#im going on holiday and ive planned almost everything out in a shared google doc

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Hey there! I’ve been a fan of the Collinses (and associates! lol) ever since you started posting. Now that I’ve begun my own blog, I have to say (with the utmost admiration and respect) I’m stunned that you’re able to manage so many damn families!

I’ve played plenty of fundie saves before, but always with a single heir per generation, which means I’m woefully inexperienced with rotational gameplay. It’s so difficult, especially when you have to juggle varying levels of fundie-ness between households, extended family relationships, constant pregnancies, timeline issues and taking posed/stages screenshots for posts on top of actual gameplay!

If you’re up for it, I would so appreciate any advice/tips/tricks you have to offer re: dealing with rotational fundie gameplay. Either way, many thanks for sticking around for so long and sharing your sims with us ☺️

Hi! I'm so happy that you enjoy the blog, honestly I've been doubting whether that many people read it anymore, I just keep posting for my own personal satisfaction. As usual I'm a rambler, so this is about to be a mini-thesis, which will be below the cut!

If there's anything that I can say to explain how I do it, it's that you should just plan. Plan, Plan, and Plan. I micromanage every little thing that happens in my sims lives, I have two saves: one for gameplay and one for taking pictures. This is so that I can be ahead in terms of the plot lines and pictures without having to rush the actual game. I've mentioned it a few times here and there, but I have this mega doc with literally everything that pertains to my sims. It's got their life stories, love stories, random facts like allergies, their birthdays, the 'outcomes' for labour and delivery which effect how many kids they have, what kind of jobs they work, etc. For planning I also have a mega note on my phone with each post and what I'll write for it, I plan what will be said and who will be included, and sometimes the outfits required for them to wear or whatever poses I'm going to need for the post. It's also where I dump future ideas that I'll eventually work into a post if I want to. Since weddings are a pillar of fundie life, I have a separate note with all things weddings, before I wedding I plan the outfits for everyone from the bride and groom and their parents to the bridal party. I assign the wedding a colour scheme and then assign different people different colours. I also plan which poses I'm going to do, which for the main couples is a lot since they have a lot of posts for their weddings. For side characters that only get one post for their weddings I'll usually do a whole photoshoot then just pick two or three pictures to post.

One thing that also helped was me putting them in categories like 'heir' 'part heir' or 'side character', that helps me prioritise whose stories to focus on and how much they'll be seen on the blog. Honestly speaking, there are some sims that I only interact with when it's time to include them in a storyline, for that I let the Neighbourhood Stories take over and check in from time to time when I need to add a kid to the family or dress them for events. Since I have two saves, what I've found myself doing is playing with the side characters in the 'picture save' so I don't lose any game time that I could be using to play with the main characters in the main save. For rotational gameplay in order to make posts, I select certain narrators and basically just rotate between them with select characters sometimes getting a post or two. For this generation I've got Adalynn, Valentina, Lana, Maggie, and Brittany as narrators (there may be more, but for now I'm sticking with these). With Lana marrying into Adalynn's family I'm experimenting with her showing us what life is like for those in Newcrest since Adalynn moved away from home when she got married. Right now I see her as an opportunity to include more side characters since she's married to the 12th child in a cohort of 13, so her experiences and interpersonal relationships will be different than the older siblings and we may see more other character involvement . Maggie and Brittany are seldom narrators, with Brittany only really showing up at Harvestfest to do her family catch up - though I'm also experimenting how to bring them into the plot a bit more because they bring the political drama.

Since pregnancy is involves the changing of time and seasons (and I play on a 4 day = 1 year system vs the game's 28 day year), I make very good use of MCCC and pause pregnancies so that I can have control of how they're documented. The way pregnancies will be documented depends on how I've labelled the characters, narrators will always have more focus on their pregnancies (even though Valentina is done having children she'll narrate the pregnancies in her family) and will share about other pregnancies in the family. Circling back round to the 2 game system, since the way I play is faster than the game's passage of time, once I'm done posing and taking screenshots in my picture save then I usually sit back and actually enjoy playing in the actual game save, where I will then rotate households depending on whatever mood I'm in.

Thank you again for being so nice! I hope this extendo reply is able to answer some of your questions, but if it doesn't then feel free to message me and I can see if I can help.