More Awesome Than You!

Is there any way that sim children and teens could be made to--instead of bringing home friends from school--just meet people at school? Say, they just come home with a dialog saying "Susie met Bobby at class today" and they get 20/20 points, like with the professors at uni?

I would like something like this because I have lots and lots of teen and child sims right now, and I really want them to meet each other--especially the teens, because they need to start getting paired up--but it's kind of hard because they don't bring people home from school very often--the chat rooms on the computer are always full of sims from their grandparents' generation--and community lots likewise are always full of old farts and not enough teens. So it would be nice to get to meet other kids and get a relationship boost--a bit more often than currently happens--but NOT have to bring them home from school.

I think there may have been a hack addressing part of this at one point (maybe the school bus hack? it asked permission before simchildren brought friends home, but still gave the relationship boost) but I am not sure if it's current for NL, or if it actually exists in reality. And I'd still like them to meet people at school more often. Maybe even more than one person a day.

When/if the NPC Visitor Zapper gets updated to ban classes of sims from community lots (so my teen clubs will no longer be full of their grandparents) that will take care of part of the problem, but since that's been eaten by twojeffs' computer, I'd really like this one.

You need TwoJeffs' "Bring Friends Home" mod or whatever it's called.  You get the option to bring them home or not, but either way you get the relationship points.  As far as I know it's been updated for Uni.  I used to use it but I don't now because I prefer to let them come home in case I get any drama out of it.

That must be what I was thinking of, but is it compatible with NL? Anyway, I still want them to bring friends home *more*--I'm sick of them getting to adulthood and realizing they only know 3 people outside their immediate family.

It seems like it should really be easy--I wish I knew anything about modding at all, I'd do it myself.

Kate, it is compatible with NL, as is the welcome wagon fix. I love them both and don't want to play without them ever again. I've had it ever since TJ announced that it was working with NL, and had no problems to date.

Kate, I agree with you that it's more fun when your kids get to know more of the other kids. Playing the game unmodified and without "cheating", childhood is the most boring lifestage (to me) ... yet I find the kid interactions and animations to be the most charming.

Awhile back I started throwing my own kids "play dates", where I shrub 3 or 4 neighborhood children to a lot after school. If you stick with 7 Sim days for chiildhood, and they only bring home one friend every few days, there isn't much of an opportunity for your Sim to "meet" many of their peers before chiildhood is gone.

Anyway, my shrub play date goal was just that they got to know each other before they transitioned to teens, but it was so much fun watching them interact with each other, that the play dates became a goal unto themselves. I love children because they are the most likely to do something interesting when you aren't controlling them. 

Toddlers on their own, god bless them, will play with the freakin' rabbit head, that's a surprise.

I'd love a play date kind of hack where several children show up randomly after school.

I always have my sim kids have group playdates on the weekends. I have the kid invite a few other children over; this is great for having all the kids in the neighbourhood at least be acquainted, especially if I cycle through a few houses. It doesn't take long before they all have a nice group of friends. I just wish there were some more group interaction objects for kids, since it is sometimes quite hard to get them to like each other.

Agree.  I usually Macro socialize friendly them to a point before I let them run loose. Running loose is fun. Cops and robbers never fails to crack me up.  I'm simple like that.  ;D

Yeah, I like the kids running round playing tag or whatever, the little engine noises they make when playing with the toybox toys are quite cool too. As a RL parent I kind of file that away, while you can hear the child you know where s/he is and what s/he's doing. When the noise stops, then you have to check it out.  ;)