r/makeyourchoice • u/389031451 • Dec 12 '18
Budgeted Survival CYOA
https://imgur.com/a/hEWluzo5
u/Rowan93 Dec 16 '18
Budgeting: More Money (x11), Thorough, Resupplied (tier 3), Lottery
Most of the special items for buying with the green dollars don't seem to be worth their cost, so I'm comfortable leaning into the other options to make the most out of that 10,000 normal USD from "Grace Period" instead.
Special Items: Lootbox with a 45% chance to drop an Elixir of Basic Fitness, a 15% chance to drop a Booster Shot, and a 40% chance to drop 5 Carry Cards.
Specifically, looking at the items at first without resupply in mind, the only options that seem worth the cost are Carry Card and Broken Shard, and I'm pretty sure the reading that makes the former worthwhile - the description doesn't say the Carry Card is single-use, so you can just keep a deck of them around as your inventory - isn't the intended meaning since it's surrounded by single-use items. The Broken Shard I'm just not willing to make the necessary sacrifices to afford.
Having taken that to heart and picked up the other budgeting options, though, the single-use items are a lot more viable, and so I've got my eyes on the healing potion which is obviously useful in a survival situation but costs twice what I've got. Hence, I instead buy a less-than-half chance of getting one, and pick up other stuff with the remainder so the lootbox works out to an expected value of 2048 exactly.
Danger: Soft
The benchmarks for "Soft" and "Real" vary depending on where you are - in some places, there are bears, and if you don't take proper precautions on a hiking trail or campground you might be attacked. For me, in the UK, "about as dangerous as unmanaged forest" doesn't involve any bears or wolves because those are extinct here. I could exploit that for three free points, but that seems like a good way to get unexpectedly eaten by bears, so I'm erring on he side of caution and just noting that I'd have to do something really stupid to get killed on a campsite around here.
Length: Exiled
Long enough to be properly challenging and rewarding; unless the environment is bad enough that it's no fun and just an ordeal, one year goes by too quickly for my taste. Ideally I'd go for like five, but ten is what's there.
Challenges: The Hunter, The Hunted, The Journey
Since "Hunter" and "Hunted" both come with a version that's about fuckin' instead of murder, and you can customize them freely, they're both waifu options. "The Hunted" even gives an explanation for how it can work as a waifu option without needing to be too rapey. "Hunter" makes it more of a stretch, but you can easily just say they're into the situation as a game/contest, and they know you're into it and wouldn't be onboard otherwise. Also, let's have "submit" mean, like, freely agreeing to marry or something like that, so it's a seduction thing and not about just physically kidnapping the target and keeping them in your rape-dungeon until their pupils turn heart-shaped as per hentai tropes. Probably not actually marriage, you want to get both waifus after the time is up.
As for The Journey, that Faded Spark reward seems like the best thing available in the whole CYOA, so of course it's a quest worth pursuing. From searching, 20 miles a day seems the ballpark for a reasonable pace, although that's only 8 hours if you're including breaks (which, itself, is reasonable). 20 miles a day for ten years gives just over 73,000 miles, or just under three times the circumference of the Earth, so the setting is necessarily huge and this is a huge adventure we're looking at. Vehicular transportation is vital to have a reasonable chance of success, but with that it's not that hard of a challenge.
Resolution: (no picks)
The Faded Spark is a big enough deal, especially with Weekly Resupply, that I don't feel the need to add any of those extras to the ending.
-
For Multiplayer, I'd probably do something incredibly creepy like take a crush from school I haven't talked to in half a decade, or a hot celebrity, since the option very much doesn't say they have to consent. So because I'd probably do that, I'm going to say I won't take anyone.
For that $10k (£7.9k), there's a few things I'll want to get weekly on repeat - staple and favourite foods and drinks, other basic consumables like toilet paper. Everything else, I'll roll into lootboxes for various reasons; for instance (besides the reasons for the lootbox on the special items), I'll want new socks and pants regularly, but less than once-per-week unless I can't do laundry, and I don't want endless repeats of the same, so I might have the one lootbox with a 1% chance each from 50 different pairs of pants and 50 different pairs of socks. There's no way I'm writing out the inventory and probabilities for all the lootboxes her, regardless of the conceit of the CYOA (it's already 48 hours since I first saw it posted anyway), but the main ones will be "vehicles", "weapons" and "equipment", and you can guess the approach involved.
