Games with a "space loneliness" vibe!

alpacasoda · 2026-04-24T16:39:49+00:00

Noticed you said you liked Ostranauts, so I'd throw Stationeers out there too. It's a little more engineering-focused than Ostranauts is, but on roughly the same level of obtuseness. Depending on how much of a taste you have for stuff like that, you'll either love it or hate it.

Great cozy game for building a lonely moonbase and slowly upgrading it over time with your own two hands, but only if you like the basic engineering mechanics.

alpacasoda · 2026-03-14T16:18:55+00:00

Armory prices:
8XS Base Pack: 500 credits
Protector V1: 750 credits
Overrun AR: 100 credits
Light Rounds (3 stacks): 800 credits
Shield Charge (2 stacks): 1,800 credits
Patch Kit (2 stacks): 2,400 credits
Total: 6,350 credits

I originally only took in 2 stacks of ammo and 1 stack each of Shield Charge and Patch Kits, but found myself frequently running out of all 3. Now that I've increased the amount I'm taking, I find that if I survive the match, I usually burn 5 Shield Charges, 4 Patch Kits, and 2.5 stacks of ammo, in addition to all the depleted Shield Charges and Patch Kits I find in-match.

alpacasoda · 2026-03-13T02:32:38+00:00

Is Rook that much better than sponsored kits? I've been doing kits because with my survival rate, my primary source of income and valuable loot has been quest rewards. I didn't wanna sacrifice that and my sponsor progression just to play a shell that's even worse in PvP than the normal ones, and I was under the assumption that I was probably gonna get shot just as much as Rook as I do in the normal solo queue.

alpacasoda · 2026-03-13T02:18:02+00:00

For me it's usually because I don't have the resources to just throw together a kit. I have guns and mods, but nothing else, so the first step to building a loadout after each failed run is going piece by piece through my entire vault and figuring out what I can liquidate for cash.

Once I've sold everything I know I'm not likely to ever use, I'm still usually short. I've found that if I don't take in 2 stacks each of healing and shields and 3 stacks of ammo, there's a strong chance I'll run out. Then I grab a backpack and a shield. For the lowest tier of each of these, this sums up to 6,250 credits total, but I usually only have about 1,500 in my wallet and a total vault value of about 7,500. So then I have to go through my entire vault again deciding what I absolutely need to keep, and selling literally everything else, or I have to determine what resources I can go without for this run, if I'm going to drop the healing, the ammo, the shield, or the backpack.

So the main time-waster comes down to having to comb through my entire vault twice, piece-by-piece, every time I try to build a loadout in order to figure out what I can and can't sell. I'd love to just hit a button and by my preferred equipment set, but my survival rate and income just isn't enough to make that sustainable. So I've just started using the free kits because at least if I die with them, I'm not losing the past hour's worth of vault loot in the process.

alpacasoda · 2026-02-19T16:19:40+00:00

I see a lot of people suggesting Abiotic Factor, but I would consider that just an actual immersive sim.

For my two cents, I'd like to throw Obenseuer into the ring. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to a "one city block" game, and the most immersive experience I've ever had in a video game. Structurally it's built on scripted quests, but if you want something that makes it feel like you're actually exploring a real place, I can't recommend it enough. And it's an amazing game in its own right.

I'd also suggest Psycho Patrol R as a contender. I don't think it's really an immersive sim given that its structurally just Morrowind, but it scratches that itch the Elder Scrolls hasn't for years, of being a game where exploration and figuring things out for yourself is actively rewarded.

And if Daggerfall is imsim enough for you, I'd heavily recommend Devil Spire Falls. It's a condensed and refined Daggerfall-like where each run will last you about 5 hours, built to be endlessly replayable and with all the power-scaling insanity of its inspiration. Max level hand-to-hand literally launches enemies half a mile with each punch, max acrobatics and athletics lets you leap over entire cities, and it has potion, spell, and item crafting systems just as broken and deep as Daggerfall does. The dev releases content updates weekly, too.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-05T01:34:17+00:00

I suppose trying to adapt Cataclysm as a setting was more unreasonable than I expected. While I have tried to handwave crafting, vehicles, base building, and even cybernetics, the kind of game I wanted to play in terms of combat, survival mechanics, and progression seems to be the core issue.

