Character starts in some location (random or preselected) and has limited time pool. This time could be spent to grab/wield/wear items from items normally found in certain location (using known grab/wield/wear times for that items in given conditions). Unspent time from the pool can be spend to relocate to other nearby location (and possibly loot there too). When certain conditions are met player can also spend time for some other actions (barricade, cooking, reading and such).
Not sure about actual realization, but it could be something like minigame via menu/dialogs (e.g. character creation dialogs in TES, text quests in Space Rangers, etc).
Interesting, so if I’m understanding correctly, it could be a during-the-cataclysm bug-out scenario.
For example, turn 1, you wake up in your bed in your home, hearing sounds of smashing, screaming, and gunfire. Rolling out of bed, you might peek out the window, if so you see masses of rampaging zombies and perhaps other creatures. Maybe we interject some nartative, like, “you don’t know what’s happening, but it’s definitely a bad situation, you need to get some stuff together and get out”.
Then it effectively starts a “looting minigame”, where you hustle around your home getting dressed and grabbing supplies. You might need to peek out windows to figure out your escape route. Meanwhile theres an invisible countdown until the horde reaches your home. After some number of turns have passed, zombies start attacking the building, crawling through windows and bashing down doors. In the next stage, you have to escape with your loot, either on foot or maybe in a vehicle. Theres a defined edge of the map, reaching it means you’ve escaped, and we might have a time skip to place you in a normal spawn location with your loot.
Fascinating idea, it would be a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.
That would definitely work to fix one of my ongoing issues, namely just that the cataclysm itself is very vague even though my character presumably lived through it. I like the idea of fade to black scene skips to keep the feel of time passing without requiring me to actually live through the cataclysm.