“forget men and get a dog instead” is always sound advice
Works for me! I have two puppies so I'm set for life 
Looking forward to more summaries, Trip!
I just have my ancient spaniel (he's going on 14 and still...living), but I hope to one day add to that.
Though I nabbed a dog person for myself, so I win in all ways!
I'm glad that you're doing this. It will be a helpful tutorial for those just starting out with dynasties. I started reading stories here about 3 years ago. That's what developed my interest in trying dynasties myself. The rest is just a very twisted history.
Who didn't start that way? I know I did, anyways.
We're glad to have you!
I read the original and I'm reading the reboot! I love them both for different reasons. You are an amazing author! Thanks for putting up this "how-to" it will definitely assist future dynasty players. Oh and I have 5 dogs so I agree with your statement lol
Thank you.
It's interesting to see how you actually played the dynasty, since it comes over rather differently in the story. Juggling all of those extra men must have been a real challenge.
I hated it a lot of the time because there was a lot of waiting involved, and I
hate waiting in dynasties. Though the worst waiting stretch...you'll see that one later. Or read about it in my HoF entry.
I'm glad you're doing this record of your work in the dynasty, I am very interested in your strategy, especially in the townies genetics. I'm taking notes!
I hope to be of use.
*cough*PM sent*cough*
This one's split into parts. Part two should come...sometime?
Why the grumpy face? You’re the immortal I was happiest with.
Generation Two:
Franco WaverlyTraits: Artistic, Grumpy, Snob, Perfectionist, Hopeless Romantic + Proper (Group Influence), Photographer’s Eye (Degree)
Spouse: Pansy Prudence, Hannah Carlton (daughter of Sofia and Harwood Clay)
Supermax: Painting
Career: Stylist
LTW: Fashion Phenomenon
LTRs: Opportunistic, Extra Creative, Fertility Treatment
Ops: Deliver a Painting to France, The Complete Circuit, Business of Decor, Interior Decor, Deliver a Painting to Egypt, Paparazzi!
Building: Franco’s Foot Massages (previously Sharma Day Spa)
Property: Grey Chiffon Lounge (previously Red Velvet Lounge)
Best Friends: Hannah Carlton, Carmen Kindle, Parker Castor, Emerald Greenwood, Mark Sargeant (half-brother), Robert Castor (fairy)
Museum Pieces: Done!
Immortalized at 75 Days
Played in real-time from November 3rd, 2013 to November 23rd, 2013Before we look at our chubby-cheeked hero/my journey through building a story during playtime, let’s have a discussion on painters.
You can’t avoid having them in an Immortal Dynasty, considering the rules about portraits. And eventually,
someone immortal has to take up the job, due to household space constraints. For those who are going for a good museum score, I think there are two equally-valid extremes:
1. Go for the death bonuses. You have six generations that will inevitably have a mortal spouse living in the household. Might as well make them useful, and make mortal housemates paint until you literally cannot fit in any more mortals.
2. Start an immortal on the skill early-on. Switch over as soon as you see their artworks’ values eclipse those of the mortals (or when the thought of training yet another person in the trade makes you vomit).
Granted, these methods can overlap...and probably should overlap. You better be prepared for when your mortal talent pool dries up, or when emergency strikes otherwise, should you go for the former. I leaned much towards the latter, though. Especially when it came to painting.
Paintings are important to the rules, but for your museum scores? Not really. My values for photos were all over the place, but the death bonus + appreciation for photographs is actually similar to sculptures. It’s just that sculptures, at least with higher materials, have a larger base value than a lot of photos do. But paintings have just a fraction of that, even if they have high base values. They weren’t much of a concern to me.
Going back to Franco, Painting was decided as his supermax early-on. All he needed was a younger minion to get his portraits and maybe some others, and that’s where Julian (Amy’s son) came into play:
Julian also sculpted, as you can see, but we didn’t have an immortal sculptor until a little later.
So! After I was too busy starting a dynasty to care about Annette having much of a plot to her life, I wanted to dip my toes into it for Franco. Funny enough, this was my first time really trying to plan something bigger to play by for a dynasty, even if it was simple.
There’s nothing wrong with simple, at least as a base. Though Franco’s was about as basic as I could make it. Franco yearns for a lost love. His lost love also turns out to be a utility girl for me. And meanwhile, he gets himself into a bad marriage with someone else.
So let’s introduce our players here, which make Franco’s life look like one nice harem at first glance.
There was Hannah, the love of his life:
Hannah Carlton got a decent amount of “watcher bias” from me because of two things: she was absolutely GORGEOUS, and she was Harwood’s daughter. But as “organic” as I wanted to make her complicated relationship with Franco appear to be, it was a carefully crafted plan. I never wanted Hannah to be the mother of Generation Three. But I wanted her in the household for...this was two years ago, don’t put me on the spot like this! I don’t think I wanted her for anything but for story purposes/her uterus.
Usually
not how one should be allocating their dynasty household space. This came back to almost screw me over when I wanted Hannah to have a child. She was creeping up to the point of virtual menopause, when the Waverly household was full. Should I have switched the roles and kept her in the Carlton House of Pain (she loathed her immediate family) while moving in her partner instead, maybe I wouldn’t have been so worried about her fate.
