Legacy Challenge Rules Teaser: Succession Laws

Two children, but who will be the heir of the 2nd generation?

In a previous post, I made a poll asking the community to weigh in on how I should handle the question of ‘who becomes heir’. With a little bit of variation, the results have become crystal clear and pretty much maintained these ratios since day 2 of the poll.

With over a thousand responses, here is how the results were distributed.

50% of you, selected “I like the rule where the first born must be the heir”
30% of you didn’t like the idea of being forced to stick with the first born and wanted to go with the child of their choice.
15% of you didn’t have a strong opinion either way and would play the challenge however I wrote it.

Lastly, 5% of you picked ‘other’ and had quite a wide variety of very insightful responses.

Now, technically, the “First born must be the heir” rule choice won, but I don’t like that it only won by a small margin. I have also done more thoughts on the matter and have come up with the final rules for The Sims 4 Legacy Challenge in how heirs are going to be handled and chosen.

Here they are:

Succession Law

As part of the creation of your founder, you must also decide, before you even start playing your new Legacy Family, what your succession law is. This decision must be made at the very start of the challenge, and may not be changed at all for the duration of your family’s 10 generations. The law has three different components, and you must make a selection for all three categories. That said, the components can be mixed and matched however you like.

Component 1: Gender Law

Here are the options governing how your challenge handles gender.

• Matriarchy: Founder must be female. Female children inherit over male children, but males may inherit if there are no females present.
• Strict Matriarchy: Same as Matriarchy but males are NOT eligible at all to be called heir. ONLY a female can be an heir.
• Patriarchy: Same as Matriarchy, but you must start with a male founder and the rule applies to male children.
• Strict Patriarchy: Same as strict matriarchy but with a male founder and male children.
• Equality: May start with either gender founder, gender does not play any factor in determining order of succession and heirs may be of either gender.
• Strict Equality: May start with either gender founder, but each generation MUST have an heir of the opposite gender, alternating back and forth. Children of the same gender as their parent are not eligible to be named Heir.

The Masque Family follows the “Equality” gender law, thus Lance being a boy does not impact his ability to become heir. Had the family been a matriarchy, Lance’s younger sister Lady Fara would be heiress instead of him.

Component 2: Heir Selection

• First Born: The oldest child who is eligible must be the heir. The heir will never change unless the eldest child dies.
• Last Born: The youngest eligible child becomes heir. The heir can change if a new eligible child is born younger than the previous heir.
• Living Will: The eligible child with the highest relationship score with their primary parent(The previous generation’s heir or founder) becomes the heir. The heir can change as relationship scores change.
• Merit: The children who have successfully completed the greatest number of aspirations (including childhood aspirations) are first to inherit. Ties are broken by the sim who was first to obtain that many completed aspirations. The heir can change as the number of completed aspirations change.
• Strength: The first born eligible child starts out with the title of heir by default. At any time, an eligible sibling may challenge the current holder of the title to a physical fight. If they win, they claim the title by force. The title may be fought over and change hands any number of times until the previous heir/founder dies.

The Masque family follows the “first born” rule, thus Lance gets the title of heir simply because he was born first. Had they followed a “living will” law, Lady Fara would be the current heir as she has a much higher relationship with her mother than Lance.

Component 3: Bloodline

Strict Traditional: In order to be eligible, a child must be able to trace their bloodline back to the original founder by birth. Children may be adopted, but they may never be heir. This is the classic rule for previous incarnations of the Legacy Challenge.

Traditional: Both natural born children and adopted children may inherit, but natural born children trump adopted children and inherit above them. This takes prescience over gender law.

Modern: Adopted and natural born children are treated equally for the purposes of determining succession order.

Foster: Adopted children and natural born children may inherit, but adopted children trump natural born children, and inherit above them. This takes precedence over gender law.

Strict Foster: Only adopted children may be heir. Natural born children may not carry the family line.

And yes, with the Traditional, Modern, Foster and Strict Foster bloodline options; homosexual spouses will be absolutely viable.

The Masque family follows the “Strict Traditional” bloodline law. But since Lady Cheshire gave birth to both Lance and Lady Fara, they are both eligible, so it doesn’t impact who is heir. If Lance were adopted, Lady Fara would be heir.

With these three components, you can mix and match to make any sort of succession law.

So a Patriarchy – Living Will – Modern family would mean that the heir would be the son that the founder likes the most, but that son could be adopted or born naturally. If the founder has no sons, then their favorite daughter would be chosen and could be adopted or natural born.

A Strict Balanced – Last Born -Traditional With a Male founder would name the youngest female child as the heir, with adopted children being illegible unless there were no female natural-born children, at which point the youngest adopted female adopted child could inherit.

Now… this DOES make it where some succession laws are “harder” or “easier” than others. However, I have decided to not tie your choice of succession law to any sort of points. Thus the succession law you choose is strictly a matter of personal choice and what sort of ‘flavor’ you want your Legacy family to have and if you want to give yourself a little extra challenge.

The “easiest” succession law would be an Equality, Living Will, Modern, which would allow you to pick whatever child you wanted as heir (by selectively managing their relationships) and even allow adopted children to be considered.

The “hardest” succession law would likely be a Strict Matriarchy First Born Strict Traditional, as women have a more limited window to when they can have children, and the heiress must be the oldest women from among the founder’s children, and they better hope they have a girl before they grow too old.

There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ succession law, and no legacy challenge family is meant to be ‘better’ or ‘worse’ because they choose one law over another. Just pick whatever feels right. It might seem very complex at first, but once you pick your family’s law, that is the only law you need to worry about.