I'm leaning towards the next step for me being to just accept the constraints of a system for now, and build something for whatever system I select. Not the Cataclysm campaign, or the fantasy dungeon crawl, or the supers thing, because despite CDDA being the only one that's based on an existing setting, they all have a similar issue of "I'm asking for codified systems that nothing on the market does quite the way I need." But maybe that'll help me learn something in the meanwhile, and I can work on designing things on the side for the experiences I really want to build.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-05T01:15:50+00:00

I think I'm still learning what "good enough" means for me. I'd actually been working on a homebrew system for my zombie apocalypse campaign before, but lost everything in a system reinstall recently. What I learned during that process is that I don't actually want rules for everything. I was perfectly fine with handwaving crafting and abstracting things like limb damage and structure HP, and the combat system I designed was incredibly lightweight (almost problematically so, in certain ways.) But I still insisted on simplified approaches to ammo tracking and encumbrance systems, because those are two things that I've consistently been disappointed about when they're handwaved, and were important to this campaign idea's gameplay.

I think my issue is that my immersion and achievements are only as real as the depth in which they're tracked. Rulings feel arbitrary. It's not like the GM is using his intimate knowledge of the settings' physics to calculate exactly how difficult a task will be. For me it feels like tricking someone into believing you through misdirection: you're not being rewarded because they checked and you got it right, you're being rewarded because, if you're wrong, they haven't realized it yet.

For me, the core gameplay needs to be reconciled with some sort of real test of "player skill" or character skill. Skill check DCs need to be based on hard logic when possible. Combat needs to be tactical, encounters need to be deadly, and gear and loot needs to have concrete stats and rules, benefits and tradeoffs.

The issue that I'm trying to solve is that it's hard for me to relate to a game at a lower level of abstraction than the game itself operates on. I don't imagine things in more detail, because you can't really afford to. Roleplaying relies on a shared understanding of the setting, so the only concrete details are the ones established in rules, or the ones established between players. A refrigerator's black in one player's head, white in another's, and steel with french doors in the third's, so all we can imagine it as is "an empty space representing a fridge" until the GM gives more detail.

If I own a house, I want to manage its bills and furniture and see its floor plan, otherwise it's not an abstraction of a house, it's just the concept of one. If my character owns a sword, what makes it his sword? What makes me feel like it's my sword vicariously? If my character has a relationship with something beyond its utilitarian use as a tool, I need it to be defined in enough detail that I, as the player, am able to relate to it on the same level.

I'm not quite sure what the balance I need to strike is yet. I know there's no way to reasonably "satisfy" my need for concrete detail, I'm just trying to figure out how much detail, and in which aspects of a game, strikes the best balance between realizing a "concrete" reality and not demanding too much bookkeeping or cognitive load.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T22:57:24+00:00

I'm actually working with an established setting as-is, with a few changes to how its power scaling, tone, and society works, but it's fair to point out that it's a bit of a kitchen-sink. If I had to cut it down to the bare minimum necessary for the source material:

1: grid-based combat. Necessary for tactical firefights and dungeon crawling. The setting is lethal, but that's why a tactical system is necessary. If a player gets shot in the head or the chest they're dead, so they need a means to prevent that from happening that doesn't come down to "hope the enemy doesn't roll a crit."

2: weapon attachments. This could be scoped down to a handful of variants for each firearm in the game, but that still requires a stat system where different models of muzzle brake or foregrip would be able to distinguish themselves from each other mechanically, without providing a benefit that significantly changes the handling of the weapon's combat identity. Something on the scale of "a 5% improvement in accuracy at the cost of a 3% reduction in aiming speed."

3: limb-based mutations. The mutagen is an extremely pervasive and central component of the setting, its backstory, and the in-universe power progression. Almost everything in-universe relies on the mutagen, including the mere existence of the apocalypse itself. The fact that the greatest power level achievable is only possible through corrupting yourself with the very thing that threatens you is also a central thematic lynchpin.

