What RPG is best-suited to portraying a typical isekai protagonist?

What RPG is best-suited to portraying a typical isekai protagonist?

FATAL

Do you just spawn in as a Japanese high school student, or so you want to work your way up from baby-hood?

To be perfectly honest the only good, logical, objective answer is NONE.

Isekais, as much as I like them, are absolutely not good for Veeky Forums related roleplay because the concept is that the MC knows things from his reality and apply it to a fantasy land to either disastrous or amazing effects that will ripple through the land and cause so much change it’ll trigger change in the the society isn’t ready for. Not only that, but Isekai protagonist are often given booms of overpowered ness that wasn’t earned in by their previous life’s work.

One isekai that shows how the MC is able to shape the world is Tania the Evil. Just because she did not believe in God, in his/her next life, she was given a bad start in life, BUT was given the means to get out of that bad situation early if she took the means to do so, and he/she did.

What I’m trying to convey by this is that players that would play as Isekais would metagame the fucking crap out. Example being in a fantasy land pre-gunpowder, one of the players would highly invest into alchemy, knowing with enough time, investment, research and incentive, gunpowder is going to be made and whoever discovers it will become the next superpower of the setting. Same thing can happen in a industrial revolution era game. Players investing enough in textiles will have someone develop nylon. And with enough time and money, ballistic nylon.

Basically doing an isekai game is literally an arms race against the GM for who’s going to develop what first

I don’t know, that sounds fun. You’d probably have to put a lot of effort to make it viable, but having a party leading the world into new era, perhaps with the world trying to push back sounds interesting. Maybe with the party then turning on each other for the spoils?

>Maybe with the party then turning on each other for the spoils?
This is where PvP happen in a TRPG. TRPGs are co-op games with one player as the guide and lore master. If you decide to do that, you will alienate everyone and will turn the game to absolute dogshit. No game is sometimes definitely better that a bad game.

D&D. The point of those series is that they represent a fairly standard fantasy setting. Sure I one could say GURPS or Runequest or some other well known fantasy system. But D&D and its derivatives, with classes, levels, and all that jazz, is what is needed to be archetypical enough.

FATE accelerated.
Play with literal pay-whores that roleplay harem girls for bigger immersion.

For isekai, the world and characters are super important. Remember, one best girl is better than a thousand worst girls.

Also there should be an option to adopt a silver-haired wolfgirl.

Dungeons and Dragons.

Maid RPG.
Main focus on the Hero, with a few harem girls in tow.

If your answer isn't freeform, you're doing it wrong.

Naw man. Everyone knows the girls are the best part and should be the top focus. The Hero is just there to be the master and bumble through the setting while the players compete to be the canon love interest.

>What I’m trying to convey by this is that players that would play as Isekais would metagame the fucking crap out. Example being in a fantasy land pre-gunpowder, one of the players would highly invest into alchemy, knowing with enough time, investment, research and incentive, gunpowder is going to be made and whoever discovers it will become the next superpower of the setting. Same thing can happen in a industrial revolution era game. Players investing enough in textiles will have someone develop nylon. And with enough time and money, ballistic nylon.

>except that the system is D&D and magic still beats guns anyway, because the gun rules are shit

Guns BTFO.

You hit one of the problems on the head: Isekai protagonists get some sort of OP bonus. Take Re:Monster, for example. A human reborn as a goblin would have been an interesting concept on its own. But then they fucked it all up by giving him the biggest cheat power in the universe. No longer does he have to overcome the challenges of his limited body by using his brains. He just becomes a never ending excuse for the author to say "and then he gets this super special power and becomes even stronger."

>wanting to be owned
>wanting to be the property of a fucking idiot harem protagonist
>not just waiting for the girls he didn't choose to realize my pure love for them.

Dungeon keeper ami manages to side step this by granting her a power that most other enemies have, while ham stringing her by her morals.

Ok, I'll just blow past the fact that isekai tends to be a pile of dogshit, and the actual few good shows the whole thing isn't very relevant to plot (Re:Zero) or hardly mentioned at all (KonoSuba) or not at all really (Grimgar).

One immediate problem you'll face is how a typical isekai style story can only suffer a single chosen one and his gaggle of shallow love interests. Unless you're running a single player campaign your players must overcome the fact that they cannot be THE Gary Stu protag, but one of a multitude instead.

What you could is try and convince them having just one play the gary stu and rest play his haremettes. Part of the fun will come from them trying to justify their interest in the protag with a straight face. You'll just have to make them agree to that and other isekai genre conventions in general as the stuff can't really work as a regular play.

One thing you could do to freshen things up. You know that stuff where a girl gets thrown into another world and acquires a harem of shallow bishies. That stuff doesn't play to isekai genre - at least I can't think of any examples - but you could make it so.In another thing you also could bait-and-switch and throw them into a scifi world so common "gunpowder invention" kind genre conventions are out, but they're still expected to play saviors of the universe because, hey isekai.

Hit summer anime of 2018
>What?!? I got cucked in a fantasy realm?

I also accept Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?, at least for now. Kumoko has gotten strong within the rules of her "game". At least up to where I have read. There's some implication that she may have or be getting cheater powers, but for the moment kumoko's growth seems like it would normally be possible for any of the spider monsters if they had the intelligence to min-max like she has.

>In another thing you also could bait-and-switch and throw them into a scifi world so common "gunpowder invention" kind genre conventions are out, but they're still expected to play saviors of the universe because, hey isekai.

What is it's a weebshit sci-fantasy world like Phantasy Star?

If you go through with it, take a page out of Konosuba and make your players absolutely useless. The only advantage they have is their metagame knowledge isntead of any actual powers. That *might* make it interesting.
But seriously, just don't.

You don't.
A typical isekai protagonist is absolutely dogshit as a character due to their innate OP trait. Do you mean as a bbeg? Well that could work, but it would be a bbeg that would never lose, so fuck it. Why bother?

Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition mixed with d20 modern additions as needed.

Konosuba is pretty distant from a typical isekai though. For one, the start bonus is less something to make off-worlders OP and more just to give them a chance to survive; Kazuma is a runt even compared to typical thieves, a bit a runt with heavy investment in luck, and his counterpart swordboy is a glass cannon who made endurance his dump stat and is liable to go down like a biplane in a flak battery if he doesn't manage to take out whatever he points his sword at in short order. They're both balanced like actual RPG characters who need to use their knowledge just to survive as opposed to seinen protagonists with a fantasy flavoring.

It's more of an interesting campaign scenario where one character starts with a magical item far beyond what should be in their level range at the cost of randomized stats and is then told to fight the bad guy. What would they do with this device? Would it actually help them in the long run or only ensure a swift demise as they miscalculate the amount of benefit it actually gives and bites off more than it can chew?

Basic idea: Players start as commoners/warriors/some other shitty tier 6 class that is offset by being given a highly effective, but in some way limited resource in order to function and have intrinsic knowledge of certain things to a level deemed appropriate by the DM to offset certain checks they would otherwise be unable to do. Some characters might also be allowed to play "standard" classes and need to keep the commoner's punk-ass alive.

but in this case he wasn't normal human, he had that power in his previous life and was some sort of psychic assassin or something in far future sci-fi world

...wait, what?

Before he reincarnated as a goblin, he was some kind of psychic that already had that ability. He was then killed some yandere girl because she was jealous or misunderstood him being friendly with another girl.

GURPS has rules for inventing high-tech stuff in low-tech settings.