@AndrewGloria sorry to have raised your hopes, but I think I misread whatever I found about 'no dream date gifts' mod and assumed that meant flowers too but it didn't so as far as I know there isn't one (I just did some google searches) to completely get rid of roses. I guess we have keep manually deleting them until further notice.

I'm not really a fan of the timed scenarios but I do the occasional date when someone rolls for it. Parties are annoying so I don't usually do them unless it's a high value want and if I want a family's kids to go to private school, I just use a mod so I don't have to deal with the headmaster, but there's private school fees so it's not like they're getting high value education for free lmao

I really like parties and outings, these are important elements of my game.

There are far too many reasons to celebrate to let parties and outings go by as far as I am concerned. Besides weddings and birthdays, the following also are celebrated in my game:

Promotions
A Chance Card reward
The first A+ report (obviously, if there is one) - family reunion!
Moving into a new house - a house warming party seems just right to me
Engagements
Rolling the want to go to a community lot/ go fishing/ whatever seems like a good reason to - outing.
Play chess - good, invite a friend and go and play in the park.
Days when everyone is off - invite friends to lunch/dinner parties
Sims looking or feeling a bit depressed or bored
For those who work nights - nights off are date nights. For the rest, Friday nights are date nights.

And, of course, there are work dinners too. And business lunches.

I throw parties for special occasions, but I rarely use the scored party system. It just has you so stressed trying to do everything right in X number of minutes and then everyone leaves before you can even have any fun.

1. Headmaster and Greek houses - I don't bother since I quit playing Legacy style aeons ago.
Education is free. Kids and teens go to my playable school and I don't have uni in my hood yet.

2. Dates - my Sims date when I feel like it. I never achieve the 50 dates LTW though but dream dates get easily done in my game.


Pescado's anti-date flowers is the answer.


3. Outings - I'm not used to the group feature and I barely do outings. When I do, they're just for fun. It seems I'm not great for the timed ones.
My current hood is fairly new. The recently funded public park is the only entertainment community lot at the moment.

4. Parties - I do some once in a while (usually on saturday and sunday). They're often roof raiser.
I use a longer parties mod mod since using the Batbox to extend the time annoys me.

@Justpetro, you're inspiring. I'll try to do more parties and outings.

I think that there may be a common misconception about your sims having to do something special at a party or outing. That is not exactly true.

The thing with parties and scored outings - it really is about whom the sim invites. Good friends will always have a great time together, even if they just go fishing.

Parties going downhill can be saved by simple things - a water balloon fight; because a number of sims can take part in one, or a snowball fight in winter often do more to spruce up a party one would expect. Knowledge sims may happily hang out and discuss science while social sims throw water balloons around outside

Parties and outings also don't have to be big - smaller ones tend to be reach the roof raiser status a lot faster in my experience - and so there are different parties for different groups of friends - one may just be family, one may be friends, one may be different friends, one may be for co-workers.

The only thing that really spoils a party in my game is a fire - setting the meal on fire is not good entertainment - all the guests run away That, of course, mean that the host will have to make up for it with another party!

I'll have to agree with Justpetro. As long as the sims invited are good friends, they'll engage in enough interactions to boost the scores on their own, especially if there aren't that many of them in the first place. I've had roofraisers with just 3 guests and rockin' outings with 2, even after one of them was struck by lightning.

It's not just fires though - I've had parties bomb because someone died in the middle of it. Whoops. I forgot to move the buffet in during a lightning storm.

If a Sim wants to do the mini-challenges, I tend to let them, unless the result would be absurd for that particular Sim (no, David Fontaine, you are not inviting the headmaster over, because you are currently in prison for... ...escaping prison, mostly), or I think they're more likely to do something else. I like all of the mini-games, but don't feel that any Sim should be obliged to do any they don't feel like doing. If I'm going to make them do something, it'll be something I devised.

I will admit that I rarely do the scored outings, if only because I had one too many Sim go "Ooh, I had fun with you at the outing, though we hardly spoke to each other and I only found out when my vivacious friend dragged me into the taxi. Let me give you this stereo system, that is worth over a quarter of my lifetime income and you have no use or interest in whatsoever except to sell".

Once, I won the headmaster scenario with a sequence of greetings plus what must have been the world's most amazing burnt spaghetti.