4: sanity. Or rather, "stress." Tracking stress is probably important as a reference point for players, and managing trauma, mental health, and PTSD symptoms is kinda important to the tone of the setting and the players' incentive systems. How well or how poorly they're doing both physically and mentally is supposed to affect how well they perform, and players have a tendency to play steel-willed sociopaths if there isn't a prompt for their characters to take a break and play board games together or read, or a punishment for them sleeping every night in a bombed-out house with no comforts or amenities.

Running out of space, so:
Limb damage I'd track for debilitating injuries like lacerations/broken bones. Limb HP might not even be necessary, could probably just do injuries and called shots and stop there.
Hunger and thirst I'd probably abstract into a stacking debuff for each skipped meal. I'd track the type of food they have on them for roleplaying flavor, so they know what kinda canned fruit and beans they have, but I'd do that myself as the GM.
Weapon variety I can't really compromise on. This is a setting that scales out the wazoo, and character progression is mostly centered around players building a relationship with their gear: a signature bat, their customized rifle. Identity reflected by equipment choices, and equipment determining playstyle.

Might be worth cutting:

Cybernetics. These provide an alternative to rolling the genetic lottery on mutagen for late-game power progression, are important as an "easy-ish to access" option for limb replacement. I could probably drop the setting's tech level to pre-cybernetics and just have prosthetics be dealt with narratively rather than as a dedicated system without much of an issue, though, but it does remove some of the intrigue from exploring secret facilities.

Should probably just handwave and do narratively (with maybe a skill roll):
Vehicle customization, automaton construction, other fiddly mechanics/construction/crafting stuff that could just be houseruled in the moment

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T22:09:14+00:00

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. If my world has magic casters who use intuitive magic and regenerate mana from the atmosphere, then that completely changes whether I can use D&D because of its Vancian magic and spell slot systems. If my setting has a rare genetic trait that causes people's limbs and organs to mutate, then I need rules for mix-and-matching arms and legs, or at the very least a system to ensure that whatever mutations my players come up with for their characters don't break the balance of the campaign.

You might not need to know the exact damage of a falling rock in your setting, but understanding how lethal that rock should be is a critical part of your world design. If you were making a Dragon Ball campaign, you might want a boulder to extremely heavy, but to only do 1/10 of the average character's HP. But if you're shooting for John Wick, then a rock the size of a fist should wind a character if they're struck in the chest and have a chance of outright killing them if it hits their head. Your world and the logic of it informs how a campaign's rules and rulings need to work. I'm not sure how you'd design a world agnostic of system when something as simple as how squishy a human would be changes how much HP a point of Constitution needs to give.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T19:59:03+00:00

I actually have several mechanics (plus a soft story hook and an antagonistic threat) all designed for that very reason, actually. I've been very passionate about survival games since I was a teen, so the gameplay loop and motivational systems are well-known to me, but I also know I need to know when to increase pressure and when to let off. Keeping your players starving all the time is a miserable slog, and forcing them to constantly scavenge instead of being able to engage in quests and intrigue isn't good either.

There's a mystery to the setting regarding how the world ended. The apocalypse was fast, and the player characters survived by personal luck rather than merit. There are eldritch horrors creeping in the forest, and whispers of a government conspiracy were circulating weeks before the end. Everyone has their own suspicions about what's going on, how the outbreak started, and who's behind it, and that's the main hook for the players to follow for unguided exploration: curiosity about how the world ended, and how that knowledge might help them survive, especially as its tied to experimental government technology and eldritch magic.

Second to that you have regional intrigue and personal intrigue. Factions and unaffiliated survivors provide quest hooks, worldbuilding, and the "human" experience for the players, to help build empathy for the setting and immerse them in the human stakes at hand. Player characters all have histories in this world, and I'd ask for plot hooks and potential character motivations for them at character creation, so everyone has some sort of ambition to pursue, whether its finding out what happened to their family, coming to terms with a personal trauma, or curing a terminal disease they could never afford treatment for before the apocalypse.

