When a child Sim grows into a teenager, how do you pick their new aspiration? Any sort of system, random, or just whatever feels best?

I go for random- I love to use Phae's random teenhood generator:
https://modthesims.info/d/293685

I just roll a physical die a few times, and the number that happens the most, I choose that aspiration. So, 1 is the top aspiration shown (I think it's Pleasure?), and I go clockwise with each number until I assign all 6. So, for example, if I roll a few times, and get side 3 several times, then I choose Knowledge.

And I do the same for secondary aspirations, but go counter clockwise from the primary aspiration. So I could have Knowledge primary, roll die a few times, and Family is the one that happens the most, then Family is secondary.

A long time ago I set up a color system for aspirations .. well actually I did it for aspirations, signs, skin, eyes, hair as it made it much easier to see at a glance on my spreadsheet for my hoods .. so when it came to pickin an asp for a new teen I ..err "roll" actually colored dice to see what they'd get .. there are 2 of each die except black/ Pleasure .. that is my least favorite so it only gets a 1 in 11 changes of comin out of the bottle
Dice color = aspiration
Black is Pleasure
Blue is Family
Red is Romance
Yellow/ Brown is Knowledge
Green is Fortune
Purple is Popularity/ Reputation

Sometimes kids' wants and/or behaviour gives me an idea of what aspiration to choose for them, usually it's that someone strikes me as a future knowledge, family or popularity sim, though I did have one kid who was very interested in the money tree and became a fortune sim. For the most part though I use a randomizer. For secondary aspirations, if I give a sim one it's usually because I already have an idea of what I feel suits them, so then I just pick that.

Right now, I'm basing it primarily on personality as well as taking into account how they were as a kid.

If they are very neat, they get Knowledge.
If they are very outgoing, they get Popularity.
If they are very active, they get Fortune.
If they are very playful, they get Romance.
If they are very nice, they get Family.
If they are fairly balanced or are extremely lazy/sloppy, they get Pleasure.
If two or three of their personality traits dominate, I take their parents' aspirations as well as their past behavior into account when deciding.

I used to make it a lot more complicated than this, but I couldn't stick with that, so I simplified it a great deal, and a lot of it is just based on what I think suits them best.

If I send them to college, I may change their aspiration junior year based on the kinds of wants they roll and just how they generally behave. For instance, Jill Smith started out as Knowledge because she is neat and also because she rolled a lot of wants to learn skills, particularly mechanical, as a child. But in her teen/young adult years, her wants and interests pointed more to Family, so she got that aspiration as a junior plus the LTW to Graduate 3 children from college, reflecting her Knowledge bent. I don't use secondary aspirations as my game doesn't support them.

I will also choose their LTW based on the wants they roll as a teen or in college and based on their interests. I don't stick with the randomly rolled one unless I think it particularly fits for some reason.

I use the modified zodiac system on Pleasant Sims' website. It's basically the Maxis method for choosing aspirations for townies but with a few tweaks to incorporate pleasure Sims.

I try to look at their interests, and personality to get a good idea of what aspiration they should have.

For instance, Fortune: Aries, Scorpio with interests in money and work.

Generally it's based on the same examples EA does, but I've been trying out different approaches such as trait based aspirations.

Thankfully I don't have many more children to grow up to teens.

I try to go by knowing the Sim well enough as a child, to intuitively "know" the aspiration she/he will choose as a teen. When Julian's younger sister Brigitte first made an appearance in my game, the first thing she asked for was a telescope. That cast the die. Throughout her childhood, when she wasn't cleaning and tidying the house, she was assiduously doing her homework. . . She soon got an A+ Grade and she stayed there. Obviously she's Knowledge!

Her younger brother Hans on the other hand, copies Julian in seldom wearing a shirt. Still at Primary School (ages 5 - 11) he already has both a girlfriend (Tessa Ramirez) and a boyfriend (Hermes Hunter). I'm pretty sure he's going to be Romance.

I now have lots of Sims in my game, so it's harder to know each as an individual, but I'd like to think I still know each of them well enough to make an individual decision in such an important matter. I prefer my own intuition to any rule. And it doesn't happen very often -- at the time of writing, Brigitte is still the only Sim in my entire game to have aged up from child to teen. I have plenty of teens in my game without having to age up children. I like to keep them as children, so the other children in my game don't lose potential playmates.

