A trilobite is no dinosaur! (It's still cool I *guess*.)

Most states don't have one, tragically!

"A role-playing game?! Based on a cartoon? Poppycock! Humbug! Villeins!" - Gary Gygax, probably

Space Adventure Hero, a game I did in my early days, was a game I did in my early days that experimented with having a dominant protagonist and rotating characters (an the referee role) around fairly often, which easily could be adapted to an solo isekai structure.

A key issue is that many isekai stores tend to have one dominant protagonist; something that traditional party-based games aren't suited for. But there are exceptions in the genre, as well as TTRPGs structures suited to that.

I imagine it must be for adults and I imagine there must be somebody out there just collecting NCIS merch because there's always one but the notion still feels wildly surreal.

In Mutants in the Now, I wanted a modern equivalent to alignments, but I didn't want organizational allegiances; I went with abstract, open-ended values. Though there wasn't much that mechanically used them, they were a "placeholder" mechanic that was intended to be (and was) expanded later.

Asking people for money more than once every five days is probably key, huh?

I've reported those ads because they're clearly deceptive; Youtubers have already tested the waters for us.

They send you something that has something like that design printed on it, if they send you anything.

I'm sure deployment of FEMA is a lot faster when there's notably less to deploy.

That's not to say it's even a bad idea depending on the experience you're looking to present. But it can also just seem like some games throw up their hands on finding ways to make mechanics engaging and interesting, and just giving up on rules design isn't necessarily the answer.

No game I'm aware of (save maybe Amber?) does this with combat; "they're swinging their short sword with their right hand towards your midsection, what do you do?", and you have to puzzle a defense. "Oh, you can't parry in time with a guisarme. The correct answer was backstepping. Sorry."

Or maybe there's a set of options and a skill roll narrows or broadens the options depending on your success. A good roll tells you where might be more ideal to hide, while a bad roll provides objectively wrong answers.

And like, it can be fun to get to that level of detail and puzzle things out as a player! But at the same time you can find a middle ground. You could say "the GM needs to know what the character's doing to set the difficulty" or in this basic, traditional game situation.

Yeah, John's finally retiring.