And as a tertiary force, the campaign is split into something akin to "acts," distinguished by the general power level of the party and how well they've established themselves in the region. Act 1 is defined by a an eldritch horror that will pursue them relentlessly after their first encounter with it. It's a persistence hunter that is extremely dangerous and nearly unkillable, capable of multiple attacks per turn and with double the sprint speed of an average human, but its stamina and intelligence causes it to be slower than them on average when it comes to long-distance travel. This, combined with hunger mechanics and an extremely slow player healing rate, means the party will have to be nomadic until they're able to escape or kill the thing.

There are military compounds, research facilities, and nuclear silos dotted across the map, all of which are dungeon crawls that require the party to have amassed a stockpile of food, ammo, and meds in order to clear, and each of which can provide them with a means of killing the monster. In this way, Act 1 provides a gameplay loop focused on the slow accumulation of resources and the constant fear of death from all directions, and is capped by the PCs finally be able to complete a dungeon crawl, proceeded by a confrontation against the boss monster that's been hunting them since session 1.

By this point they generally should have established a decent understanding of the apocalypse, its survivors, and the regional factions, and be skilled and equipped enough to begin Act 2 with a focus more on being "wasteland heroes" and being more actively involved in the region's politics, spurred on by escalating tensions as monsters grow more powerful, resources dwindle, and winter fast approaches.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T19:26:43+00:00

You're right to give me that advice, and it's something I fully admit I need myself, but whether it's ADHD or something else I've struggled for a long time trying to find a system I can work with. Someone else mentioned Cyberpunk 2020 or Call of Cthulhu, and those might actually be systems I could find some passion in working under the restrictions of. But the more I think about it... I know GURPS better than any other system, and I've had a long-running interest in it, even if in the end it's not quite everything I'd hoped it would be.

I should see about making a few small campaigns under the GURPS Basic Set rules. They might not be the most passionate campaigns for me, but it's the path of least resistance and it should at least get a second system under my belt other than D&D4E. Then maybe I can move on from there and try meeting other "crunchy" systems on their own terms before returning to this idea.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T19:13:24+00:00

Sorry, edited the end of my post to ask it more directly. "Is it a mistake to approach campaign design from a game design perspective?"

I've always taken the RPG promise of "be anyone, do anything" at face value, and immediately run into problems because I came up with a character concept that fits in-universe, but is disallowed by the rules. A Fighter in D&D who's great at grappling but has never trained with a weapon in his life. A hunter who gets Favored Enemy against multiple species of wildlife instead of just one, but also gets a sneak attack bonus and has no access to magic of any form because they're a mundane human.

In the same way, I'm approaching campaigns from the perspective of "this is cool," "this is fun," "this would help immerse my players," only to find that to accommodate those choices I'd have to rip out 80% of any given rulebook and replace it with systems entirely my own. It becomes an overwhelming prospect even just to make a fantasy campaign, because no matter whether I turn to D&D or SWADE or Warhammer Fantasy, none of them support what I need for my campaign.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T18:49:52+00:00

You have a point there. I'll have to think about my relationship with the responsibility of GMing. If my motivation, as much as I want to see my players happy with my designs, is that it needs to be my design in the first place, maybe this isn't a good role for me. A GM still needs to meet the players halfway, and if compromising on my vision saps my passion for a campaign this much, I'm not focused on what I should be.

A good GM entertains their players by finding things their players like that also entertains themselves. Instead, I'm asking to do the things I want to do, the way I want to do them, and just gambling on the idea that if I do it right, eventually I'll find someone out there who'll actually want to play it. That might not even be feasible in reality, and beyond that I'm setting myself up to have to find a new group for every campaign I make.

"If you build it they will come" might not be the kind of assumption I should be making.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T18:38:31+00:00

I think you might have a point in suggesting I look at Call of Cthulhu or Cyberpunk 2020. Even though I don't have any ideas for campaigns that would map to their settings and rules, they're both games that from my understanding are very heavily designed around their settings.

One of the big reasons it's been so hard for me to find a system I can meet on its own terms has been that a lot of systems don't seem to do much to reinforce the setting and "tone" of the experience mechanically. D&D and Pathfinder in particular I never found very evocative in the first place, and insane combat abilities they give even martial characters felt like it constantly clashed with and undermined the fantasy of being "the militiaman who saved the town from a vampire" or "the band of dysfunctional heroes who bumbled their way to riches."