Eventually more will undoubtedly age up, but give me time; I've only been playing for eleven years!

Vibes and taking into account what they were like as a child.

I pay attention to their childhood wants. Some of them I know right out of toddlerhood and others it's at the last second before they age up, but I do my best to pick what's consistent to what they've already been wanting.

I have done various different things.

Sometimes I get a sense based on what wants they roll as a child or what they have been thinking/talking about or the clothes they age up into. I do this for general story stuff too - like I had a teen who constantly thought about adoption, so I decided she will probably adopt when she grows up rather than or in addition to having biological children. She is straight, so it wasn't rolling because she is lesbian.

I had a random generator which I put in all different combos of primary and secondary, and I weighted them according to age. I used the RandomStuff program from MATY and I put my own script into it.

At the midpoint of college, or on their teen > adult birthday, also after any huge or lifechanging life events, it had a roll for whether to change (no change, change primary, change secondary, swap primary/secondary, change everything)

So things like Pleasure, Romance, Grilled Cheese and Popularity, were weighted higher for teens.
For uneducated adults, Popularity, Fortune and Family were weighted higher.
For educated adults, Knowledge, Fortune and Family are weighted highest.

Also I ranked the combinations according to how common/unusual I thought they would be and used that in the weighting too.

All aspiration combinations are possible for all ages, but they vary in how likely they are to show up.

I had a system at some point to weight according to their childhood so for example:

If they grew up rich OR poor, they are more likely to be Fortune.
If their parents had an open relationship, or they had a bad relationship with their parents, they are more likely to be Romance.
If they had a very stable family, or no siblings, or a lot of siblings, or a parent left/had an affair, they are more likely to be Family.
If their parent was very relaxed, or very strict, or their childhood was tough they are more likely to be Pleasure.
If their parent was very encouraging of school etc, or their school experience was very different (much better than) home, they are more likely to be Knowledge.
If their family was very conventional or very unconventional, they are more likely to be Popularity.

With this, I tried to incorporate - you had a great childhood and want to continue those values into adult life, or you had something bad in your childhood that you want to do the opposite. But it became a bit tricky to implement this in addition to the randomiser, and so I sort of abandoned it though I might work it back in again at some point.

I had started to observe people IRL and think about the concept of sim aspiration. There are people who dress fashionably (Popularity) or expensively (Fortune), people who definitely want children (Family) and who will do it because it is the expected thing (Popularity, Fortune). There are intelligent people, or geeks/nerds (Knowledge). People who care very much about social norms and being accepted and not being "weird" (Popularity) etc. This all gave me some ideas I wanted to try to implement in the game.

Then someone mentioned SophiethePuffin's Weighted Aspiration Calculator and the two "types" for each aspiration. I liked the idea of this so I grabbed it for myself, but I didn't like all of the categories and found that the calculator gave me way too many "hopeless romantic" shy Romance sims. I don't mind a shy Romance sim, but to me this ought to be unusual because Romance is about craving admiration and adoration and attention, whereas shy is the opposite of this.

I have never wanted to allocate aspiration purely on personality, because I think it makes the sims all feel very shut-in-boxes, which I really don't like. But OTOH my approach of total randomness meant that I tended to find it was hard to keep track of which parts of a sim's "simology" existed; and everyone started to feel very bland and characterless. Which was a shame. So I realised that I DO want some kind of "categories" but 6 is too few.

So I modified Sophie's calculator, changing the two types to types that I felt more intuitive about, and adding a grilled cheese category on the side. That worked for a while and then again started to bother me/feel too samey so I made an entirely new calculator from scratch using the 30 main aspiration combinations. This is quite cool, and I have it arranged in a pleasing grid formation!

Because teens undergo an interest change when they age up, and you can't view interests and personality at the same time on-screen while a dialogue box is open, I decided to keep the "2 subcategories" model for teens, and so my idea now is that I'll allocate teenagers an aspiration based on personality, and then at college or teen > adult, I roll again based on interests and include these for their main aspiration combo. Adults from CAS also get their aspiration chosen the "teen way" and then updated later on in-game. Adults are no longer allowed to be "double family" or similar - they have to have more nuanced motivations.

