Ok, so I noticed some personality types/back stories that come up in pretty much every town in sims 3. Some are:

- Single casanova who lives alone (Hal Breckenridge and Don Lothario from Riverview, Gladsten Farmwell from Moonlight Falls, Darren Lott from Starlight shores)
- Unhappy marriage/doomed to fail relationship [usually one spouse has commitment issues] (the Wolffs of Sunset Valley, Carpenter Rhodes couple of Riverview, Hemlocks of Bridgeport, Parrots of Appaloosa Plains, Wan/Goddard from Sunset Valley, Bedlingtons of Appaloosa plains)
- Single loner guy lives alone: (Pesce of Barnacle Bay, Caspian of Riverview)

And some others I've forgotten, but I think there's the "4 friends who live together" thing too. I'm asking because I'm populating a world and am running out of ideas for personalities/back stories and such.

Make a super mean spirited family. At the very least it'll make for some funny moments when they get into fights on community lots.

There's always at least one single woman pregnant with the child of either a married family father or some single guy who doesn't care or even know.

A family whose main hobby seems to be to reproduce

A single father with either a teenage daughter or a toddler

A single (adult) woman who is often in the Music career or a supposed painter

A single elder (mostly male) who is either insane or an angler or both and lives far off from the city centre

A freshly married couple that has recently moved in. Most often they do not really match. He wants children, she wants success or vice versa.

An annoying family that has nothing better to do than being in your own Sims' way. Wherever you send your own, at least one of them will already be there, using exactly the object that you wanted to use yourself.

A single male who doesn't seem to have any female friends

One woman who is flirty and childish

Two opposing families, quite often with a Romeo & Juliet story running along

But the oddest thing is that there is always one male Sim among the homeless that appears in every single resident's relationship panel, usually with a high score, too

Family/sim with a single gimmick. That describes all EA families. I was recently clearing out Moonlight Falls and looked at the family bios. "Can the Macduff family survive ANOTHER child?" (Well, I should hope so. They only have seven sims and I have an overstuffed mod) "Can the Van Gould family/Wolff family regain their position of prominence in the town?" "Will Gladsten Farmwell get run out of town by his many adoring girlfriends?" They make a sim and give us a story prompt based on a single question. It's like archetypes, if they were stripped down to their skeletons and then had the marrow sucked out and stacked in a pattern resembling archetypes and then cloned for every expansion pack.

It looks like there's a pretty comprehensive list, already. It's not like they use that many different patterns. But they're really not sustainable for total-neighborhood play. Are you looking for a bunch of NPC background characters, or do you want an entire neighborhood to play?

If you don't just want to copy EA, think about the archetypes and think about a twist. For instance, EA is fond of having feuding families. What if the families were actually very friendly with each other and only felt obligated to keep up with the feud in public because of cranky family members or the fact that the rest of the town has divided into Team Family A and Team Family B, complete with slapping Team stickers on random cars? If the latter, why would they want to focus so much on the feud? Maybe the rest of the town is very boring and leaves everyone wanting entertainment...or is it? Perhaps they want to hide their own misdeeds and are trying really really hard not to think about it, so they choose to force a feud to shadow everything else.
There's the ever-present Casanova. There's an obvious twist built in: he's really in love with one girl, who's the only one who doesn't notice him. I'm not sure that counts as a twist anymore. Maybe he's just a whiny jerk who wants to be one and might actually be attractive, but he reads PUA material, which makes him completely unsuccessful. So he pretends that he's successful and lies about it quite a bit, but his self-esteem erodes constantly from repeated failures with pressure building to succeed as his lies build up, and he's paranoid that someone will catch him in a lie.
And the obviously-Doomed-To-Failure family? What if the couple is actually a perfect match, but one half is terrified that every little difference means that it's doomed because s/he's addicted to romance novels where everything turns out perfectly?
There are probably going to be rich sims. Mostly, they're evil and/or snobby, or eccentric. What about a family who's spoiled sweet? They expect the world to fall into their hands, but they actually kind of deserve it, since they're generally nice people. Unless, of course, they come across someone who's emphatically not nice, in which case they can and will do anything to make those people get their comeuppance.
And how about a social butterfly who just doesn't understand that some people want to be left alone, and starts stalking all the loners in town to bring them out into the world of parties...wait, that's Pinkie Pie.