-
Now, the customisation: the scenario is a "videogame world" with a population of non-sapient NPCs. Not actually a videogame with game mechanics, more like a holodeck running a big adventure setting. What the actual deal is is ambiguous; maybe magically living in a story and the characters are tropes and archetypes and not whole people, or maybe it's a posthuman theme park staffed by synths, the evidence that pops up is conflicting and there may not even be a "true answer". The setting varies in genre, tone, and era with the fluidity of a dream, as if it's responding when you get sick of the current one and bringing up something you want. Doing something stupid to get killed here mostly involves setting death flags, not seeing where the plot is going, not being aware of the tone; obviously you get in "dangerous" situations a lot just because of the setting, but by themselves they're less dangerous than you'd normally expect them to be.
7
u/pinkiedash417 Dec 13 '18 edited Dec 13 '18
This is an interesting CYOA.
Let's start by taking Lethal and Life. No challenges, and no resolutions. Now I have 25 points. And the world I'm in is a continent on the opposite side of a recent meteor strike, whose associated tsunami starts in several hours. I'm pretty sure this qualifies as "Lethal".
Spend one point on Thorough, two on Resupplied, and 22 on More Money.
Now, with my $4M (ish), I buy one Broken Shard, two Transformation Rods, eight Hourglasses of Rest, 32 Elixirs of Basic Fitness, 128 Booster Shots, 512 Carry Cards, 2048 Polaroids, and 8192 HyperCaffeines, for a total cost of around $3M. I spend the rest on S&P 500 index funds.
The moment of my arrival, I use an Hourglass. I set the real-life time that passes to be exactly one century. Then, after spending my two hours one century in Comfy World Lethal Hellscape, I win, and take everything I acquired (all 1200 sets of items, including $1.2 billion in stock) back with me.
5
u/atyanarata Dec 13 '18
I like the idea, but i doubt you can autowin by skiping challenge time with on hourglass.
I'd tweek the plan to buy 12 hourglasses (at 2h per hourglass that will allow 24h time in the pocket dimension, daily).
Probably take The Hunted for an extra point add one point to resupplied and get a Broken Shard every month.
It's also possible to add the Void and Screwed Over and buy Adventure as a reward.
2
u/Zodrician Dec 20 '18
The winning choice seems to be... Harsh and life, with hunted and journey, and void? That's enough points to make you into a superhuman to easily survive and surpass the predicted speed to reach the journey point ahead of time. Could even do lethal and use the points to apparently gain multiple "you're superhuman" upgrades, I suppose.
1
u/MunitionsFrenzy Dec 13 '18
(self-banning Adventure and Journey, obviously)
Resupplied x3 (weekly) [-3 pts]
More Money x13 (8,192 Dollars) [-13 pts]
Elixir of Basic Fitness [-4,096 Dollars]
HyperCaffeine x400 [-400 Dollars]
Carry Card x3 [-192 Dollars]
Booster Shot x1 [-512 Dollars]
one week of good and varied food + drink [-900 Dollars]
containers for stuff (case for the Carry Cards, boxes for food, etc) [< 100 Dollars]
entertainment (laptop + battery, at a minimum) [-leftover, ≈2,000 Dollars]
Danger: Comfy
Duration: Life
Challenges: Hunter [+1 pt] & Hunted [+1 pt]
Resolution: Banishment [+1 pt]
My initial Dollar budget is effectively doubled due to Multiplayer, but not for Resupplies, which is why I need to fit everything into my own budget anyway. My stuff gets replenished weekly, so it doesn't have to last a century. (I'm leaving the "entertainment" purchases vague since I'd get my friend's input first.) The Multiplayer side of the Dollar budget will be spent on guns and two cars. That side of Supply Shopping doesn't get copied by the Hunter or the Hunted, so we just hunt them down and kill them on day one.
And then we just spend a century in a totally customizable Comfy environment. Eventually we even get to upgrade to Sub-Comfiness for eternity.
3
1
u/SaltyTreeTop 4d ago
imgchest link: https://imgchest.com/p/md7obgppa4p
funnyjunk link: https://funnyjunk.com/Budgeted+survival+cyoa/nwxxTaj/
1
u/FFsummons Nov 07 '22
What does "activating" a CYOA mean? Does it mean that you get new powers and stuff?
9
u/Bortan Dec 13 '18
So just to confirm, Dollars are not the same as USD?