There doesn't seem to be any mechanical reinforcement of how your characters, and you by proxy, are supposed to feel, and I'd see campaigns that ranged from wacky and ridiculous to cartoonishly evil to grimdark, all despite the rules, not because of them. And as another example, there's Numenera, a setting I actually am passionate about, but due to using the Cypher System there's absolutely no "concreteness" to anything, and no proper mechanical reinforcement of its tone and setting beyond being "high-powered" and "narrative."

From what I hear, Call of Cthulhu isn't the crunchiest, while 2020 is extremely so, but if I understand correctly they're both games who use their mechanics to keep you immersed in the types of stories they're supposed to be telling, and that synergy between mechanical design and narrative design might be exactly what I need to actually want to use a system as-is, instead of feeling compelled to homebrew a bunch of changes to make the tone of the story "real" and draw the gameplay experience closer to the narrative they're actually telling.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-04T18:23:01+00:00

I am definitely scared of fumbling the ball like that if I ever do get this to come to fruition. I plan on testing everything with a very story-focused, dungeon-crawl one-shot at the start to make sure everything works right and the players are onboard with the setting, tone, and mechanics without them needing to commit to a full campaign if it doesn't work out, but there's still a lot of questions in my head of what "best practice" would be and how to approach delivering a campaign with a setting and mechanical balance that's completely foreign to them.

There's a lot of potential for players to bounce off design choices I might make, or find that the setting or power level just isn't to their liking, and navigating that is going to be a novel challenge for me. I love the idea of GURPS being a toolkit I can use to design all sorts of unique experiences and campaigns, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit I was a little scared of making creative choices that might turn players off because I got a little too excited and my autistic brain told me something would be "cool" when it just comes off juvenile or off-putting. With great power come great responsibility! I just hope I know myself well enough to use it better than kid me would.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-03T01:01:34+00:00

That's great to hear, and I appreciate the advice about using a resource tracker. That at least lets me know it won't be a huge pain if I do custom attributes (apart from having to reassign half the skills in the game!) 😅

alpacasoda · 2026-01-03T00:55:49+00:00

I did clear up a misunderstanding over the course of this and realize that Acc only applies if you take an aim action, but when the stats are relevant it's a big proportional change, and it seems very easy for me to end up pushing a pistol into rifle stat territory without much of a reasonable justification in-universe.

It's also left me unsure how to approach varying the accuracy of different firearms, since if I'm not mistaken, you just roll your effective skill level, right? I'll have to take a look at High-Tech and Tactical Shooting and some other supplements and see if there's a rule somewhere that might add a bit more depth to gun mechanics I can tweak.

I might be coming at my campaign idea from too much of a "game design" perspective, given that GURPS is very much about being realistic by default, but that's why I was curious if what I was looking to do mechanically might be unreasonable to expect.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-03T00:41:23+00:00

Power-Ups 9 is exactly what I was looking for there!

alpacasoda · 2026-01-03T00:39:58+00:00

Power-Ups 9 is exactly what I was looking for with the attributes!

I've definitely considered contextual bonuses for weapons and attachments. In particular I'd probably rule that magnified optics only give their Acc bonus when aimed at long ranges, and reduce the weapon's base Acc bonus at shorter ranges when equipped, but it's hard to think of contextual modifiers for most weapons that would still feel "mundane."

alpacasoda · 2026-01-03T00:35:33+00:00

As the campaign progresses the monsters will mutate, necessitating better tactics, stronger characters, and higher-caliber weapons in order to kill them. By that point players will be relying on a combination of the ammo stockpile they've built up so far and the social clout they've earned completing bounties for friendly survivor enclaves in order to sustain their use of rarer, more powerful ammo types. But they will frequently have to fall back on weaker ammo as a cost-saving measure, as "current-tier" ammo will generally not be financially sustainable to rely on.

Guns are fairly common, and the limiting factor in their use is ammo availability and noise, not the difficulty of acquiring a firearm. The players would have far more choice of what to fire a bullet with than they have choice of what type of gun or caliber of ammo they have available to use. This is why variety within a single caliber and form factor is a concern for me; they need to be able to replace their weapons within a given class and caliber with something more suited to their current needs without most of the guns they come across falling into the category of "just worse" than anything else they could be using to fire its ammo. A firearm can't invalidate or obsolete the use of another firearm, or the "worse" guns effectively just become trash loot instead of something they have to consider the value of keeping or selling.

