BTK: Alicia Grace’s Apartment

SPOILER WARNING: This journal entry is related to the entirety of generation 1 of “How To Live Your Life With Grace” but contains very minor spoilers.

Behind The Keys: Dealing with Alicia Grace’s Apartment Traits

When I first asked my fiance Jason to be involved with choosing the random traits for my Sims and their houses, he was hesitant. Jason does not play the Sims, and has little understanding of how traits work. After creating Alicia (whom he gave the traits Bro, Perfectionist, and Self Assured) I chose a quaint apartment for her to start in and started reading off the traits he could choose from.

Now, one thing to know about me is that in the past, I’ve played The Sims with absolute control. I RARELY choose negative traits unless it fits a narrative, and at that its generally only things like slob or mean. Jason had different ideas.

This particular apartment already came with “TLC”. Jason wasn’t terribly interested in the traits that encouraged particular moods or skill building. What did peek his interest, however, was “cursed” which causes things to go wrong in the apartment. He asked what that meant, and I told him I had no idea, as I’d never used it. Looking it up seemed like cheating, so we didn’t bother and he chose that one. Later, I heard from other simmers that cursed generally makes fires and death more common. I’ll admit, there hasn’t been a single fire in the apartment yet (fingers crossed).

The other trait Jason chose was “gremlins”, who come out at night to break things. Didn’t seem so bad, I optimistically said it would be a good way to build Alicia’s handiness skill.

Well, I don’t know the extend to which gremlins are supposed to break something.
Perhaps it’s a combination of having cursed gremlins, but every few days in the middle of the night, every single device in the apartment broke. I mean everything. Anything that had plumbing or electronics.

This resulted in many early mornings where Alicia had to wake up early and prioritize what to fix first based on her needs. Generally the order was toilet, sink, stove, then all else. There were a few times when everything broke again before Alicia had gotten around to fixing everything. After the third or fourth time this happened, I decided to minimize the amount of electronics in the apartment to reduce how much Alicia had to fix. When Akira first moved in, he was tense for 3 days straight trying to deal with the constantly broken appliances.

As the story progressed, my annoyance grew. One day when I was ranting (playfully) at Jason for the hell he caused, he said nothing, but started playing the song “You’re Welcome” from Moana with the biggest grin on his face. I glared at him.

What did I get myself into?

Ready about Alicia Grace’s story in the “How To Live With Grace” series!