I tried to think of a polite way to phrase it.

Since Sims 2 only recognizes up to first cousins, how do you handle incest? Do you care? Have you ever put 2 sims get together and forget they share great-great-grandparents...on both sides?

Obviously there's no consequences, but just wondering if anyone has rules for "how close is too close" in their games beyond what the game recognizes as family.

I track my family lines and so far so good, but I've had a few moments where I've planned something and then think "Oh wait, oops!"

For many cultures in the world, first cousins isn't incest.

I can't say I'd worry if they are not tagged as family.

Don't have many connected families in my game so it's not going to be so much of a problem.

I'd personally think that 2nd cousins is too close based on real life genetic problems due to increased genetic relation, even if its okay by the law.

The problem I'd end up with is vertical in nature. A sim marrying their nth great grandchild could be possible especially due to the vampires in the family. At any point it would seem weird, like the Bartender family that I created each person in the line is their own grandparent and grandchild had to cheat of course but one generation more and the game could accept a marriage between the oldest and youngest family members provided of course that they are both adults.
By that point though it could be hard to keep track considering at least one family of mine has 12 children.

If the (unmodded) game doesn't see them as related, then I have few issues with it. I don't think I've really had a situation where I've had two sims with common ancestors get together as I tend to like marrying in new sims and seeing how the genetics populate.

Of course, in my medieval hood I may have to manipulate the family trees to allow closer-relation marriage - with such few noble families, you're a teeny bit limited in your marriage choices/options. I'm still at the stage where I'd be freely adding new sims and families, but I'm hoping to have the nobility somewhat self-sustaining.

in some past thread I posted how close sims could mate in shipped version. 2 posts.
http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...703#post5225703
http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...410#post5227410

had one "incest" couple in past times playing; Pascal Curious & Lola "Singles"/Curious.
corrected their family trees this time playing.

not sure, but the only shipped version way for actual incest between game-produced characters I think would be through adoption into separate families.

If the game doesn't see them as related then I don't tend to care. Although I allow first cousin marriage in my Veronaville and Riverblossom subhoods for my megahood. To me that makes sense. Veronaville Sims marry for power, and Riverblossom Sims marry for land so it makes sense when they want to keep certain things in the family.

@Bigsimsfan12 - how does marrying for land work?

The closest situation I've had so far was when a foster child had an attraction to their foster mother, but none by 'blood' I think. If it did come up that I felt it would be incestuous despite the game not tagging them, I'd probably just use ACR's friendzone option (which is what I did with the foster situation).

I don't handle incest in game and I care, so I use a mod to prevent that: http://faiuwle.wikidot.com/sims2hacks
And romance between two sims sharing the same surname (even if they're not that close) is forbidden in my game. :p

ETA: I assume the mod is available through Ihatemandatoryregister's signature.

Yes, it is

In my country it is legal to marry a cousin. So my answer is no, marriage of cousins is not incest. Obviously what is viewed as incest or not varies by country or culture.

Yeah, I wouldn't put 2 sims together who share a last name. Currently, it's more of a challenge than anything to keep the lines separate in my hood, but 5 generations on, it's starting to get trickier, especially since I have social classes as an added challenge. I'm getting to the point of Queen Victoria, when every royal family in Europe was first cousins. I should probably generate some new townies.

The Extended Family mod looks super helpful. I have a lot with 2 apartments, and the father in one family was the uncle of the mother in the other. All his kids registered as a relative of their mom (his niece/their first cousin), but once they became teens, they started getting chemistry bolts with her children. It was a little close for comfort.

There is of course legal definitions and there are cultural definitions. Legally, incest is between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren and siblings. The rest are not illegal in many countries, although it may be culturally unacceptable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEHu2sAy5hc

Its just a game and if the game will allow it so be it then.

I go with what the game allows and what it doesn't, in terms of blood relationships. It bothers me far more between two sims who are not genetically related but are definitely family by my definition, such as step-parent/step-child, or children who have grown up in the same household as siblings even though technically, genetically they aren't.

As for the risk of hereditary illness mentioned above, second cousins on average share about 3% of their DNA. The chance of a recessive problem being carried in those 3% is small. Yeah, it's several times greater than between two completely unrelated individuals, but that's because the chance of that is so very small for most problems. Intermarrying at that level generally only causes problems when it goes on for several generations. There are some exceptions, but in general you only need to worry about it if there is a known genetic issue in your family already, or if you come from a population that has a history of intermarriage. (For example, Tay-Sachs and Ashkenazi Jews, or sickle cell and people of West African origins.)

I use Faiuwle's extended family mod. I also sometimes manually set the family flags in SimPE (e.g. if someone's abducted by aliens, i set their spouse to be flagged as a parent of the alien baby, even if it doesn't show in the family tree - I've never run into any problems with that).

As far as I know, the only universally forbidden relationship is between mother and son, regarded as taboo even by some animals. Egyptian kings regularly married their sisters or half-sisters, and many cultures practise some form of cousin marriage.

