Old School Spirit

''The more rules you add the more likely it is you will constrain the players and the game. Rules are good, too many rules are bad''. -- Dave Arneson  The secret we should never let the game masters know is that they don’t need any rules. -- E. Gary Gygax

Rules vs. Rulings
Most of the contents of this document are not rules, but are rather advice and sample rulings for the GM. Rules are distinctive in that your players can rely on them to be consistently in force, if occasionally bent by strong magic. As GM you can change rules, but you should not do so without notifying your players in advance. Likewise you should not lightly make exceptions to a rule. Your players deserve a consistent game world, ever if that world sometimes appears inconsistent from their limited perspective.

Some games have tried to make rules to cover all situations, but that is not the Isekai approach. Instead, Isekai tries to use as few rules as possible and to rely on you as GM to use your judgement to resolve unexpected situations. Those decisions are called "rulings". A ruling applies only to a specific situation and may or may not apply in what appears to be a similar situation. Whatever rulings you make, you should keep track of them and try to apply them consistently most of the time; but you should depart from precedent when that better represents the particular situation faced by the PCs. Your responsibility is to make fair (and fun) rulings, not to slavishly apply a written code.

 To the Players : Your knowledge of this document is meant to simulate knowledge which your character gained thru training, practice, and experience, but which would not be fun to play out in-game. The worlds of Isekai generally follow the laws of physics (magic, of course, is an exception), so you should be able to predict the results of most actions based on your real-world experience and your in-game experience. Please try to express any concerns in terms of that experience, not in terms of this document. (Eg. "When I was learning to cast this spell it always did ...," rather than, "It's written here that this spell should ....") Stay in character as much as possible.

Role-Play, Not Roll-Play
Isekai is a game of skill in a few areas where many games just rely on die rolls. Your players don’t have a “bluff” check to let then automatically fool a suspicious city guardsman, and they don’t have a “sense motive” check to tell them when someone’s lying. They have to tell you whatever tall tale you’re trying to get the city guardsman to believe and decide for themselves if some NPC lying to their character.

No Limitations
In Isekai a player can describe and attempt virtually anything he can think of. Everyone can perform what in other games are called "feats" without any sort of game-defined ability. They can try to slide on the ground between opponents, swing from a chandelier and chop at a distant foe, taunt an opponent into running over a pit trap ... whatever they want to try. That doesn’t, of course, mean that they’ll succeed. It’s your job as GM to handle these attempts colorfully and fairly, choosing the probability you think is right and rolling the dice.