You might need to start with archetypes, but the further you can get from cookie-cutter backgrounds, the more interesting your neighborhood will be. Just look at the Scumthorpes. And now, I have yet another world buzzing in my head. I really need to stop thinking sometimes.

Hmm, I see what you mean, about the gimmicks. I'm too lazy to use my mods to make a cohesive town with relationships, I just downloaded an empty town and started plopping sims down, but I like to make little back stories and ran out of ideas. I was playing Moonlight falls and noticed "wait....haven't I seen these personalities before?" then went into sunset valley and I found almost all of the corresponding sims.... Only one I think Sunset Valley doesn't have is "cop in love with a thief" but I may be wrong.

In that respect Twinbrook is probably the most interesting EA town: there's a cougar with her boytoy, the Miss Marple type with a tombstone in the attic, the mad inventor who lives in a burnt-down-farm while the grave of a woman with the same last name is in a junkyard that is supposed to be his, a trashy Paris Hilton and the slightly crazy elderly lady with her equally weird "adopted" daughter and so on.

I have various storylines I like to use with my own sims but normally I find a way to incorporate the townies. I have a variety of families I use over and over and sometimes I make brand new ones, depending on what I have planned for the new town. One I haven't reused yet was poor Bertram Bedlington kept getting knocked up by aliens and I allowed him to keep one. My town got borked so I took him and his now teenage alien daughter and put them in the bin for a maybe my next town. I have sims with a variety of personalities, but I always just play as one family and don't switch around. I might seduce townies away from their partners but I just like to stick to one household. Sometimes I start off as a poor single sim, other times a couple, or 2 siblings or a single parent combo. I never start off as a whole premade family, I generally like to start off with nothing and build up and see where things take me while keeping the general idea of what I had planned. Sometimes I play as mean and horrible sims, othertimes, super sweet and friendly and other times super flirty and homewrecking. Depends on my mood at the time I start a new town I guess, lol.

You could have a Sim from an occult and a normal Sim have a child together in a 'conservative' town and everyone could dislike them..
Or maybe a manwhore with 20 different women on the go but he could secretly be in love with another guy

Agreed. Don't forget the family stuck in the 50's, the divorced couple who hate each other but still live in the same house with their young pregnant daughter, the sleazy people who live in what looks like a car lot plus the strange roommate combinations and the numerous dead and missing people spread around.

Go for weird, creepy and dark. EA usually tries to push the overly nice, cheerful suburbinites. Most of the time it's usually dull so I say go for the opposite. Have a family of vampires that are like a parody of the Cullens but more sinister: They plan to turn the entire town. Have a couple of methhead-lookalikes who run some underground illegal nectary, a single father who is successful in his career but is too far self-absorbed to see how awful his children are, a sim who seems quite jolly and cheerful on the outside but when you see their basement you find all these graves, someone who lost their entire family and has gone mad with grief trying to resurrect them, an old woman who adopted a bunch of kids only so she can have them cook and clean and be slaves, basically.

Everybody likes a bit of mystery, so go for that. Maybe have it so that the player slowly pieces together clues from biographies and the character relations to find the answers.

Edit: Oh! Oh! Have a bunch of kids who are trying to fight an evil Imaginary Friend named Pennywise. That thing has Stephen King written all over it.

