Private School & The Headmaster. WTF?

[Dea]

I finally got some kids into private school...I almost didnt make it bc I forgot the doors were locked to visitors...He would follow my sims around...

John Burb is a great schmoozer...

[Jelenedra]

I could be wrong, but I think the best shmoozers are sims with a high interest in school and work.

[Orikes]

I could be wrong, but I think the best shmoozers are sims with a high interest in school and work.

That could be true. I know my Romance sim with maxed Charisma couldn't schmooze to save his life, but his shy Family sim wife had hte headmaster eating out of his hand.

[Jelenedra]

That could be it too, my sims are usually either family or fortune, which are both logically good people to schmooze about money and school. But Maxis isn't exactly logical...

[Dea]

Ill check what kinda interests John's daughters have bc they tried to schmooze too and they got negative points. 

[kutto]

The hot tub is a sentence of death! Usually if the headmaster gets in, he won't get out until the next morning, and so he misses dinner and coffee.

Really? I've had no problems with it. He wandered away once, and I found him in there. I just "Call Over"'d him, and he came right back inside.

[gali]

Now I use the Education Spawn of the Insimenator, to move my kids to private school, but before it, I observed a lot the Head Masters, with the Merola's mirror.

When the Head Master comes to the house, all his moods are 50% (social, hunger, bladder, fun, hunger, etc). He is very lonely sim, with very low social and fun moods.

After the dinner, I always increased his moods to 100% with the Multipainting, and he immediately left, giving me 90 points. He didn't even check the houses' rooms.

[rohina]

This would be the mainly cheating method, though, so not all that useful for people who want to get their kids in without cheating (like if they are playing a challenge).

[laylei]

Another thing I suggest is to delete or inventory the BYU controllers before the Headmaster gets to the house. It was probably just a freaky glitch, but I had the Headmaster get stuck in a loop trying to use the bathroom over and over. Had to exit without saving because everything just got wonky and bad.

[cwykes]

I finally got some kids into private school...I almost didnt make it bc I forgot the doors were locked to visitors..

Yup add that to the list if you have a home business - Locking your doors to visitors will leave HM standing on the doorstep while you try to give him that tour.  Took me a few tries to understand that he wasn't blocked by the family milling around or some stuck object - he was locked out!

You can usually shoo him out of the hottub if he gets in. The 10pt Expresso bonus is fast and easy.

Aren't the schmooze options like flirt in that you can't use each one successfully unless the relationship is high enough? I don't even try schmooze about school until I reckon it's about 20/20.  I've never used the top ones.  I reckon teens or kids with high charisma are the best for greeting and touring.  One of the sim kids who played with the charisma rabbit non-stop.  Maybe because they have the right interest set...   Greeting him with the aspiration specs on is said to help too.

I make a point of making friends with HM after the visit in case he comes again.  (Someone posted "don't do that and don't phone him" - I think that's wrong and it it's right I want to know.)    Marrying HMs is a bad idea if there are going to be any kids on that lot.  Never heard it was totally "a bad thing".  I was thinking about marrying one to Isabella Monty - Patrizio died during the HM tour where Romeo and Mercutio got into private school.  Isabella and the HM got on like a house on fire!

If the HM arrives and doesn't stay - it's bugged according to Pescado.  It's in the Myths thread in the War Room.

[gjam]

Someone above posted a link to a page about how to get a really high score.  Well, I don't care as long as it's high enough, but the person who wrote that page sounds reasonably competent. 

However, they talked about getting the HM to go to the part of a room that had the best environment and said it didn't matter if there was clutter/mess in other parts of the room.  I thought the environment score applied to the whole room.  I thought the thing about putting a bright light next to an expensive painting and having the HM stand close was a sheeple myth. 

So which is true?  Can you get different environment scores in different areas of a room?  Does it depend on how big the room is, how far away the dirty area is from the good area?

[Gwill]

Marrying a headmaster was buggy, but has apparently been fixed by  a patch.  The problem was that if you married the headmaster, no one would step up and take his place, and you'd have no option to invite the headmaste over to get any of your other kids into private school.  As far as I remember the only way I could fix the problem was by killing the guy off.
That was a long time ago (base game only), so it's probably not likely to happen anymore.

In addition to that I was disappointed to find that the stupid man had no job, no money and no skills.

[J. M. Pescado]

I make a point of making friends with HM after the visit in case he comes again.  (Someone posted "don't do that and don't phone him" - I think that's wrong and it it's right I want to know.)    Marrying HMs is a bad idea if there are going to be any kids on that lot.  Never heard it was totally "a bad thing".  I was thinking about marrying one to Isabella Monty - Patrizio died during the HM tour where Romeo and Mercutio got into private school.  Isabella and the HM got on like a house on fire!

Marrying the headmaster *SHOULD* be OK if you have the Phone Hack. That's one of the fixes in the Phone Hack. As long as you don't mind a replacement headmaster spawning, anyway.

[Gwill]

What about the FFS lot debugger's "fix AWOL headmaster"?
Does that fix married headmasters, or is it related to that other bug where headmasters don't show up when they said, no matter how many times you invite them?

[J. M. Pescado]

Married Headmasters is a phone artifact, it won't let you invite the Headmaster because it perceives the resident headmaster as a headmaster already present. The Phone Hack fixes this by doublechecking that the headmaster is, in fact, a reigning headmaster in the NPC family, and not a resident. The "never shows up when invited" is a scenario controller corruption. Fix AWOL Headmaster nukes the corrupted controller, forcing it to respawn.

