So, I can offer you one of 3 advantages available to a videogame character, which one do you want?
Manual save game: you can “save your game” a total of 10 times in your life. You only have one save slot so any further saving will delete your save slot. Loading your save brings you back to the exact point you saved, with any knowledge gained and deletes it. Your save expires after 6 months.
Auto save game: every time you enter/exit any building or vehicle a save game is created. The last 2 days worth of saves are kept and you can load any one of them at any time. You may load an earlier game 10 times in your life. You may not load any save older than 2 days.
Video-game stamina: you don’t need to eat or sleep, (although you can). You don’t get too hot or cold. You can perform feats like hanging off an edge for days easily. Any injury of any type you receive that doesn’t kill you can be cured instantly with 2 small standard first aid kits. Any physical damage you take will affect you approximately 10% as much as it would otherwise.
Stamina seems like the largest quality of life enhancer. The save points have too many restrictions to use casually for stuff like testing real-life dialogue options or trying to brute force a risky act via “save scumming”. I’d mainly wind up using it as “Well, if I’m ever in a car accident” style insurance and the damage reduction from the stamina is about 80% of that anyway – anything that’s not catastrophic instant death, I’m likely to survive and come back from.
Two days and six months isn’t enough time to look back and realise what mistakes you made that need correcting. If there were no time limits I’d pick one of them, but as it stands, I’ll take stamina, as I am sure I could leverage that into good things somehow.
I’d pick 4 - God Mode, but stamina seems the most useful of these choices. But how does restoring a save work? For example, say I do a save just before breakfast then eat oatmeal. Later I restore to that save and have bacon instead. Do I remember having had both breakfasts?
I pick stamina because it gives immediate tangible benefits. With saves you could go back to a previous save to make a different life decision only to get a worse result.
Ok, so with manual save, you gain 6 months * 10 of extra life. Also, each of those 6 months is a repeat.
With auto save, the way you have structured it, you can reach a good point in your life and keep doing the same 2 days, over and over, for thousands of years. Two days is a long time if you can just go back in time whenever you want (I would assume it’s automatic if you are killed). Could go steal jets, sleep with whoever you like, pretty much do whatever you want.
This kind of ability to save scum would also let you commit crimes with near impunity, as if the cops arrest you, you just roll back 2 days and prevent them from capturing you…or just not commit the crime at all. Jailbreaks would also be much easier.
So I choose option 2.
Also, yeah, no need for crime to make money. 2 days is plenty of time to find out the winning lottery ticket numbers and roll back and buy a ticket. Or memorize the sequence of cards at a blackjack table, roll back to when you got out of the limo, and walk back in. Or just day trade a highly volatile commodity like bitcoin…
Only reason for crime is to go do stuff you aren’t allowed to do no matter how much money you have. Want to sneak into area 51 and see what’s really there? There’s probably a way if you get to try an infinite number of times.
You only get 10 reloads total with option 2. The basic tradeoff is that with option 1 you have to decide to “save” first but you then get a long time to deliberate the ramifications, option 2 keeps a selection of saves on hand so if something comes out of nowhere you can go back a day or so, but you don’t get the time to weigh up the value.
Ok, I see. Option 2 is still the best because it gives you 10 lives. You don’t live any longer, but if you experience a situation where you are about to die, you do get 10 additional evade chances. This lets you avoid a lot of sudden mishaps like crimes, car wrecks, sudden heart attacks and strokes, etc. So you can just live normally and if something really bad happens that would have killed you or ruined you, you can roll back and undo it.
All your options suck, though, and if this were a video game, gamers would refund it on steam. This is why I assumed in your autosave system you get to scum all you want. Limited loads and saves? Awful. Everyone would want a system where you could play real life like a game of grand theft auto.
Went with 3, I imagine I can make money Wolverine style; not crazy stupid money, maybe, but enough, and stamina is an all the time benefit. I wonder what our age breakdown is, old timers might value stamina more. (56)
