So am wondering how many here play with aging on vs aging off.

If you play with aging on do you play with the default (vanilla) settings or do you use an aging mod?

If off do you ever manually age up your sims? How do you decided when to do so?
For those of (many) of you who play multiple households do you try too keep your familys in sinc?

I play with aging on all the way. Sims weren't aging in TS1 so I was looking forward to this in TS2.
I used a aging mod where 1 simday equal 1 year. The baby, child, teen stages were shortened to add days to adulthood (43 days).

Aging on. Up until a few weeks ago, I had never used an aging mod but now I use one that increases both toddler and child and slightly reduces the teen ages. I manually age my sims up after they have been on vacation to compensate for them not aging while they were gone. I used to be really diligent about playing families in sync and played a strict 3-day rotation. Now I'm a lot laxer about it and while I do still rotate houses I might only play them 1 day or I could play a whole season just depends on how I feel.

I normally play with aging off. I occasionally turn it on to let a Sim age up, and then turn it off again. With aging usually off, the pace of my game is so slow that keeping things in sync isn't a problem. In the eight years I've been playing, most of my Sims haven't aged up. None have died.

Playing the way I do, I miss out on seeing change over the generations, but I get to know individual Sims very well.

Aging on.

I have one mod in that varies the number of days adults get, so that lifespan usually averages 35-40 days, which is a bit longer than normal. Everything else is vanilla.

I'm not strict about it, but I usually age up toddlers at 3 days and children at 7 days using the birthday cake. I let babies age up naturally. I send teens to college when they have 8 or fewer days left as a teen. This keeps each of the younger life stages (baby/toddler, child, and teen) to around a week, and college is shortened so it takes 8 days total. However, if there is a lot going on, I may forget or let them age up naturally, and sometimes they stay teens longer if they aren't ready (don't have the want or the grades) to go to college.

I play loose rotations based on the week. So I may play households for as little to 2 days or as many as 7 days at a time, but once they reach the end of the week, they don't get played again until every household is ready to start the next week, and that includes everyone at uni. I have a spreadsheet to keep track. If there are young kids or teens in the house, I tend to play through those houses on shorter rotations (2 days) so that they have a chance to make friends with their cohort before they age up. Uni is a bit harder to coordinate because it's 8 days instead of 7, but I usually send teens to college on Sunday, Tuesday, or Thursday evening and bring them back on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday morning to try to keep their ages more or less relative when they become adults. But since the adult lifespan is varied, it doesn't matter too much unless they're siblings.

Right now, I'm playing Pleasantview with Bluewater Village, Downtown, and 3 universities attached, and all playables that came with those neighborhoods or in the bin are moved into houses or dorms. I feel like this gives me a well-populated neighborhood with lots of marriage possibilities. However, I only actively play members of 5 families. All other playables are treated like townies unless they marry in. When someone ages up, I'll typically find their good friends (whether nonplayed playable or townie) and age them up too. When someone dies of old age, their elder friends also die. A teen going to college will take their friends with them, but I'll just stick them in an unopened dorm and then "graduate" them when the playable graduates. I'm really happy since I started doing this because it feels like the neighborhood is changing and growing as my characters do, like their friends are aging along with them, and also I don't feel like I have to play every single Sim just to keep aging in sync.

I do not use Maxis aging off. But I use BO-Slow Aging Controller. With this mod I can set every individual sim age as I want and one priority of this is that BO's mod set to aging off lets sim to get pregnant and have a baby.

I play always with aging on, keeping everyone the right age is very important to me. I use TwoJeffs' age duration hack, which changes adult lifespan to be variable based on aspiration level and elder lifespan to be much shorter and variable at random. I also use midgethetree's modified version of BO's slow aging controller, so that certain supernatural sims (plantsims and fairies) have very long adult and elder lifespans.

I used to do aging off, and manually aging Sims once a year (four seasons), but now I have AlmightyHat's aging controller.

Wow thanks for all the replies. So far it seems most play with aging on, but no one uses vanilla aging.

Personally when i first started playing sims 2 I played with aging off. Back then I would fill the neighborhood with sims of my own creation and jusst play each family as I felt like it. I really enjoyed seeing how my different characters interacted from diffrent perspectives.

After a while I became interested in legacys challenges and started playing with aging on. However I felt (and still do) that the vanilla aging was too short. At first i used the temporal adjuster from insimanator to reset the life bar of children and adults once just before they aged. Later after i learned to use SimPE I made my own custom age mod. I didn't base it off of any sort of scale, just what felt right in proportion. I also tried to keep every thing a multiple of seven so my sims could age up by week so to speak. Baby ended up being 4 days (add to 3 days of pregnancy for one week.) Toddler is one week, child and teen are two each and adult is eight weeks. Elder I believe is four weeks minimum.