An interesting thread. Here are my types of families and sims I like to play:
- a rich, aristocratic, conservative family that look down at the others and are super-proud of their noble roots, usually with one young family member who "spoils" the family reputation by being gay/having extraordinary looks/choosing a profession the family doesn't respect; etc;
- an orphan or orphan siblings that live with their relative(s) who care(s) too little about them and is/are usually either mean, or insane, or both, so the kids are left to themselves and neglected (usually this is a poor family);
- a young woman who is supposed to be immigrant from Al-Simhara, and has run away from there because she was heavily mistreated by her husband, father and/or brothers, so she wants to start a new life, to get education, have a career, and to build a healthy, equal relationship with a nice guy/ I usually move her into a shabby house or a trailer, and make her struggle to reach her goals;
- a stylist or a designer with a crazy taste (and usually with extraordinary lifestyle);
- a family of farmers, with 3 generations living in one house, and with a huge garden and a couple of horses;
- two siblings, a happy one, and an unlucky one;
- a sophisticated and cruel vampire lady, who likes to pick up the cutest guys in town, make them her slaves, drink their blood, and use their bodies for her pleasure;
- a couple where each spouse has several marriages behind them, and several kids from these marriages, but they also have their own kids (1 or 2); some kids live with thier former spouses but come to visit often, so, there's some chaos and mis;
- a very poor, young, but devoted single mother who is cleptomanic and works in criminal career, but aspires to have another, normal career (like, sha steals because sha can't provide for her and her kid's living n any other way at the moment, but she hates it, and wants to be a decent person; however, when she starts the career of her dream, her cleptomanic habit doesn't go away, and she keeps stealing stuff from time to time, untill I remove that trait);
- a sim who has some kind of obssession, which shows in their looks and home interior (like, when I had WA installed, I made a girl with very generic European appearence, but in love with Chinese culture, so, she traveled to China several times, learned sim-fu and meditation, then dyed her hair black and started wearing Chinese dresses, hairstyle and make-up, and redecorated her flat with oriental design);
- a sim who loves pets too much, so their house is full of many different pets, and this is supposedly a reason why this sim is still single (there can be some short romances though, but nothing serious) - nobody wants to move in with someone who is willing to turn their home into a mini-zoo;
- a couple who likes to make parties, and also has very much freedom in their relationships (this requires the no-jealousy reward, as they known about each other's side affairs, but still love each other);
- a celebrity (usually a singer) who comes from a down-to-earth family;
- a sim who lives in a neglected house which was obviously rich and nice before; it's like this sim started to drink, lost their job, sold many things from the house, and is now very miserable; jobless, and often visits bars; this sim usually then meets a good friend or lover, who helps the poor thing to get back on track again;
- a middle-aged, soon-to-be-elder couple with their beloved adopted child(ren)

and then there is the rarest of EA pre-mades. How rare you ask? Rarer than the rainbow butterfly. Rarer than the Sixam bird. It is..... a single man without the: slob, neurotic, insane, commitment phobe, evil, dislikes children, hotheaded, absent minded or mean spirited traits. In other words, a guy your sim would want to marry, not one you'll stick her with because he's the best available in a townful of losers.

Shit, just let Bao Louie in Shang Simla knock her up.... he's an easy lay.

What I am finding pretty useful in a town full of family oriented Sims is to have one of your relatives move in and use them as a nanny/babysitter/maid/slave what have you. It is essential if you have lots of little kids or babies around to keep them from wailing. I don't want to use too many mods and cheats so I usually cull some useless relative from another family and make him or her move in and do the work along side Mum and Dad.

I normally just play one family, following them down the generations, so I have many cousins or nieces or someone just sitting around aging. In my recent family, they just moved in one of the nieces of the father and she's already going nuts with the twins to mind, the house to clean, and the kid to help with homework.

Yeah, it's fun.

This is a great thread. I'm making characters for my world now, and picking up some of your suggestions. What about husband with wife, and 5 kids in all ages and only 1 teen, ends up losing his wife from selfcombustion and then what does he do?

I'd personally suggest including a few premades that start out in gay or lesbian relationships when populating a custom world, because if Aurora Skies is any indication EA are too cowardly and afraid of complaints from homophobic groups to do it themselves.

Also, this is more about town planning than individual households, but whenever I'm controlling a virtual community I'll usually attempt to give the impression of variable income levels by deliberately building the poor, run-down part of town. Usually, this involves placing a whole bunch of ex-industrial-looking buildings and scrapyards, building a lot of small houses very close together, using a dull, desaturated, grimy colour scheme for everything and populating the area with blue-collar workers in inexpensive-looking clothes, university students renting cheap houses, the town drunk and the occasional hobo. Sometimes I'll put all the local vampires there too, with the premise being that they sleep in the basement of an abandoned house in such an area because it's a good place to hide several coffins without anyone noticing.

Some of the sims that wind up in my neighborhoods are:

1. The grandparents stuck with a handful of (usually obnoxious) kids when their daughter decided to dump them there.

2. The retired traveller whose home is stuffed with relics and keepsakes from his time as an adventurer.

3. The crazy cat lady.

4. The "boy and his dog"... young adult man, shy, loner, uncomfortable in social situations and the dog that is his only/best friend.

5. The barely turned young adult trying to raise a couple younger siblings.

6. The neighborhood "wise woman".... usually a witch with good and friendly traits who has a killer garden and a front yard that begs you to sit and relax in it.

