Well, I just completed this challenge. I found it fairly easy; I lost one Sim to a fire while my controllable sim was at work, though.
My controllable sim was Knowledge with a LTW of becoming chief of staff. That was fairly easy. I ended up romancing a co-worker and getting him to give me promotions.
It did take 31 days, though.
I had six fires.
One patient kept beating up on two girls. The girls ended up being best friends... shared misery, one supposes.
Every patient but one--a Popularity sim--was in constant aspiration failure. I've never seen the flour baby before this. Kind of cute, actually.
Four out of six surviving patients actually maxed out their Creativity.
My controllable sim actually got abducted by aliens! She was female, so no babies. (Thankfully. What's the rule on alien pregnancy in this challenge? Do you have to let the social worker take the baby, or can you try to raise it?)
There was one big hurdle. Because I used the money cheat to build a nice, roomy asylum (it worked wonders--the sims almost never got stuck in traffic jams), I also had the rule, "You may not buy anything else during the game except to replace stolen or repossessed items." There was nothing mentioning replacing
destroyed items--and wouldn't you know it, somebody let in a stray dog on the first day who promptly ate one of my beds! And during the third week, just after my fatal fire (after which I removed one bed and one chair), it happened again!
I ended up spending nearly two weeks with two beds and seven Sims. Surprisingly, there were only six collapses.
The ghost of the dead Sim wasn't very troublesome.
I got my last promotion on Tuesday of the fourth week, making 31 days total. Afterwards, I passed out while the kitchen caught on fire and two patients had nervous breakdowns.
Scoring:
20, never used influence
138 total skill points on surviving patients
33 for 33,000 aspiration points (most of them from the aforesaid Popularity sim--three of the surviving patients had zero!)
6 friends of the household. I had eight, at one point, but had a habit of keeping them just above friend relationship.
-31 days institutionalized
-20 for one death
Total score: 138
Oh, and this is my first post, so hi, everybody.
Edit: Hmm, this would have been easier with the modified rules. Being allowed to lock pets out would have saved my beds...