I'm quite funny when it comes to this.

So in my custom hoods, Crystal Lake and Crystal River, I play with aging off. This is because I usually like sims to age when I want them to, not when the game dictates. When I want them to age, I simply turn aging on, set to birthday, and then they continue to the next lifestage. In these hoods, I just play whatever household I feel like playing; some houses are played more than others.

In my Crystal Pleasantview, my current Pleasantview where I do things I've never considered, I leave aging on and play with the Maxis ages (no aging mods). I play in week long rotations and I even have a sheet of which order I play them in, This way, no one gets left out.

Weird, I know, but different playstyles are fun to experiment with.

Definitely aging on. I recently adjusted Two-Jeffs aging mod for an extended and random adult duration and a random elder duration. I found with default aging most of my Sims were dying around 75 days, rarely saw grandkids and NEVER were alive for their grandkids' weddings. Taking one day to be approximately one year, I thought that was highly unrealistic.

Now if everything goes right and the random number generator is extremely kind to them, some of my Sims MIGHT actually make it to 100 days and many should be able to attend their grandkids' weddings. The average death age now should be moving into the mid-80's which I find more realistic for a modern age.

Without aging, I would never play the Sims - tracking the generations and the passing of "time" is one of my favorite parts of the game (Unsurprisingly, I also like genealogy).

I play strict week-long rotations; I almost always age up a day early; teens stay teens only until the end of the rotation they age up (7 days max, usually less) - then everyone goes to University (where a use 36-hr semester mod and play two semesters to a "week"). My sims born week one (in-game) will go to college at the start of week four, graduate at the end of week five, and start life back in the hood at the start of week six. Sims born in-game usually live 10-12 weeks (total), which is more than enough for me. I rarely make new CAS sims (and then, only as Create-a-student), which after a couple generations leads to a self-sustaining, endogenous community.

Aging on because I like seeing the generations come and go. I do use Twojeffs's mod that moves bonus days from the elder stage to the adult stage. Never bother with Elixir of Life any more. My sims all manage to get permaplat before they die. If I really want an immortal sim, I would make it a vampire or live on an agingoff lot.

My ageing is very modded.
Babies: 2 days
Toddler: 8 days
Children: 14 days
Teens: 10 days
Young Adult: 10 days
Adults: 74 days
Elder: I don't know, no one has died in over 3 years as I play very slowly.

I have individual ageing on/off modded on each sims pie menu should things get out of whack or at a birthday party since I like them to age by cake. Don't want anyone ageing up while waiting at a cake.

All ages, seasons and days of the week I keep in sync and change them if they are not.

Aging on, and usually with an aging mod to make adulthood longer. One hood is on a 1 day = 6 months aging scheme so that I get plenty of time with my sims to tell stories; another was briefly Maxis aging, then I got fed up with my teens being teens so long that their baby siblings would catch up to them before they became adults, so I installed Cyjon's 8-Day Teens, then all my adults getting old too soon bothered me and I changed it again. I'd like to aim for simplicity and not need to mod things too much, but it really bothered me that grandparents would die before their grandchildren could grow up.

I used to use the aging on or off cheat and later switched to using an aging contoller Mod to turn aging on or off for each age group and let them age up when it's the time for that to happen.I have aging off for all of my BACC sims in both households since none are ready to start families and I don't want them getting old and dying off before even being able to do anything.I base aging on the seasons and length of years which is 40 days for each year.Baby and Toddler stages last until they become a child at three years of age and nine is when they become a teen and they get to be young adult or adult at twelve.

definitely on. unmodded aging. that doesn't mean they're in any sort of consistent timeline though.

Aging on because I want to see generations pass and see my sims' whole lives. I play with an unmodded lifespan so far but I'm considering adding one that only shortens the length of the teenage years to about half. In my opinion they are way too long in comparison to childhood and adulthood. Sims age up as soon as I get the pop up that they are ready for it.

Aging on and I use Almighty Hats aging mod, mainly because Teen is very long and adult to short if you play vanilla. I still don't like that elders are approximately 45, because they look like 70, but I gather that age was picked for the loss of fertility.
Before that, I used InTeens indepent Teen option for Teens that didn't go to college and treated them like young adults.

I might use aging off for a couple of days to get a household settled in, because I don't like how most Teens don't have skill points and don't know how to study. After that, I play loose weekly rotations. I try to get them all to sunday before starting the next round, but an interesting household might go in one session, while a more stressfull one might take two or three. College goes two semesters at a time, so they should be away for four rotations. I try to take those days of the beginning of adulthood, so if one twin goes to college and the other one doesn't, they should end up adults of the same age at the 5th rotation. I'm not very strict about it and it is more of an estimate.