7. A set of identical twins.... I don't know why this cracks me up seeing how two sims exactly the same progress in different ways, but it does (this is most effective with Twallan's SP so you know what they are up to)

8. The "head case".... insane, inappropriate, friendly, loves the outdoors..... this person will wander all over the neighborhood doing god knows what.

re: hugbug's awesome post
I wish sims allowed for more depth/range in character so some of those storylines would be attainable outside of imagination/family bio.

I am LOVING your guys's ideas! I've already made a female vampire with 3 romantic interests, and made her pregnant with one of them (I use Nraas Woohooer so I made her risky woohoo with each of them in one day, no baby chimes but she's pregnant! I can't wait to see who's the dad! [I could easily do this with Master Controller, but that would ruin the fun])

The sim that ALWAYS winds up in my world.
The "town witch". She's usually a teen with the following traits: Green Thumb, Loves the Outdoors, Eco-Friendly, Perceptive. She's always female and usually a witch. Sometimes I make her parents ultra-conservative with the following traits: Supernatural Skeptic, Hates the Outdoors, Coward, Good, Hopeless Romantic. Usually Mom or Dad will be caught trying to beat her up on a community lot-and she'll win the fight.

I only can tell you about single sims , I am not a family oriented simmer , I have 3 or 4 families with toddlers only .
The best is to create families, if you love to play with, which are completely contradictoty. For example ,parents who have the trait "children hater" , that don't
raise their children (it smells coming social workers) , don't overabuse of these kind of family.
Families who never follow their lifetime rewards .

In my game I always try to create interesting sims , some are totally negative, some are totally positive, and the other one are balanced.I only focus on the personality of the sims .

Well I've noticed in EA towns there's always:

That one household that's described as being genetically royalty, some kind of family feud or romeo and juliet set up, a single parent household, a jester or clown archetype (usually subversive) like the tragic clown, or the guy is really using humour to make you trust them so they can backstab you, the single sim usually female who is a cook, the family of two usually female kleptomaniacs. The one Sim in the neighbourhood who is most likely to be the Emperor of Evil and the Stepford Normal Family, there also almost always a household of 3 siblings all the same gender, The one guy who exists to bang everything, the token old person who dies on the first day on the lowest age setting, the family that probably could star in a very wholesome or creepily stepford sitcom, the classic Good and Evil room mates set up, The single Female looking for love, there's also the one recognisable cop Sim, The overstayed their vacation Family, The token about to pop when the game starts lady in either a reasonably sized family of 3 or a ridiculously large household. The token hippies, The token town celebrity, the token parody of a RL celebrity, the token expy of a fictional character or group of fictional characters and the Sim with the insane and inappropriate trait who inevitabley shows up at your door at 3:00AM dressed in a Raccoon suit to dig through your trash.

Well, I am populating a town and tend to make a little background for them as I create them in CAS.

Two YA males in a homosexual relationship: one is very serious; the other has the Childish trait - for some reason, I had both of them have the Hydrophobic trait. (in Alocasia, which is a very water-based world...)

The grandparents who raise their granddaughter, after their daughter came home with her and subsequently died.

Several couple-with-one-child families.

The Surfer dude. Along with the Lifeguard job (which doesn't work on non-household Sims) and the typical appearance of tanned skin and sunbleached hair.

A single male household with Loner, Computer Whiz and similar.

An Evil + Friendly criminal.

Athletic Policewoman.

I also make single households consisting of either a Vampire or Alien (if I have LN/Seasons installed)

The single mom with two or three kids.

Single dad raising a daughter who is pretty tomboyish.

Single YA living with elderly parent, who mostly paints.

A Femme Fatale woman who oozes sex appeal and wants to become rich. (I literally called her Eve Fatale)

The reclusive writer. Hates the Outdoors, Bookworm, Loner, etc, to make her super happy to remain in her home and just write.

The Left-Alone Kids: at least three kids of different ages - teen, child and toddler - who were abandoned by dad, who ran away in grief after their mother suddenly died. The oldest tries their best to earn money for the family, as well as raise their siblings.

Cinderella: father who remarries a Snob/Evil woman, with his biological daughter being often bullied by his stepdaughter, who may be Evil or Mean-Spirited.

The Ironic Life: an adult Sim who, despite disliking children, has several of them to take care of.

Business Lady: a female Sim in either a high Business or Political job, complete with glasses, strict, business-dress clothes and proper bun.