However, again, I started to become dissatisfied with the way this was all chosen. So I have recently been cataloguing all the different wants and fears for each aspiration, to understand what really is likely to motivate or bother sims in-game. I painstakingly coded all of these and collated my own descriptions. I found out some surprising things, which I hadn't realised before. For example, both Pleasure and Romance want to avoid responsibility. Popularity and Family are both likely to want to interact with pets. Fortune and Knowledge are less interested in frivolous or social activities (but Fortune does enjoy luxurious things, like massages). Knowledge and Family both enjoy gardening and cooking and care about the environment. Fortune only rolls socialising and studying wants when they have an ulterior goal (e.g. promotion). Fortune, Pleasure, and Family all worry about responsibility failures. (Pleasure is very interesting in this context, both wishing to avoid responsibility, but also fearing the consequences of avoiding responsibility).

This helped; some of my previous categories had been spot on, and some of my previous categories hadn't been right at all. So I re-wrote everything. I also re-did all the personality and interest combinations both making sure that they were consistent within their own types and as evenly spread as I could manage. I've finished this now; I intend to test it in-game.

The teen subtypes are based on classroom stereotypes, but they work in terms of dividing each aspiration up into its main two motivations.

Pleasure is about having fun (class clown) or avoiding hard work (slacker)
Romance is about being admired (ego) or about getting woohoo (horny)
Popularity is about enjoying company (friendly) or about fitting in/being a social elite (preppy)
Fortune is about ensuring security (hardworker) or luxuries (hedonist)
Family is about fulfilling expectations (responsible) or being compassionate (caring)
Knowledge is about intelligence (clever) or about not really fitting in with the crowd (weirdo)

So for adults I end up with combos like:
Popularity + Fortune = (Active, Serious, Fashion, Politics) - money brings social status, which is very important to this sim.
Popularity + Pleasure = (Culture, Entertainment, Sports, Nice) - loves to hang out and do fun stuff with other sims. That's their favourite pastime.
Romance + Pleasure = (Culture, Fashion, Travel, Outgoing) - serial dater. They'll date all kinds of different people and have all kinds of different experiences and see where that takes them in life.
Family + Popularity = (Animals, School, Food, Outgoing) - big family network - they love the bustle of a large family, they probably also have pets, they care what their family thinks and want good things for them.
Knowledge + Popularity = (Serious, Nice, Environment, Health) - they seek to do good, and be respected through their work - they probably pick a job such as teaching, science or medicine.

All of these things are shareable if anyone is interested in them.

I've gone through so many ways of doing this. Sometimes its been completely random, sometimes I'd base it purely on interests, other times I've come up with more complex systems. For example in one of them I'd pick three potential aspirations based on the mother and three based on the father and assign them each to a number on a die so the roll table might look something like this:

1. Family
2. Knowledge
3. Fortune
4. Fortune
5. Knowledge
6. Popularity

Obviously, this means some aspirations will be more likely then others, but it worked pretty well.

Eventually I abandoned this though and now start planning aspirations based on personality and their family and if feeling really inspired what might lead to a good central conflict. For example, Heath is the son of Cassandra and Don. Due to my new method of doing personalities he has less then 25 points (but I mean hey so does nervous subject). He's extremely sloppy, shy, serious, and active. That slopping, mismatched socks, bow-tie, young adult outfit leapt to mind and from that point he has been destined to investigate the unknown and maybe discover the truth of what happened to Bella. He will be a knowledge sim and it could be interesting since I think he will clash with Don. Meanwhile, his sister Anastasia has a much more balanced personality (with more then 25 points). I wanted to keep that old money vibe, but also be more reflective of the Lothario's. Yet, something about her strikes me as very lady-like. I think she'll be a pleasure sim so she can be a lady of leisure.

There are of course limits to this. I have a set of twins at the moment I have no idea what to do with. I made their father as an adult. The concept behind him was that he was an ex-frat boy who'd never been in a serious relationship. He was a pleasure sim and the idea was to play the dating game and see if he clicked with anyone or if he'd remain an eternal bachelor. It took awhile, but he did click with Andrea Hogan. Since neither are especially developed characters I'm at a loss, but I will say this thread is giving me some ideas.