[cwykes]

Marrying the headmaster *SHOULD* be OK if you have the Phone Hack. That's one of the fixes in the Phone Hack. As long as you don't mind a replacement headmaster spawning, anyway.

Not totally reassured there!  Still I may risk it to keep Isabella happy - couldn't live without the phone hack!  I have the normal 3 HMs, so marrying one shouldn't cause an extra to spawn I hope.

...... they talked about getting the HM to go to the part of a room that had the best environment and said it didn't matter if there was clutter/mess in other parts of the room.  I thought the environment score applied to the whole room.  I thought the thing about putting a bright light next to an expensive painting and having the HM stand close was a sheeple myth. 

So which is true?  Can you get different environment scores in different areas of a room?  Does it depend on how big the room is, how far away the dirty area is from the good area?

I've been told elsewhere that the environment score is "area-based" rather than averaged over the room.  DK any details though and I'd be interested to hear them.  I've never bothered trying to get the HM into a good bit though.  You can always move dirty plates outside with moveobjects on if you think they matter.

[jsalemi]

Not totally reassured there!  Still I may risk it to keep Isabella happy - couldn't live without the phone hack!  I have the normal 3 HMs, so marrying one shouldn't cause an extra to spawn I hope.

No, the extra will spawn --  the game likes to keep 3 of each of the service NPCs around. Same if you kill off a nanny, as many of us have done -- the game spawns replacements the next time you call for a nanny.

[simmiecal]

Has anyone had a problem with the headmaster not giving any food points. I recently noticed that no matter which house or family I was playing and no matter who cooked, or how many cooking skills they had, the headmaster will not score my sims' meals. I think it might be a glitch, but I'm not sure. Anyone else having this problem?

How are you calling the headmaster to the meal? Make sure you are not clicking on the platter to "call to meal" like you normally would, but click on a sim and "call to meal" that way when running the scenerio.

[rohina]

There are a couple of possibilities that I have encountered:

1) did you use maxmotives or some other cheat which may have affected his hunger level? He won't eat enough to give you points if he isn't hungry.
2) is he eating someone's leftovers? This has happened to me a couple of times; for some reason he will pick the mostly empty plate someone else has eaten from instead of a full one, and then he only gives 1 or 2 food points. Stupid HM.

[syberspunk]

So which is true?  Can you get different environment scores in different areas of a room?  Does it depend on how big the room is, how far away the dirty area is from the good area?

Pescado pointed this out to me once and it pretty much is true as far as I can tell. The environment score is 'area based' as someone said rather than an overall room average. If you put objects that give a high environment score closer together, and you have the HM stand at a spot that maximizes proximity to all those objects, you will get a higher score for that room than if you have him stand anywhere else. I'm not sure exactly how the score is calculated, but I definitely got a much higher score when I had him stand in a corner that was surrounded by an expensive TV, bookcase, couch, and Light rather than if I had him stand at the entrance of the room further away from these objects.

I also had him stand in a bathroom with BUY installed, and he didn't get stuck in any use loop. But I suppose this was fairly early in the scenario, and maybe his bladder wasn't depleted enough. *shrugs*

Pescado also mentioned that it is better to have teens/children schmooze because the HM's interests tend to be 'juvenile' or something to that effect. I'm not sure if it is also mood based. When I was running several HM scenarios to test out my Enroll Legacy phone hack, I was using the Pleasant household as guinea pigs. I tried it often with Daniel or Mary-Sue schmoozing, and it seemed to be ok. But whenever their moods were just Green instead of Gold/Platinum, it appeared that the schmoozing failed. I can't say for sure whether it was actually mood/aspiration based or just more Maxian sadorandomness. But when I tried schmoozing with Angela or Lilith, it always seemed to go well. I didn't think to actually check the interests at that time though, so it might have been that their interests were high in school or work. I wonder if those interests get set randomly for Maxis pre-made families, like the Turn On/Offs, or if they are 'hard coded' from the start. Also curious, are the personality and zodiac signs for Maxis pre-mades 'hard-coded' or random?

Regardless, I rarely have that much of a problem with the HM scenario. I'd say maybe 9 times out of 10, it's pretty easy. I've only had it fail a few times when I was doing my tests, but that was mostly due to poor schmoozing, which apparently dropped points drastically, and a few times I decided to use different foods to see how it would affect it. I'm not completely sure that using the more expensive foods or foods that require higher skill necessarily racks up more points. It's been awhile, but I do remember passing the scenario with lunch meat sandwiches and even burnt hamburgers.

Ste

[J. M. Pescado]

I also had him stand in a bathroom with BUY installed, and he didn't get stuck in any use loop. But I suppose this was fairly early in the scenario, and maybe his bladder wasn't depleted enough. *shrugs*

BUY does not act on NPCs like the headmaster, so if he gets stuck in the bathroom, it's not because of BUY.

Pescado also mentioned that it is better to have teens/children schmooze because the HM's interests tend to be 'juvenile' or something to that effect.

That's not specifically what I said, i said that SOME headmasters are like this, and if your sim and/or the headmaster don't have a decent interest in the schmooze field, the interaction won't go too well. The "school" topic, however, tends to be more interesting to children than to adults, so many adults don't do well on this topic. It's largely based on interests.

[idtaminger]

That's the last time I will send any kids to private school.
To much for my and my sims nerves.

I use the Syberspunk "legacy" mod. Once you get one kid into private school, you can just call up and register subsequent generations/siblings. No headmaster scenario required.