Hey guys.

I've decided to manually roll my Sim babies personalities, because my game only gives birth to grouches and I find it unrealistic that extremely nice parents only get grumpy kids. Joandsarah mentioned the generator is possibly broken, that it might run out of points and thus tend to give grouchy kids. Whether that is the case or not, I'm not a fan of how it's working in my game so I want to do it manually for a while.

I was wondering if anyone has a system for such things. I'd like to take genetic personality in to account, so that the kids personality is actually determined by parents personality. What I'm thinking I want to do is some kind of adding together parents personality in each trait, and then have a set span that the childs personality could be. Say parents are both 5 nice, (5+5)/2=5 so kid could be 3-7 nice. Something like that. But also throw in a dice roll to see if they completely ignore genetic personality, so there is some chance to get wild cards in terms of personality.

Anyone done anything similar and have ideas to share?

Rolling the pacifier should take care of this and if it is not then use the bat box to fix stuck controllers and see if that works.

Allow me to clarify. This is not a stuck generator problem, I do know to roll pacifier. Kids are not getting identical personalities, it's just skewed towards rolling very high numbers in the earlier traits and 0 or 1 in niceness. If Jo remembers correctly and there is a problem with the generator running out of points, that would explain why I see so grouchy kids. Either way I'd rather do it manually.

Not trying to troubleshoot a problem, want to hear ideas on manually rolling personalities

Sounds complicated, quite honestly I'm fine with the personality points the game gives me. It can lead to some interesting balances, like one Sim who is painfully shy at only one outgoing point but has 10 neat points, whilst her twin brother is very playful and active.

I used to randomize birth personality using this system: http://sullivansims.blogspot.fr/201...make-sense.html
It was great. I stopped doing this because I'm lazy :D

Thanks for the link Essa. That mentions the same thing Jo was talking about, that game is prone to generating grouchy Sims because it seemingly has a set number of points to deal out and always does nice last which means it often runs out of points. i am inclined to believe that, but to each their own if they want to as well

Interesting way of doing it, though for me that gives too little randomness. I wouldn't want 50% of babies to just copy either mother or fathers number, but it's certainly easier than my system

in shipped version, the personality totals of pregnancy-produced characters are 25 to 35 points.
not sure, but there might be mods that change the totals.

I read somewhere that the game is *supposed* to hand out personality points based on the parents but, like you, I've noticed the game spewing bunches of grouchy game-born childreen. The extra neat kids are especially grouchy, so Jo's idea of running out of points makes a ton of sense. I am not fond of grouchy Sims -- perhaps because my game always gets so many of them -- so those are the ones I tend to play in fast motion in an old folks home or kill off with some sort of "accident."

I'm starting a new game from scratch and I would like to give rotational play a try -- which means no aging of some Sims while others the Sim-aging mod 1 day = 2 years mod that I just installed. (I did this because I want most of my Sims to have slightly longer lives than what Maxis provided.)

I like your idea about manually setting the kids personality based on parent personality scores. Thanks to a post Penni left, pointing out that there are more than just six-sided dice, I now have a couple sets with 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20 and % dice that I will probably put to use on game-born Sims. I look forward to hearing any and all ideas about how this might be implemented.

Edited to add:
I also bought my son a couple sets of these dice. We each keep a set in our vehicles and have decided to use it when we get bored and can't decide which fast-food place to grab a quick bite to eat. I love being a NERD!

I wish my memory was better, but all I recall of a thread a long time ago was that the game starts assigning a born in sims points from the top, so it starts with neatness and that it can run out of assignable points by the time it arrives at niceness and that whoever made that post indicated that something was slightly broken with the way the game did it. I can't remember whose made that post or any more than that although I thought it was somehow who might know a thing or too. Obviously it wasn't you @gummilutt or you would know all about it.

Some thoughts: An average could be taken. So parent A is 6 nice and parents B is 8 points nice so the child might be 7.

Personality could be more leaned towards who the child takes after. Perhaps they look more like one parent or seemed favoured by one parent. Or perhaps even a grandparent.

