Being an avid player of Sims 3 since the summer of 2009, I couldn't resist the temptation to start one of those legacy games when I came across this thread on their forums describing the challenge. If you don't want to read the long specifications for it there, here it is in a nutshell. You start with one Sim as your "founder", whose traits you choose, and buy the largest empty lot in the game to start with. This leaves you with next to no money to begin with, and your goal is to amass as much wealth and happiness as you can for your Sim family over ten generations. You aren't allowed to take any easy ways out or cheat. Obviously this means no money or mood cheats, like "kaching" or "motherlode", or making needs static. You must have aging and story progression on, and set the Sim lifespan to the 90-day normal setting.
You can't eat ambrosia or life fruit, or use death flowers or ghost resurrections to let your Sims live longer. Your founder and heirs must marry town NPCs generated by the game, and not custom characters of your own creation or from the exchange. The founder is also not allowed to marry a rich Sim and start off rich that way. You have to live and build on that same lot for the entire time and leave it as your active household. When your founder dies, you continue through an heir, which has to be one of his/her blood children (no adoptions). You can have more children, but only one heir, and if you send other children out of the house on their own once they grow up, you're not allowed to re-import them.
Even more crazy, you aren't allowed to select the traits for the children you have, unless you play with the "family trait" option where your founder and heirs share one common trait that you can assign if you choose. Everything else must be rolled for with the random button if your parenting skills are good enough that you're given the option to choose. If you roll terrible traits on the first try, them's the breaks. Even the "midlife crisis" lifetime reward you can purchase where you can change traits must be a random roll for the new ones. There is also an option to use a matriarchy or patriarchy, where your heirs must be one gender, although I did not choose to use that one.
You only get credit for satisfying a Sim's lifetime wish once for each type. That's to prevent you from using, say, the Perfect Garden, with your founder and keeping it going so each Sim created with it gets it again off the bat. If you get to the point where you have duplicates from marrying in Sims with the same lifetime wish, or the traits limit the ones you can pick to ones you've done, you don't get any Legacy Game points for satisfying it again.
It's a challenging way to start for sure, but it was fun, and I figured I'd try it with my Reginald Bushroot Sim. Sure, he's not a duck, and is a green and purple humanized version, but he actually plays out in personality pretty close to his Darkwing Duck canon self... or at least as close as a Sim's personality can get. I did decide to use the family trait option, which I picked to be "Genius". Bushy's pretty smart, so it stands to reason that his kids would be, too. Plus it's a useful one, so if his descendants roll all terrible traits aside from that, they'll at least be smart! I did not go for the matriarchy or patriarchy, or even first born, just with whichever kid seems like he or she will be the best to carry on the legacy. (And it helps to be green!)
As a Sim, Reginald Bushroot had the following traits when he started out:
His personality traits are Green Thumb, Hopeless Romantic, Genius, Cowardly, and Loves the Outdoors.
His Lifetime Wish is The Perfect Garden.
His favorite color is Green, favorite food is Cobbler, and favorite music is Pop. Of the genres to choose from, that seemed to be the one that fit him best, since I can see him being a pop or easy listening type.
His age was set to Young Adult, to give him plenty of time to find a wife and have a family before kicking the bucket on the 90-day Sim lifespan.
The story of Reginald Bushroot and his humble beginnings in Sunset Valley.
Let Spike take you back to the main chamber!