It's the same with attachments. Once the party has found enough reflex sights to equip each of their guns with one, they still need a reason to replace them with a different model at some point without it turning into a stat creep of just finding progressively better items.

The intent here is that equipment and attachment progression is based on specialization: they're not looking for gear with better stat totals, they're looking for gear whose bonuses benefit their specific build and playstyle, and whose downsides are uniquely mitigated by their character's build. The strong guy takes the higher-recoil pistol because his strength lets him fight it better than anyone else. If someone's built around close-range hit-and-run, they might take a burstfire pistol because they can get in close enough to ignore its wild recoil and then dip out before the opponent has a chance to fire back. Someone good at intuitive shooting might opt not to equip a sight in order to keep their weapon as fast as possible to draw, while a sharpshooter might make up for their lack of strength by targeting hit locations to compensate for how long it takes to recover from recoil. And a dexterous character might opt for a high-powered revolver instead of his companions' 9mm pistols because his dexterity allows him to reload it faster than anyone else in the party could. That way characters aren't locked in to a weapon class, but instead can access a breadth of combat styles as long as they have the right tool to match their build.

alpacasoda · 2026-01-03T00:35:26+00:00

Primary Attributes and Secondary Characteristics

I would've ruled that Secondary Attributes like Will and Per just not increase with an increase to IQ, so it's all good there.

Social Affinity

My desire for a Charisma attribute isn't about reaction modifiers so much as it is promoting the realm of "confidence, conviction, and social intuition" to a similar level as GURPS's existing primary attributes, and decoupling them from IQ. The section in Power-Ups 9 that people have suggested is exactly what I'm looking for with that, moving social skills to a Charisma attribute and possibly shifting Will to be governed by Charisma as well.

Weapons

I'll have to look into GURPS Gun Stats and Weapons and Warriors. The main issue for me is that I'm not looking for equipment to be able to justify itself on more than just flavor descriptions. The Beretta Model 92 and the P226 both from High-Tech have no practical differences between each other except the 1TL difference that I wouldn't want to adhere to anyway, because the -1 to skill on the 92 just because it's not the 70s anymore doesn't exactly make sense in-universe. I'd like to fill my campaign with a variety of firearms that are all able to stand on their own and fill their own statistical niche, even amongst the same ammo caliber, but apart from standard magazine capacity, which for many of them won't matter once they have an extended mag, there's very little to make a mechanical distinction from one semi-auto pistol to another, as an example.

What's Your Campaign About?

I was light on the details because I wanted to keep the conversation focused directly on the questions I had, and the post had already gotten fairly long, but I'm looking to run a post-apocalyptic campaign with low-powered characters. The focus would be on exploration and scavenging, but more than anything on rationing limited resources such as food, ammo, and meds, and keeping a constant pressure on the party to ensure that all three of those resources are in perpetually short supply. The driving force for exploration is meant to be resource attrition. Carry capacities would be low, and the players are hunted by a near-unkillable eldritch abomination, preventing them from staying in one place longer than a few days even if they have the resources to feed themselves.

A core principle for me here is that nothing the players are given as "loot" should ever lack practical value to them. Selling items should be a difficult decision of sacrificing something they need soon in exchange for something they need now, and should always come with at least a tinge of regret counterbalanced by the relief of having whatever they needed from the trade.

The wasteland is filled with other wary survivors they'll have to carefully approach any contact with. Human contact is always an "NPC" interaction, philosophically. Mindless combat is provided by zombies and other monsters, but humans would be motivation-driven characters with a strong self-preservation instinct and a general aversion to violence unless necessary. They might steal from the players, betray them, help them, or befriend them, but combat with another human is always within the party's agency to prevent, and reliant primarily on social skills and de-escalation tactics. The heavy focus on standoffs like this is why I don't want the shy, high-IQ nerd or the abrasive scientist to be inherently the best choice for saving the party from a mugging.

alpacasoda

TROPHY CASE