I'm not sure that can be entirely correct since it's common for born-in-game offspring to have more personality points than their parents (at least in my game). It's something I noticed (and posted about on newsnet back in the day) really early on in the game cycle. I can give you some examples if you like. Anyway, as well as gaining points, sims can also, it appears lose points too (or my born-in-game great-grandkids would have entirely full personalities). It seems to be more to do with the game calculating each aspect of personality from their parents' scores though, and here I do agree with Jo, the calculation for niceness doesn't always seem to work properly. There does seem sometimes to be a tendency to produce off-spring with opposing personality features to their parents. I would be interested to see how the coding does it AAMOF. Maybe Chris Hatch would know.

Your suggested method of working it out seems quite good to me, and I suspect Maxis code probably tries to do something similar. To introduce the wild card element, I would suggest, for each trait first randomise a chance of [say] 10% of it being a non-genetic trait. If it is non-genetic, generate a random number between 0 and 10 inclusive. If it is genetic, then use the method you described in your first post. I'm tempted to see if I can write a little program in Visual Basic to automate the process.

However I'm wondering if the run of grouchy kids you're getting is just one of Peni's "statistical clusters". The birth-rate in my own game is notoriously very low - probably one of the lowest in the known Sims world. There have been only 4 Sims born in my entire game to date. But they're certainly not grouchy. In fact 3 of the 4 have 10 nice points, although none of their parents are as nice as that! Here are the full personalities of all my born-in-game Sims, with their parents' personalities in brackets for comparison:

I have Tarlia's Strangetown, so Titus Curious's personality may be more randomised than in the vanilla Maxis version.

I thought about this subject as I ate my dinner. I really like the idea of basing the personality on the Sims parents--with a chance that the parents could have a rebel child who ends up nothing like them. However, I decided not to go with averages. I fear that doing so would eventually lead to an entire generation with all traits in the 4-6 range. I am not a math person, so I don't know if that would actually happen or not -- it's just something that crossed my mind as a possibility.

Until I figure out a better way, I plan to do this:
** Children will have a 1 in 12 chance of staying with the personality points Maxi gave them.
I will roll a 12-sided die. A roll of 1 means the kid is stuck with what he/she was born with. A roll of 2-12 means the points will change.
** I will change a child's points to reflect his parents' traits, with a +/- (1) possible difference.
For example, mom is #2, dad is #8, the kid can be a 1-9, as decided by the roll of a die. If mom is #2 and dad is #3, then the kid can be a 1-4. Each time, I will use a 4, 6, 8 or 10-sided die that most closely matches the possible trait-point range. A roll outside the range means that one trait stays as Maxi dealt it. (ie: Using a 10-side die, on our first example, the kid can get 1-9 points. Roll a 10 and he/she is stuck with what Maxis gave it -- but just for that one trait.)

Yeah, this is a lot of work. But my polyhedral dice set is new, so I've gotta put 'em to work.

I'll share my opinion with you Gummi, hoping you aren't looking for mathematical tricks..
I like to play this game as realistic as life is, when I can. I am also a mother of 4. I never decide to manually set a sim child's personality, but to me, there would be only one way. Who the parents are..so what will they teach.
Logic..are the parents above average?..lower..because smarter parents will raise they kids to be smarter. neat parents, should teach their kids how important being neat is..creative parents will pass along their passion etc. Just like real life, kids should be an improvement of who you are..then you know you did well. (ideally. )
So this is how I would do it.

If the code was in one of the game's packages and I knew where to find it, I could fix it. Unless it's a Lua script, which I don't know much about.
Personally, I haven't even noticed there were more grouchy kids than nice ones. But it would makes sense if it works like you said.

I used to have this issue, myself, though apparently mine really was related to the game not randomizing properly. Once I started remembering to roll the pacifier, I got fewer out of the blue grouchy kids. When I did get them, I didn't have a formal system to figure out points. I just dragged points up and down until they looked like something the parents would produce based on their personalities.

A related anecdote to offer. I had a sim who fathered something like four children and three of them had almost the same personality as him. Actually, the first born did. Then the second had the same personality with one extra point. Then the third had the same personality with two extra points in the same trait as the second had the one. It was really bizarre. I'd never seen that happen before. (Three of his four children also had his same skintone and many of his facial features. He had some dominant genes!)

