I currently play with 6-day long seasons, split into two rounds (so 3 days per rounds). In other words, for each season I will play all the families twice. I love 3-days round because it’s short enough for me to play it in one sitting, but long enough to progress the story in a meaningful way. And with three days, the Sims ages don’t go too out of sync while I am making my way through the neighborhood.
As I am renovating each subhoods as I go, my idea is to play a hood for one full season, then add a new hood and its families for the next season, and so on, until I have a complete uberhood.
If the number of families become too overwhelming, I might reduce the seasons length to 3 days and only play one round. (I’m not a fan of this idea because I feel like 3 days is to short to properly enjoy the season, especially regarding to holidays.). Alternatively, I might allow myself to skip the families I don’t like and simple age them up manually. I will however play with everyone for at least two rounds before deciding to skip.
I am still figuring things out so we will have to adapt as we go.
One issue with playing rotationally is how to explain time paradoxes. For instance, if I know that a Sim was supposed to do something specific, like go on an appointment on Spring Day 1, how do I explain that I saw them somewhere else while playing a different household?
My answer to this is that I don’t consider time as linear. Let me explain. Think about it like a TV show. In a series or movie, we are not shown every living moment of the characters. We don’t get to see every single day, but only the ones where interesting events happened. And scenes are not always shown chronologically either: you can have flashbacks, or events that were supposed to happen at the same time told differently, etc.
The same principle applies to my game. Because a year last 24 days, 2 days make up one real life month. To give an example, if I play with Don Lothario on Spring Day 1, Februray in my calendar, I am witnessing a random day in his life during February. Then, if I play with the Goth family on Spring Day 1, when Don is supposed to get married to Cassandra, it’s still Februray but a completely different day, that probably happened later in the month. (If the scenario was different, we might say that it happened earlier or at the same time, depending on what make sense for the story).
The only exception to this is for Sims who are supposed to be away for a long period of time, for instance if they are hospitalized, in prison or traveling abroad. In that case, I will use mods to make sure that they don’t appear where they are not supposed to be.
Ultimate Uberhood 