u/Financial-Swim-5884

Welcome to Generic System Apocalypse, presented by Company, Incorporated!

We offer only the most mediocre of video-game inspired power systems for your end of the world experience.

Meet The System. It is perfectly fair and balanced. We think.

You cannot get better at things normally. Instead of improving, you will gain experience points equivalent to the amount of skill you would normally gain by practicing a task, as determined by our patent-pending formula our CEO came up with after 7 martinis and a particularly good steak.

If you would not have meaningfully improved through your training, you will not gain experience! By that same token, if a session would have yielded a breakthrough, you might gain thousands or even MILLIONS of points! How fun!

Now, we are big on player freedom here, so we don’t want to tell you how you have to spend those points! They are YOUR points, to spend how YOU want!

That means any experience gained can be spent on ANY skill or attribute! That’s right folks, lifting weights can increase your IQ! Going for a jog can make you taller! Speedrunning a video game? Try speedrunning sleeping.

Your new world is to be filled with terrors. Demigods will prowl the land, cracking the earth where they walk and boiling the seas where they swim. The weakest among them is a city-level threat. A big city. Think Houston.

Needless to say, you will die unless you break this system over your knees.

You have 10 years before the apocalypse begins.

How are you gonna maximize your chances of surviving?

Edit to add: assume you can do magic and shit now. Whatever’s cool. I’m not here to yack your yums.

But magic sure sounds really hard. Might take a lot of experience to learn such a thing.

Timex. Citizen. Casio. Seiko.

Budget titans. Any-day all-stars. Each offers an incredible range of watches under $300 that will be reliable, accurate, and stunning to look at.

And each and every one of them uses the most dogshit-toilet-paper-ass straps and bracelets conceived by man.

So buy the cheap mechanical Timex. Grab that Eco-Drive mall watch. Learn all over again why you loved Seiko 5s so much when you were 17. And you know Reddit will upvote the Casio Tank, so we gotta have that.

And then immediately throw its included band away and put something good on it.

Signed, a cheap, solar quartz wearing bastard who somehow just talked himself into buying a Veblenist canvas strap and feels the need to justify it to himself, his wallet, and the world.

ETA: I don't necessarily mean "buy an expensive strap." Just, like, buy a better one.

I’ve read all the good words books. Good words are good, but good numbers are good too. I now want to read the good numbers books.

Who has the most logically consistent, intricate, balanced, and fair system? Which books are allergic to ass pulls and show their work each and every step of the way?

Put another way, I’ve seen the art at the museum. Now show me the plumbing.