But if it wasn’t Hannah to bear Franco’s spawn, it was Pansy Prudence, the original townie wife:
How adorable. If only it could last.
I might come off as having a lot of hate for Pansy as the character I wrote her as. In
Eight Ways to Live Forever, she was a rather nasty person towards Franco. I haven’t gotten to the point of writing her in the new story, but the outline I have brings her from “ill-mannered person” to “literally abusive.” And while I wrote the former story to at least somewhat follow the real events that I played, Pansy’s badness was largely constructed out of nothing. At worst, she had angry reactions to Franco being an absolute moron. Take this:
That dumb marshmallow (or not; this was during Franco's very brief period of being ripped. Silly man took a run with a friend) was engaged to Pansy when I took that picture. Although he was not a dedicated cheater, Franco harbored a lot of feelings for Hannah, and I think his wife had all rights to be angry at him for it. I instead wanted to interpret Franco’s lingering feelings for Hannah as something that could be sympathetic. And I think that a character cheating and a character being a protagonist can easily intersect, but I wanted to keep things simple for Franco’s story. It was a test run for some greater things.
In short: Pansy was only bad if I wrote her that way.
Otherwise, she did some photography for the museum, due to aging up with the Photographer’s Eye trait sometime in her life. Maybe this is where that characterization came from! Due to a game bug, none of Pansy’s photos appreciated in value, nor did they get a death bonus. This was something that always seemed to affect the spouses I treated as butt-monkeys the most. Huh.
And to round this off, we had Carmen Kindle, Franco’s “in-between” lover. Dated her in high school, and also made the same mistake again after divorcing Pansy but before winning Hannah over.
Did I mention that Carmen and Hannah were half-sisters? Their dad got around. Carmen was more obviously Harwood’s kid, in the best and worst ways. I chose the absolute best shot to show the nice side of her features, but...I’ve ranted about her cheekbones a lot before. Please draw your own conclusions. But she had her father’s lips! Always a coveted thing for me.
Carmen was never a part of the Waverly household, even if she could have been an asset. I got a peek at her traits early on, and she had the same artistic inclinations that her father did. What could have been? Who knows.
She and Franco did the nasty quite a bit, enough to produce five little Kindlelets. That was mostly for my own amusement.
But now that we have a cast, let’s recap Franco’s life in…less than 22 chapters.
Franco worked as a Stylist, because maxing the self-employed Painter career is too easy for me, and I wanted to unlock some of the uniforms for later use. Here he was failing hard with Hannah’s twin brother.
Things eventually got better for him there.
He painted, but every dynasty has at least one who does. He was trained exactly like how I trained mortal painters: keep doing small paintings. Do them for life. Take breaks to do large portraits when needed. (Though Franco did a lot of extra portraits when he was old and in the background. I think he got to 700 or more paintings by the end of it all)
Most of his young adult life was spent sandwiched between two attractive women. Ah, if only it were that easy in real life. In spite of the romantic tensions, Hannah and Pansy got along at first.
Oh! And I had to get that French VISA. Befitting of his name (it’s an Italian name that means “French”), Franco was the man for the job. It clashed with his tidy, formal mannerisms that permeated the rest of his life, but I always brought him on vacations so I could have some fun while others mindlessly skilled.
Things started to look up for him and Pansy.
They had just enough time to make a baby before divorce entered the conversation. I am not kidding when I say that their marriage lasted for a mere four days in the game. Maybe equal to a year in real life.
Oh well. Their little sprout was adorable.
Later on, I sent five of the adults to university at once. Julian was of the right age to do it, being a fresh new young adult, but Franco, Hannah, Pansy, and Annette all tagged along. They had some wild and crazy adventures, but our main hero might have had the worst:
Oof.
Things seemed to go better for Franco one night, when he went with Hannah to the gym. They spent the whole night together until sunrise, where they watched it from the beach.
The divorce was probably still fresh in Franco’s mind, which led to some vitriol between him and Hannah. For the rest of their adult lives, they had to settle with the second best.
I was really big into The Kills when playing this. The underlying story in their song “Future Starts Slow” is this: sometimes you can’t be with the best person in your life, but while you can find the second-best and feel something nice out of it, there’s no forgetting the best. And it’s worth looking forward to a future with them anyways. Or at least that’s what I got out of it. The situation describes Franco and Hannah perfectly, so much so that the song gave me a name for Chapter 33 in
Eight Ways to Live Forever. It might name a chapter in my current story. But yes, they didn’t have the capacity to be with each other without any baggage attached. At least not for a while.
Hannah’s “second-best” is his own story. But for Franco, it was Carmen:
Carmen made Franco happy for a bit. But the point was that his happiness was empty, and especially so because he had a jealousy for Hannah doing a lot better with the “second-best.” At his elder birthday party, he took to playing roulette and giving me one of my favorite unplanned screenshots ever:
It would be interesting to write a story about an immortal who goes along with the mission out of obligation, while feeling downright miserable. In fact, I would try that with a later generation. But Franco had some salvation.
He had the best.
And the clichéd ending of the guy getting the girl as the ending reward was enough to make him smile. At least until time made him a widower.
But you think Franco’s entry is over? Next time, we look deeper at the lives of his mortal peers, in another entry of “Having Fun with Everyone, Even Those Pesky Mortals.”
