without finding floor babies scattered about the lot. Now its like breeding has gone out of style, and the way it's going Sunset Valley will be getting like a ghost town before my family reaches its second generation.

Yes, I shall definitely give Nraas SP another try. In fact I've just downloaded it and put it in the game.

When I was first playing, I started a legacy in Riverview. The first generation was fine and normal, but my founder took a bit of time to get established in her career before marrying and having 6 kids. I had a hard time finding spouses for them since the only kids in school were babysitters and paper deliverers and there were no new kids. My heir married the maid, I thought she was pretty enough, young enough to have children, and had decent traits. (I realize now she had zero slider face) They had a son and once he was old enough to go to school, we discovered that he was the only kid in school. My founder was now an elder and all the original townies were elders as well and all the original children were in the Adult life stage or moving away. It was depressing to live in a dying town.

At about this time, I started going on sims websites and getting into mods and custom content and I downloaded the NRAAS Story Progression mod. All of a sudden it was like I was watching a geriatric soap opera! Ruby Broke started dating people. People got married and broke up. They switched careers and began new hobbies. Unfortunately, I stopped playing with that file, it was too little too late. Now my heart breakers have to fight for their sweethearts and when they break up a couple, it feels like it has weight.

I didn't play many legacies before Story Progression, which, yeah, okay shouldn't be that shocking. I knew the game was best with NRAAS mods, especially the more common ones like Overwatch and Errortrap. My first family went a little something like this:

-I moved the eldest child out of the family home into a second house with the other children. She married and had her own child when I moved to the second eldest child's new home. He married, and had a child. I check the family tree to see the parents had triplets (not that surprising in that game).
-I move back, and one of the children has been taken away by the social worker.

Not the biggest or worst one but still made me sad. I later gave up on that save file even though I want to recreate the family again, for nostalgia's sake.

I play both ways. With Nraas SP for some saves and EA's SP with others. I see no progression at all with EA's SP. So I think it's broken in my game. Although the premade families do get jobs, they don't marry, they don't have children, or adopt children or any of that. EA SP will add new families to the game that make no sense at all, or are just absurd looking, and they will age, but other then that it's pretty stagnate. That's why I prefer it, because I play legacy style, so I just play with the families of the family I started out with initially and progress through save games with them, until I start a new one. Oh EA SP will add cars and things to any families you're not playing, but I don't mind that.

Like any scripted component (that works as intended), SP will react almost violently to a town whose demographics are far out of balance and whose future is deemed to be in jeopardy. There will be pregnancies and babies everywhere, if you allow immigration new families will keep arriving, emigration (culling) is off by default, etc. Sometimes SP gets carried away, it was doing that for me in Bridgeport where the locals weren't having kids on their own because...oh, I don't know, maybe very few of them really liked each other and who has time for kids in the Big City? Anyway, I did have to adjust some of the more advanced mod settings and rethink the SP population cap to get it to calm down, even found myself telling the screen (since there was no one else around to hear) that "Okay you can stop now, the next generation is very much guaranteed to survive already!" after the first twenty births and age-ups to toddlers. I was even getting SP warnings that the mod couldn't find anyone else suitable to impregnate. Now I have to build more schools as if there were a post-war suburban baby boom having taken place, sheesh. Of course these newly expanded families were not for the most part stable home environments, although the newly arriving ones were more so, because at the risk of sounding judgmental basically Bridgeport as it starts out is full of losers. But not every world reacts exactly the same way to such forced scenarios of domesticity and breeding. Watching and guiding entire towns like this is all part of the fun for many of us, others of course just want schoolmates for their kids and suitable dating fodder for when they are older no matter how they come to arrive in town.



I might have played around with that one a bit and had some fun. It may have been "too late" for the geriatric population's progression and antics to have much impact on future generations but I would have been tempted to banish most of them to one quadrant of town and let SP Immigration repopulate the rest of it with younger blood, so to speak. Admittedly that idea probably wouldn't come right away to someone just using the mod for the first time. Of course there's always foreign worlds and the Pre-Wed major at Uni (just making this up, I mean some players send their sims to Uni to find mates, the academic activities are merely distractions) but those methods only tend to work one sim at a time.

Maybe not, I'd taken matters into my own hands by that point, inviting randoms to live with my family, editing them in CAS to look different, pairing them off and moving them out. All of them had really undesirable traits that left me questioning how well the game took care of them. One of the heir's sisters married an elderly man, maybe they would've gotten around to making cousins if I'd stuck with it. I just grew to hate the town and the file, so it was time to do something different.