I try to think about their personality and the interests and hobbies they had accumulated in the Child lifestage. For example, if they had a hobby in Tinkering or Games, they would be Knowledge when they grow up.

This is really cool even if you abandoned it, I'd love to try it sometime. Using their life circumstances makes a ton of sense.



I would love to see this! Please share.



Also would reeeeeally like to see the final product! It all seems really well thought out. The teen subtypes seem so spot on. It's just great. Please share! Please?

I roll dice. And by roll dice, I mean I google "roll dice"

1- Fortune
2- Knowledge
3- Romance
4- Family
5- Popularity
6- Pleasure

If it seems completely unfitting based on their personality traits (shy serious sim gets Pleasure, etc.), I'll roll again, but I usually go with the first result. I've seen some of the generators people have created and tried a few out, but it's a lot of work, and to be honest, I don't like the idea of everyone with an aspiration having a similar personality. Sometimes you want the serious businessman becoming the CEO and sometimes you want the playboy buying a bunch of expensive toys.

I roll a die and commit to what it says regardless of whether I like it or not.

I roll dice! I give a weight to parent's aspirations. So if Dad is Wealth/Pleasure and Mum is Family/Pleasure, my matrix works like this:

d6
1) Wealth
2) Pleasure
3) Family
4) Pleasure
5-6) roll another d6 on the wheel, starting with Wealth, going clockwise.

If at any point I roll Grilled Cheese it means reroll, or I get to pick!

I use the same system for secondary aspirations. Weights still apply, unless they are already applied. (So if my sim rolled Wealth for primary, the weights for secondary would Be 1) Pleasure, 2) Family, 3) Pleasure)

I'm happy with the system as it encourages family continuity, but also allows for black sheep and outliers. It also creates interesting off types, like the angry parent, the shy romance sim, the insecure popularity sim, the jock who really digs science and so on.

People are complex and so are my sims.

College gives a chance for a do over. By that point I've known the sim for a while, and may make adjustments. However, its usually a flip of primary and secondary, hopefully showcasing some maturity while still maintaining continuity.

I'm also just happy to roll real dice.

Generally I pick between knowledge, pleasure, wealth, and popularity and just ignore/skip/forget(?) about romance and family. I usually pick between the four aspirations on a whim by just clicking something, by contemplating what that sim's overall vibe is, or whether I (rarely) have a plan for them. Secondary is always Grilled Cheese because grilled cheese really is the best

I feel I know them well enough.

Bringing friends over all the time - social sim.
Sells a LOT of lemonade - fortune sim
Wants to gain more skills than other kids and to do homework before everything else - knowledge sim.
Contributes more to the raising of babies and toddlers - by playing peekaboo, joining them at the toy box and just generally loves their smaller siblings - family sim. (One or two may perfect family sims may have been overlooked because they were the youngest - if it looks like that, I change their aspiration during Uni).
Wants to play games from sunrise to - well, sunrise - fun sims.
Not too clear on anything; seeming a bit useless to me - romance sim (Very fair, I am not going to expect them to move heaven and earth to make the hood a better place).

Sure! It's a google sheet so easy to share. I will just have to apologise to Sophie the Puffin for bastardising her work I am still working on testing how it matches to my sims in game so I expect a few more tweaks.

I didn't work life circumstances in - no way to do this easily.

When they're born, I run a script that generates a file with their name that contains primary and second aspirations and turn-ons. Then I don't open the file until they age up to teen. That way, I'm not inadvertently making sims according to some personality archetype I have in mind, and I get a wider variety of different aspiration/personality/etc. combinations.

Can't wait thank you so much! :D

One thing that hasn't been addressed is that there are 2 ways to fulfill the aspirations-the primary and the secondary which really helps fill out the missing pieces of a personality.

This makes it easier to deal with a complex personality. Most pixels are complex pieces of computer code, you know.

I love that idea! I may try this myself!


Can they choose secondary aspiration when they are still teens? I stopped playing with them a while ago and always forget about the secondaries!


Sim Sample would like a word with you...