A two-part question:

A) Has anyone ever figured out a relatively clean way to create a family where the grandparents are looking after kids or teens, totally without the parents being present? After re-watching The Wire on HBO, I wanted to try my hand at re-creating some of that world; in some of those families, the parents aren't always a part of the picture. In the past, I've artificially created such situations by killing off parents, but I'm leery of doing so, for all the usual reasons. I've also just moved teens and their grandparents out, abandoning the parental household, but that leaves lots of unnecessary characters floating around, and my number of files is already obscenely high.
SO, Simmers... I know there's no real way to get the CAS screen to release you to the neighborhood without the usual family tree requirements being met... so what's the best solution out there?

B) Speaking of family trees, I've created neighborhoods which contain a family spread out over several households... usually when re-creating a model of a movie or TV show. Now, it's no problem to have several families all named the same, but they're not really related in the eyes of the game, right? I guess this piggybacks on part A: can you artificially edit family trees to create several RELATED households of (let's say) Sopranos, so that Meadow and A.J. can have dinner with Livia as their actual grandmother, without having to play out Livia's marriage, the birth and growth of Tony, and the death of Johnny Boy? And if you add Uncle Junior into the mix, then you have to go back another generation to where Corrado and Johnny were growing up. I've seen mods where more loosely related Sims are given privileges of more immediate family members, but that's not what I'm getting at here.

Just create parents in CAS and then kill them. You can set up any family ties you want with the sim blender, but if you leave holes in the family tree by not creating parents, then the family tree will obviously be wrong and other family ties might be inconsistent.

Never thought about this. So you can create the three generations in CAS, than delete the parents (still in CAS) and the game will let you proceed? If you have to have PARENTS with children in CAS, then you would be back to putting all three generations in a house and killing off the parents..Yes?

No, pretty sure if you delete the parents in CAS then all the family ties get deleted.

Thanks for your help. Seeing as how in some of these cases on The Wire, the parents ARE either dead, or "guests of the government", maybe bumping them off in the game isn't quite as objectionable as I thought. However, I know there are better and worse ways of doing this; what's the safest method you can recommend? Die by Flies? Rodney's Tombstone? Also, it'd be ideal to not have them trying to maintain a ghostly presence after they're gone; however, in another neighborhood of mine, I need to have the ghost of a specific Sim appear, for storytelling purposes. Is there a foolproof method for making this happen? In the past I've noticed ghosts appear after deaths, but not all deaths, and I admittedly never paid attention to the circumstances which caused it, or not.

Also, I've heard much talk about the Blender, but have never tried it. Is there a link for a tutorial or anything like that?

If 'guests of the government' means in prison you could use Inge's prisoner token and lump them all in a house somewhere that serves as a jail. More complicated than killing them off though. http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2P...ims2_Prison.htm

Killing sims with the cheat objects is not dangerous, any old way will do. It only affects the color their ghost will be. If you don't want ghosts hanging around, send the graves to a community lot you don't visit. As for summoning a ghost specifically, there's an old Christianluv mod that can supposedly be used to summon and control ghosts, but I haven't tried it, so I don't know how well it works. Otherwise, I think ghosts haunting is pretty random.

Unless you have mods or you're particular about ghost color, it doesn't really matter what type of death you choose. The exception to that is of course, drowning ghosts, because they leave puddles everywhere, which eventually leads to weeds all over your lawn. Absolutely the worse ghosts in the game, imo, so I don't recommend that.

But otherwise, yeah, what kestrellyn said. Death = death, whether it's by mod/cheat object, Rodney's Death Creator (I think that's what it's called), or whatever.

And yes, if you don't want ghosts around, it's best to send them to a community lot. Remember to visit the lot and move the graves off the street and onto the lot, so the graves don't get stuck in transit. And I do recommend No Death Type Loss When Moving Tombstones to Community Lots by SixAM! so that you don't lose ghost colors. Or you can use Simler90's Better Ghosts, which incorporates that fix and changes a bit more about ghosts and hauntings. Now, the old rule of thumb used to be that, if you want to see a ghost on a community lot, you should wait until it spawns before sending the tombstone/urn to a community lot. But there seems to be some conflicting reports on whether that's really necessary. I've never confirmed it myself. But if you aren't seeing ghosts in your community lot graveyards (and you want to), you can always move them back to a residential lot, wait until the ghost spawns, and then send them back. So no real harm in sending them off right away.

The Christianlov mod kestrellyn was talking about is here; it supposedly lets you control a ghost, so that you can tell it to scare sims, etc. I haven't tried it either.

Finally, the Blender is short for the Sim Blender. It's originally by Twojeffs (and you can find it in the Simbology archives) but I recommend this update by Whoward69/PickNMixSims here. Honestly, it does a lot of the same things that other mods and boolprop does. It's handy for things like changing motives, adjusting age and relationships, etc. It's an all purpose cheat object, really. If you use the Insimenator or the Sim Manipulator, though, you don't need it. In fact, the Sim Manipulator is probably superior--except for maybe skill limiting, it'll do pretty much everything the Sim Blender does and more. I think the Sim Blender still persists in popularity because it has a slightly better menu system, and, even more likely, it's been around a really long time. A lot of us older simmers are used to using it and are really familiar with it. I know that's why I keep it around, even though I also have the Manipulator. Anyway, if you want to read more about it, the original version for AL is here--check out the rtf file inside.

There is a variety of things you can do with the parents. Not every child raised by grandparents has 2 dead parents.

1)Kill one or both,
2)play one or both as a separate family,
3)make one of both townies. If you do this you will need a mod fix called 'get parents' or kids with an A+ report card will bug out on arriving home.
4)Place one into the sleeping chamber at a hospital. I played a challenge once with just children by having the parent in a chamber on the lot. I would have to search to find this piece of cc but the adult sim sleeps unageing needs not moving in this thing.

Maybe Numenorean Hibernation Cell (Aspiration reward OR Buyable)?

Yes, that's the sleeping chamber that I meant but couldn't think who made it or what it was called.

Ooh - the Hibernation Cell sounds intriguing. I'll check it out, and the Manipulator, too. Thanks!

...or - if you DON'T have a downtown, make them downtownees. There will no kids crying about them dying, and they won't care that they can't interact with them. Or (I think someone already said) make them townees, put them on a lot with a phone, and give them a prisoner token.