But not the stem!

For a fairly meaty swords and sorcery system, have you looked at Dungeon Fantasy RPG? It’s GURPS distilled down to just the bits relevant to this kind of setting; so it’ll definitely have the meat you’re after.

I’ve seen people successfully using ChatGPT in conjunction with solo resources as well. It seems like the main thing is you have to keep an eye on the details, as ChatGPT can play fast and loose with things it established before; similarly to how you have to factcheck any kind of summary you ask it for - it’s great at conversation and ideas, but internal consistency is still spotty.

Seconding GURPS! I feel like there’s not enough emphasis on diverging from the printed rules. If you’re not sure which target number to use, or exactly what modifier to apply to it, just pick one and go! It won’t break!

“When in doubt, roll and shout!” shows up a few times in the core books, but they really need to emphasize that idea more - people don’t seem to have picked up on it.

I came in to say this! In addition, if you still have the bug to hack/mod whatever system you’re playing, you don’t have to explain the new rules to anyone else; you can change rules on the fly, or even rerun a scene a few different ways to see how things shake out. You can do this for a multiplayer game too (running everyone yourself); but in a solo game, you can try it as soon as you think of it!

Also, to expand slightly on GM Emulators - Mythic is the big one I know of, and they just released a second edition that’s supposed to be rather good!

I’m only marginally familiar with Frostpunk as a genre - what sort of game is your friend looking for? Gritty apocalyptic survival with some settlement building aspects?

Ironsworn could be easily tweaked to fill that need, I think. I suspect Savage Worlds could too. I see a lot of suggestions at https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/frostpunk-tabletop-system-recommendations.858901/ too.

If I may ask, why is GURPS not desirable? I know it has a few supplements for exactly this; including character templates to simplify chargen.

I’ve seen this a lot in discussion about the Eberron setting - the setting’s author has a blog where he goes over his take on things; but he intentionally leaves a lot of things unanswered (including the cause of the biggest natural disaster in living memory). People often talk about things IME (In My Eberron) when detailing what happened in their games.

It’s a refreshing take on an issue with a published setting.

You might skim the offerings at https://1shotadventures.com/ - they’re all one-off GURPS adventures the author writes and makes freely available! Could lower the barrier to trying out the system :) (edit) Each adventure also includes a set of optional character sheets; since character creation is one of the more time consuming parts of GURPS (/edit)

I’m running a GURPS game for some family (Dungeon Fantasy tropes plopped into a Steampunk world, for Firefly-esque fun), and I’m running a solo game of Eberron using GURPS rules as well! For the solo game, I’m using Ironsworn to manage the GM side of things.

I feel like Starforged can feel pretty cinematic, particularly for a dogfight style encounter!