I love it when Nice sims produce Grouchy offspring, same for the opposite. I've noticed more variation in offspring personality when the parents have wildly different personality stats. (And some Grouchy sims act very nice and personable, while some Nice sims are caustic little assholes.)

I have been considering the possibility of randomising my born-in-game sims' personalities for a while now. I haven't settled on a definite way to do it (yet?), but currently I have the following ideas.

I will almost certainly use a random number generator, because I use one for loads of other aspects of my game, so it makes sense to me to do the same for this. I will roll separately for each aspect of personality (sloppy-neat, shy-outgoing etc). I want to have a range of possibilities for each personality trait - currently my ideas are as follows, though I'm not sure how likely each possibility would be.

1. The baby has the same number of "trait points" as its mother.
2. The baby has the same number of "trait points" as its father.
3. The baby has the number of "trait points" equal to the average of its mother and father, rounded up (if applicable).
4. The baby has the number of "trait points" equal to the average of its mother and father, rounded down (if applicable).
5. The baby has the number of "trait points" equal to twice its mother's points plus once its father's points divided by three.
6. The baby has the number of "trait points" equal to twice its father's points plus once its mother's points divided by three.
7. The baby has a randomised number of "trait points" with its parents' points as the limits of the range.
8. The baby has a completely randomised number of "trait points", between 0-10.

So, as an example, if Baby A's mother has 8 neat points and Baby's A's father has 3 neat points, Baby A would have the following number of neat points:

1. 8
2. 3
3. 6
4. 5
5. 6
6. 5
7. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8
8. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10

I have never had this problem, if one has 8 and the other has a 4 I will get anywhere from 2 - 9 and never get 0 unless one of them have a 0 like Nervous Subject in Strangetown.

I guess I am just lucky.

Only has one born with no nice points - love him to bits, though My Mr No Nice Points is a LOT of fun.

For what it matters, I've never actually seen this issue either, although sometimes infants vastly differ from either parent. This is from my Birth Records sheet:

Is that Aries second from the bottom a Beaker baby? S/he has the same stats as one of my Beaker kids (and the same as a Beaker grandkid), and that sim is just one of the friendliest sims around.

Born in game babies "running out of points" doesn't fit with how it works IME.

The way I understand that it works, though I'm afraid I can't remember where I read this, so I can't verify the source, is as follows:

For each personality scale (neat/sloppy, grouchy/nice, etc) sim babies have a chance of inheriting their mum's value, their dad's value, OR being assigned a totally random value (0-10). I don't know whether the chances of that are 1:3 for each or whether it's 25% for each parent, 50% random, or something else. But there's no counting of points and babies can indeed be born with completely unbalanced personalities - I've seen this happen, as I'm a fan of extreme personalities myself.

I'd quite like to test this now I've thought about it! I'm happy to do it in a new thread though as this isn't really supposed to be about the current theory.

I don't think I have this problem...
I harly ever peek into personality stats but I have just done so, in case I had not noticed. Indeed I have one child with 0 niceness, another with 1... and others with 6, even 10! Actually Brody stats are 8/2/10/5/10, so "running out of points" does not sem to be the case.
I like having some grouchy sims here and there, so I'm fine.

But even so the idea of customizing personality genetics sounds appealing to me, I think it's worth thinking about it.
(In the meantime I'll keep using the "encourage" action as usual.)

Yes! Her name is Glass Beaker

I had a similar problem (lots of grouches) in my game, so I started randomising them. For each trait, I roll a number out of 5. I got the idea from Sullivan's blog post, 4 of the 5 are the same as in the blog post (1 is the same points as the child's father, 2 is the same as the mother, 3 is an average of both, 4 means I roll a random number). Then for number 5 I take the average plus a random number from -2 to +2. When I have averages with .5, I round towards the parent the child is closest to. If they only have one known parent (plantsims and aliens) I'll make up a random personality for the missing parent first.

It means that kids can "take after" one parent in certain areas, be a combination of their parents in others, completely suprise you, or be a milder or more extreme version of their parents.