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I put restrictions on aspiration rewards
and career rewards.This does mean that sometimes I forget these two things exist and/or never use them at all, but I am overall ok with this. After all these years, I like the increased challenge.
So my rules; I might have talked a bit about this before, but I tie career rewards to Greek House membership. Only sims who are members of a Greek House may use career rewards, and if I'm feeling extra strict, graduates of the Fraternity must actually earn the reward by getting promoted to the appropriate level, and then they would either donate the reward back to the Fraternity/Sorority, or keep it on their home lot for their personal use only, with an option of passing it back and forth to fellow Greek House members. The headcanon is that members of Greek Houses create the "Old Sim's Network," a play on the "old boy network." Members help each other out by sharing perks, helping each other skill, get hired/promoted, meet other prominent sims, find suitable spouses, etc. So this works nicely as a perk, and I await the day I finally get around to letting my upper crust fraternity/sorority members take over their neighborhoods with their classism and schmoozing.
For aspiration rewards, I usually follow some challenge rule (I want to say the apocalypse challenge, but I honestly forget) and restrict it to aliens and the households of sims who are abducted. So in my game, aspiration rewards are alien tech, which explains the magic-like qualities and cheaty behaviors. Usually I have a sim who is also a fraternity/sorority member get abducted, and that will unlock aspiration reward use for the Greek House. Sometimes I let it unlock for just while members are on campus in the actual Greek House, but other times I let it unlock for all members of the fraternity/sorority--but with no extensions/exceptions for members' spouses or future household members. Basically you gotta be in the frat to receive frat privileges.
But I was just thinking about shaking up my rules for aspiration rewards because I never use them and they can be quite useful perks. I don't use all of them, but I do have my favorites. Anyway, I started a new hood a few months ago and am playing the Academie Le Tour premades. I decided that Jonah Powers and Phineaus Furley would not only start a Frat but also use the Frat to try and spread some strict Patriarchy rules throughout Sim City. So to facilitate that, I let members of the Frat use aspiration rewards. I think I let them unlock it once they found and obtained the voodoo doll, but if I expand this idea to more neighborhoods, I'll have to come up with a more interesting challenge to unlock aspiration rewards because they're so powerful.
I like the idea of adding custom objects to aspiration rewards, too! I just did this for Cyjon's Personalit-O-Nomitron--turns out just a simple re-categorization was all that was needed. I like the idea of Greek House members using these objects to cheat through life.
I also use BoilingOil's Reward Catalog so while they're in university, they can pool points together to buy items to benefit them all, and then when they graduate, they can steal their household members' and dates' unused aspiration points to give themselves more rewards and perks. To balance this a tad, I did download mods to reduce the number of days the Elixir of Life gives. And there are a few mods out there were you can use aspiration points to buy things--like Monique has a cowplant that lets you buy milk for aspiration points. So I can't wait to check out all the objects everyone mentioned so I can find more items to help Jonah and Phineaus takeover the city!
As for magic, while I don't usually play aliens, I occasionally play witches, and they have plenty powerful stuff and spells (I use mods to unlock spells by skill level, regardless of alignment). If I find a cool cc magical object or some other thing that could conceivably be caused by/made with magic, then I'll restrict it's use to witches. But magic isn't something I give every sim, and sometimes I make sims do something/give something in exchange for learning magic. For example, in my game a head evil witch is definitely going to ask sims to be made a playable or to give up their firstborn or something, in exchange for magic. A head good witch will be nicer about it, but will be way less likely to teach sims--I'd probably do a coin toss to see.
But I think you get the gist! I do let my sims use cheaty items, but I generally try to make sims go through some hoops/pass a milestone to get them.