Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Medieval Career Conversions

For the longest time in my medieval hood I've just ignored the Maxis jobs and flat out told my simmies not to want them. Unfortunately, removing the careers seriously strips the game of much of its flavor. I recently stumbled upon a post about people saying they either wanted or made default replacements of the careers to be more in keeping with their game. I was already working on a set of stand-alone medieval careers, but doing them as defaults is a much better idea.

Let's start at the very beginning, with school. I've created a mod to make the regular public school not exist, and the private school is run by 'the Church'. While I'm by no means even remotely religious, we have to face facts, the Church was just as important if not more so than the ruling class in medieval life. Because people tend to be polarized about religion, I've kept all talk of God out of it. If it truly offends you, you can easily replace all mention of 'church' with any other organization and its titles and the game play will be the same. This takes care of any issues of religious brands. It could be the muslim church or jewish church just as easily. (It wasn't back then, but this is a game and whose to say it can't be like that? It's your game!)

Now the reason its important to make this schooling switch is that similarly to the restricted UNI careers, some careers will require that you had gone to school (private school). Other jobs will require that you did not. Some jobs don't matter. This is an easy way of creating a class system. The lowly peasant jobs are for those who did not attend school, and career tracks like medical and scholar require that you do. The in between jobs are helpful for families that are trying to move up in the world, or for spare heirs who want to escape the pressures of court life.

The schooling check is placed both on the LTW and on joining the career, so sims will aspire to be something they can be, and they can't get a job that they are not suited for.

There are actually 6 class levels in my system.

  1. At the very bottom are the lowlifes: the Outlaws (Criminal), Vagrants (Slacker), and Gamblers (Gamer). Both outlaws and gamblers have neither school or lack of school requirements, just so storylines of 'how the mighty have fallen' can exist. Vagrants do require a lack of schooling however.
  2. Next after them are the peasants: Farmers (Athletic), House Servants (Culinary), Herders (Natural Science), Fisherman (Oceanography), and Horse Masters (Adventurers). I have removed the Uni requirement on Nat. Sci. so our goat herders do not need college degrees. All of these careers require a lack of schooling.
  3. After them are the working class: Merchants (Business), Actors (Show Business), Musicians (Music), Jesters (Entertainment), Dancers (Dance), Craftsman (Architecture), and Artist (Artist). None of these careers have the schooling check, so everyone can be these if they are so inclined. Once again, the Uni requirement is removed.
  4. Above them is a class I don't have a name for yet. It consists of Law Enforcement, Military, Clergy/Monks (Journalism), and Divination (Intelligence). There are two Clergy careers in my set, this one is for those who were interested in study and prayer (the path of monks and nuns) and lived in monastery and convents. This is the only career in this class that requires schooling. The other three do not have the schooling check.
  5. The second highest class is the learned class: Academia (Education), Medicine, Science, and Witchcraft (Paranormal). All except witchcraft require schooling. While it takes a lot of study to learn witchcraft, I doubt you when to church school to learn it! ;)
  6. The final class is the ruling class and consists of only Monarchy (Politics) and Clergy (Law). Both require schooling. This Clergy career is more about leading churches and the top position is Pope. In that time period the King and the Pope were both as powerful as each other, or even the Pope was more powerful, so that is the reason it's included so high up.
In addition to having a schooling check on these careers, for the LTWs, I've also rearranged which careers are for which aspiration types. I never liked having such a limited range for each that every Knowledge sim would always have the same LTW. It was so boring. Of the 25 careers, each of the main six aspiration types has 10 careers. Grilled Cheese has 5. Additionally, I've included personality type to these. Sims who are deathly shy will not aspire to be an actor or a jester. They are not precluded from taking the job, but they won't want it themselves. Some careers require an either or of personality, so a sim who is either very lazy or quite sloppy may wish to live out their life as a Vagrant.

The other 16 LTWs are being included in a similar fashion, and add another 5 to each of the aspiration types. Some ones are what you'd think would be backwards, 50 dream dates is for both Romance and Family, but family sims enjoy going out with their sweethearts as well. 50 1st dates is obviously still not for them, its for Romance and Pleasure. The annoying Pet wants are restricted to those without educations, as pets in medieval hoods are often sheep and goats and pigs. Anyone working with dirty animals and such is most definitely not civilized. *sticks nose in air like the court members would do*

2 comments:

  1. This might help: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=270812

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  2. Not sure if you're still working on this, but you could call the class with Law Enforcement and Military "Gentry". Semi-reasonable, I think, though it doesn't work well with the clergy-ish careers.

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