Have a genie on hand, run around ensorceling sims and making babies yourself. Or ensorcel the first two sims you find and marrying them off. Dragging up the relationship bar shouldn't be to hard with strangers to get babies. But with already married families it's really easy to get them breeding agian.... ...

I have Nraas to keep my family from disappearing, I can over populate my town on my own. XD

There is a 100 baby challege, create a 100 babies by ensorceling sims. XD

I play with NRaas for story progression as the EA bugfest would often break my saves or just cause them to get corrupted by sending social workers to take children away.I had sims get matched up and the tentirw town turn into a transient migrant camp with the soap opera from the afternoon TV quite a few times with EA's bugfest which would eventually kill the town off until it died if I kept playing it.
I can play my towns for generations with NRaas set to function like the TS2 style of story progression and I play rotationally like Sims 2 with my towns which means they're all growing slowly into a thriving town over time even if they look like deserted ghost towns in the start as I only have one family in the start of a new legacy and don't add sims very quickly.Everybody will move into town and signles will start with makeing close friends and eventually start to date a friend and get married to one of the friends.Others will start rting for babies and get pregnant and babies get born though I have to play story progression to make this happen.It's because of how my story progression is tuned and configured that I have to play with story progression manually.

Wut? Talk more about this...

You want to know what a summer vacation is generally or how to implement them in the game?

For the first one, it's an archaic, artificial construct through which most students and teachers, with exceptions for those who need or teach catch-up classes, don't go to school for 8-12 weeks at a time. Historically this is so the kids can work on the family farms in the summer and so that (some) schools do not need air conditioning. What it's come to be instead is that many kids get sent to summer camp, or roam the streets getting into trouble and watch massive amounts of television or surf the web thereby getting into more trouble in their copious amounts of spare time.

In the game, it's an SP Career module thing.

But the schools still have not installed air conditioning... Unless you count the window that gets opened until some joker starts throwing pencils out of it.

One of the things I appreciate about Nraas SP is that my sims co-workers get promotions. With EA's version (at least in my game) they all stay where they are, right at the lowest level except the boss and pretty soon your sim will outrank him/her too - which is absurd.

I haven't tried it in my doomed Sunset Valley yet, but last night I played for an hour in Finnington, in which I am playing Stormcat3's "We Built This City" challenge. This city is slowly being developed as my founder family increases its wealth and influence. Its been rather disappointing up till now, families have been moving into the variety of houses I've placed but at least two have subsequently disappeared again. And my sim's co-workers kept leaving to become singers, acrobats or magicians - even though there are no Showtime venues in town yet!

That was with EA Story Progression, but the Nraas mod has made all the difference. The place seems to have come to life: stuff is happening, things are going on, existing sims are dating - two have already got hitched. Of course they were just game generated puddings, but I dropped in a couple of my own sims (breeding stock, you might say) and within no time they were both out checking the local talent. I can't wait to get back to it!

The schools here certainly all have AC. (I live in the US South. Everything is air conditioned.)

Back when I had an unmodded game, I played with SP off, which was broken, so...
- I'd placed a new family, played them for a bit to start them on their jobs, adopted a kid, made friends in town and then switched over to a different household. Almost immediately, they receive a call along the lines of 'lolbye' and the first family is GONE. All the curses.
- a married couple in town had a kid. Dad disappeared one day. Two days later, he was back, or so I thought... but it was a clone with no relations, other than the baby he had spawned.
- another married couple had just moved out from the main household. What do you know, the wife disappeared. I pulled her from the bin and got them married again. Next morning, she is gone again.
And countless other woes. Yeah, none of this would matter if I just let the townies be and never moved anyone out of the main household, but I want to see my kids thrive.
Also, NRaas SP has made me invested in what goes on around town. I rarely interfere, but it's just so funny when all of the drama starts happening.

@kin.gyo1413 -Your story is almost as bad as mine from my Mod-free days and I even had saves glitch out with pregnant teens or become corrupted with social workers taking children away.The EA bugfest used to sometimes glitch out and make teens pregnant after forgetting to age them up first which made glitchy sims in those games.This was before I even knew to add Mods to my game and was one of the reasons why I loaded up on Mods.I got NRaas Mods to stop the overload of too many pregnancies even in the right ages and the odd ones with teens which I never even wanted.I do use young adults as fake teens for teen pregnancies as they're able to get pregnant in umodded games and I can still pretend they are teens.

One of the things I want to do is to stop NPC sims from phoning my sims and asking them out on a date if the NPC already has a partner. They get my sims' hopes (and mine) up, and then reveal they have a partner already. Is there a way to stop that?

The other thing is, the reason I said it seems like same-ole-same-ole is because SP keeps generating the same stories over and over and over and over. I want the peeps to start doing new and different things!