I have no problem with distantly related Sims marrying, and it would be fine by me if the game allowed first-cousin marriage for greater realism when playing royal families or non-Western hoods. For me, 'too close' means parents and siblings (adoption should not override those ties where marriage is concerned), or growing up in the same household.

Who inherits which house. For example usually the oldest sibling will marry and inherit the house, meaning a younger sibling may marry a cousin and live in their spouse's parents home instead of marrying an outsider and having to start up in a starter home in another subhood. Most of my RiverBlossom Sims are related distantly through marriages and not many people tend to move there because I like to keep the population down.

Incest is a theoretical risk in my game, since I continue my neighbourhood across installations and don't usually bother connecting family relations between Sims living in different households to one another. This is particuarly noticable in large families because I still run the vanilla 8-Sims-per-household rule. A family whose children live in 3 different houses will typically only remember they are related to the family members who were living with them at the time of the reinstall.

I remember them in my notes. Although the game will allow them to marry, I deem any marriage in a relationship the game normally forbids as illegal. A couple engaging in a within-family marriage of that type would face prison time and the annulment of their marriage, which puts off most Sims.

I also forbid marriages between Sims with the same surname, since I assume they are relatives of unknown degree.

Cousins may marry in theory, but in practise marriage in SimHampton is almost invariably among Sims with no obvious relation to one another.

There's no risk from inbreeding in sim genetics, of course, so it's 100% a matter of who's squicked by what. If it doesn't squick me, it can happen.

That doesn't mean it's always okay in the story! My Upslope Drama Acres sims lived in such an inbred situation for so long that they became hyperconscious of family trees and have much more stringent rules for who can be with who than Downslopers or Simmigrants have. I actually have one potential pairing in the game who are keeping it on the downlow not only because they're both seeing other people, but because their Downsloper parents would disapprove. In the game they aren't related at all; and in story, they aren't either, but think they're one step too close for breeding. Although Lance's mother has figured out that she's not her own father's biological daughter, she won't be telling anyone till after her mother shuffles off this mortal coil - and Kitty shows no signs of doing that any time soon. If Ma knew Lance and Madeleine had been getting it on and were all tortured about it she'd swear them to secrecy and tell them, but as far as she's aware they're not on the Need to Know list, because they've been keeping it secret, because they don't know!

For me personally, it's less about the shared DNA (obviously with Sims 2, it makes no difference), and more the recognition of someone as family. I have a few sim families who are close with their extended families, so it was weird that they could grow up as best friends with their first cousin, but if the first cousin has a child, it's not recognized as family. And when the child ages to adult, they have chemistry with their dad's BFF cousin. Which is 2 different types of taboos, the familial incest and thinking your best friend's child is hot.

At the same time, I have a sim who has no idea who her father is. Lux's mother had a brief fling with a married man. Lux has never met him. He knows she exists, but obviously he's trying to keep that hidden from his wife and family and has kept his distance. But Lux still recognizes her friend as a brother even though they have no idea they're related. There are many real life cases of children separated young, and then meeting later in life and dating because they don't know.

It makes more real life sense for Lux to be able to kiss the friend she doesn't know is her brother than it does for first cousins once removed who grew up next door to each other with the knowledge they're all family. But the distinctions are too subtle with the programming of the game, so I make do with user knowledge.

Since sims can be a small world I'm fine with having second cousins get together, since they aren't recognized as family by the game and I don't play them as family i.e. they aren't invited to each other's holiday shindigs or birthday parties just because they are related. Though, there's only one instance I can think of it happening in ten years of playing the same hood and they are only engaged at the moment. Their grandparents were siblings so they had the same great-grandfather and their parents (his father and her father) were first cousins.

SimBlender can help you. You can tag distant family members as "cousins" and they will be family in the relationship panel even if it takes a while to find the ties in the Family Tree .

I put the daughter of Jill Smith and Buzz Grunt with the adopted son of Pascal Curious. They would be related to each other. But he's adopted so...whatever. They are together in college now. Makes for a good story

I agree with Felicia on most of this - and I wish there was a way to override the 'cousins-can't-marry' thing in selected cases, though I wouldn't want it to happen most of the time. One of the things I like about TS3 is that it recognises step families, and so prohibits relationships between them (though that did annoy me in one case - Miraj's mother married Elizabeth's father, but Miraj grew up with his father and Elizabeth grew up with her mother, so while they were technically step-siblings they never lived together, didn't meet until they were adults, and in fact became step-siblings as teenagers... but they couldn't have a romantic relationship until Miraj's mother died and the marriage ended).

In reality, a second cousin marriage is only a little more likely to produce children with genetic problems that marrying a random member of the population, and a third cousin marriage is the same as marrying an unrelated person. Even a first cousin marriage, assuming it hasn't happened repeatedly in the family, only increases the chance of genetic issues to the same amount as having parents who are 40 rather than 30 - and we don't stop 40-year-olds from having kids! Genetic issues are only really a problem if, as Felicia said, you have genetic issues in the family already, you come from a population with genetic problems, or your family has a habit of inbreeding and so genetically your relationships are much closer than they are on paper (e.g. Charles II of Spain)