@HobbesED
Would you mind me asking how to mod the elder lifespan?
I never have the want to use TJ's mod because I don't like the random adult duration. I play generations so it's not interesting for me.
My elders usually live enough to meet their grandchildren till they reach teen-hood when they're lucky.

I sent you a PM.

I play similar to AndrewGloria with aging off and practically no one ever dying. I play with life moving very slowly, with far-reaching interconnected stories. I don't care about syncing them, but since no one is aging, they are in sync anyway most of the time. A sim is aged in whatever way I feel like at the time when it suits the story, but sometimes I simulate sims being a little older, like having a bald toddler in a family crawling, while another toddler with a lot of hair walks everywhere so they seem different ages, or like keeping some children in the running stage with more babyish clothes and some in the regular walk stage with more school age clothes, some adults with wrinkles, etc. I just consider this moving sims at real life pace, so I also don't see a ton of babies or generations.

Aging 100% on, I've never gotten into aging off play since my main reason for playing is for generational family life. It is modded, and after a few years of messing around with the ages I think I've finally found a system that I like.
A year is 4 sim days, and that's the length of each round I play too so everyone is within the same year and their ages match up.
Toddlers become children at 4, Children become Teens at 12 and Adults from 18 to 60. Elders can live to be up to 100.

Aging most definitely ON - but... I cheat every now and then.

I am guilty of reloading a lot when a sim has died from something stupid that I don't feel like running with. I'm also guilty of saving sims from death whenever possible. AND, when I play the maxis playables, I don't set their ages like I really should. It's a royal pain in the rear to have to go in, age them down and back up and then go into SimPE and set everyone to the appropriate age that I feel that they should be so that they can live properly, and also be the appropriate age for where they are in their lives. So in those instances, I definitely cheat - and I don't always roll with sudden deaths either.

BUT

I get so much joy and satisfaction out of playing my sims as they grow throughout their lives. I wouldn't trade that for anything. It makes them real to me you know? And I do play with my own custom age mod. Toddlers are about 36 days, Babies are 12, Kids are a whopping 96, Teens are 84, and Adults are over 300! Elders have a varied amount of life, but I edited theirs too - they can live to about 90 or drop at 60. For many it would be too long (especially that toddler stage LOL), but I have a whole complicated time system in-game that keeps track of things like individual birthdays (day, month and year >u< ) as well as the exact age of each sim. That lets me track in evernote, so I document the current expecting mums, and the birthdays of all the new babies, as well as tracking each generation (In my game each generation is exactly 10 years). And I find that it goes fast. By the time you do holidays, birthday celebrations, family vacations, the births of new siblings, the camping trips and first dates and attending school and slumber parties, it all goes really really fast.

Everyone's allowed to age up naturally in my game - except toddler multiples where inevitably one baby hasn't had it's nappy changed and ends up refusing to become a child over it. I hit the little rugrats with the cake when those incidents happen. Can't have a triplet being a whole day younger than it's other two siblings because of foolishness.

I don't play strict rotations - I'm fast and loose with exactly how long to be in a house. More than one day, less than 12 is around the rough estimate, but it's simple enough to keep rotations in sync based on pregnancies. For new babies, I make sure that all the currently pregnant sims give birth in the same 'year', so I will play a pregnant sim for 9 days to complete her pregnancy before moving on to the next one, if someone else has already given birth before her. My sims pregnancies are 9 days, so that I can have a 12 day year, which is how I constructed their ages, so that greatly simplifies the tracking process as well. For kids and teens and toddlers, I just play a house until the children are about the same age as the others in their cohort, and cohorts are defined by birth year, which I start from 01, becuase it's like saying '2001' LOL. < I am a nerd basically. That's why I do this. I'm that much of a nerd.

I play with aging on. I have InTeen, which creates an 'independent teen' stage halfway through the ridiculously long vanilla teen stage (they graduate from school at that point, and can start working fulltime), and a mod to shorten university to 8 days. This means that if two Sims are born on the same day, one goes to university and the other doesn't, they stay in synch and the one who doesn't go to uni gets to earn some money instead. I play one-day rotations.

Otherwise, I mostly use vanilla aging, although in one hood I tried using the Elixir of Life (aspiration reward object) to vary the length of the adult stage. Sims had to take the Elixir at specific times regardless of aspiration level, so those whose lives were going well could get up to 15 days extra, and those whose lives were going badly could lose 15 days.

The only other time I interfere with a Sim's aging is when I'm setting up a new hood, when I might use the Sim Blender to adjust adults' ages to make more sense given their children's ages. I also age elders like the Goodies down to adult so they can get a job, then age them up again and have them retire, so that they have a pension income. It annoys me that Maxis didn't give pre-made elders pensions.