This is a continuation of a review. In part 1, I described what I like about Nimble 2e. In this Part 2, I outline some things this homebrewer would fix, and give my overall take.
The thorns:
And now we come to the part of this review where (if anyone reads it), I may get some angry notes from Nimble 2e fans. For there are things about this system that are not quite my favorite flavor of ice cream, that prick at me. Four of these 'thorns', I think I can prune with some armchair homebrew. The others are style choices that just aren't my cuppa joe, like strawberry ice cream, and I encourage you to ignore my take if you don't agree.
Four things I would prune:
_________
1) Defend and armor don't seem real to me. You can Defend once per turn, at any time, as a reaction. Defending applies your Armor and Dex to the incoming attack, reducing its damage. But here's the thing--Armor now doesn't exist for the rest of your turn, like Schrodinger's cat-mail. Even if you are wearing plate armor, you can only use it to reduce damage against ONE attack. First goblin tries to stab ya? He fails. That next goblin, and the next one? They line up, it's Sunday dinner and you are the full-damage turkey.
You might be thinking, "This is real, defending against more than one enemy is hard!" And if this doesn't jar you out of the fantasy, awesome. But it does for me. Historically, armor was handy in melee, great scrums of people thwacking on all sides with axes and spears. Armor should help protect your back at all times, even when you are not actively defending or parrying.
This also leads to unrealistic situations. Example: Pally is level 3 with +2 dex, and wearing a chain shirt and iron shield (15 armor). Bobbi the goblin is attacking with a scimitar (1d6+2) and gets one attack. If Pally Defends each turn, Bobbi would have to explode twice to even damage Pally—odds at 3%. But add one just more gobbo, and suddenly Pally is getting damaged each turn. Huh?
When I posted this puzzler on the Nimble Discord, folks characterized a goblin as an angry child with a big knife, dangerous only in numbers. But this is unsatisfying ex post facto reasoning--the game mechanics are glaringly unrealistic in this edge case. No more so than HP I suppose, but I am of the camp that believes any angry idiot with a sword is dangerous to a swordsman, even by accident. In DnD 5e, with Pally's AC at 16 and Bobbi at +4 to hit, Bobbi has a 45% chance to damage Pally. And if Bobbi crits, Pally is in trouble. This is more real to me.
So, I want two things from Nimble 2e here. I want armor to matter for every attack, and I want Bobbi to be able to damage Pally, dammit. So here's how I would homebrew Nimble 2e to make armor feel real to me:
A) Against every attack, Armor has passive defense (2 light, 3 medium, 4 heavy). This is not added to your Defend roll, but subtracted from other hits you receive.
B) Let's make Monster Criticals more similar to PC criticals--they still can't bypass initial armor from Defend (unless they exceed it), but let's say that the exploding dice damage portion bypasses armor.
So if Bobbi crits, Pally's Defend reaction stops the first 1d6+2, but Bobbi's second exploding 1d6 can damage Pally through his medium armor. He now has a 15% chance of damaging Pally a little, and a 3% chance of decent damage. Good! He's still going to lose, but it's a realistic fight.
_________
2) Square-counting movement and kiting. Grids are useful to me in big combats for approximation, but I don't like playing on a strict grid. Nimble 2e is focused on grid play, with all distances in numbers of squares. However, it does have conversion rules for range bands (Close/Near/Far) in the GM guide. Good so far.
Unfortunately, with the three-action economy, Nimble 2e also has a kiting problem. Move in your full move, attack, back away full move. If the monster moves less than you, it will never be able to attack you in melee--only PCs have opportunity attacks. Here's some simple homebrew to stop kiting in its tracks:
A) Using a grid: Once you have entered melee range, getting out is difficult terrain because you have to face your opponent. In other words, leaving melee range, you can only move half of your number of spaces, backing up or sidling sideways, on guard. This is how I ditch opportunity attacks in 5e.
B) Using range bands: When you approach to attack, you move from Near to Close (1 Move). Leaving, the same in reverse (1 Move). But when you leave Close, it ceases to exist as a range band for your opponent. The opposing fighter can then advance across Near to Close in one move to catch you up, in 1 move.
_________
3) Assess has three serious issues. As an action, Assess allows you to make a skill check (DC 12) and then either ask the GM a question, -1 on incoming attack rolls against you, or +1 to your attack die on one attack. But it is rarely the optimal choice, the '5e Grapple' of Nimble 2e.
First, if you want information, then it's a useful action, but it runs the risk of pulling people out of the fiction. Middle of the fight, GM is describing the ghoul's slavering jaws and screams, player Assesses, 'How much HP does that ghoul have left?" Instant balloon puncture of the ambiance.
Second, if you want to receive less damage, awesome, do Assess. But what happens if you fail your Assess skill check? Nothing. Crickets. For a game that prioritizes having something interesting happen every turn, this is an odd design choice. Why isn't there a fall back 'something helpful' that happens if you fail your Assess check?
Third, if you want to do more damage, using Assess to +1 on one attack is only slight better than attacking again. Let's compare attacking with daggers (1d4) three times to Assessing, then attacking twice.
Attack x3: First attack average is ~3 damage. Second attack misses 44% of the time, so ~1.6. Third attack misses 58% of the time, so ~1. Total of 5.6 damage on average, and your chances of critting are 25%, 6.25% and 1.5%.
Assess/Attack x2: If you pass the Assess check, first attack can't miss, so average is ~3.28 damage. Second attack (d4) misses 44% of the time, so ~1.6 damage. Total of 4.9 +1 (Assess) =5.9 damage, with critting at 25% and 6.25%.
In short, Assess leaves you with slightly more damage on average, and you can't miss. But if you fail the Assess check***, you just do less damage. That means on average, you will do less damage with Assess.
***Let's say you have a 35% chance of failing your Assess check (+4 on the skill check).
So I want Assess to avoid pulling people out of the story, to have a fallback benefit if the skill check fails, and to be consistently worth it from a damage perspective. Here's my Nimble 2e homebrew for that:
A) To avoid gamist questions, have a table rule that all Assess questions have to be from the perspective of the characters, not players.
B) When you Assess, you can make a skill check to lower damage or ask a question. But if you fail that check, or just want to increase damage, you can do that without a roll.
C) If you Assess to increase damage, you actually raise the size the damage die, and you crit on either the original or new max value. For example, from 1d4 to 1d6, you crit on 4 or 6. Your chances of a crit now go up when you Assess (from 25% to 33%).****
****The math holds up with bigger die sizes. 1d6 to 1d8, crit on 6/8, 17 to 25% crit. 1d8 to 1d10, crit 8/10, 12 to 20%. 1d10 to 1d12, crit on 10/12, 8 to 17%. Interestingly, if you Assess, the high-end crit damage of a 1d4 (now 1d6) weapon is higher than that of a 1d10, but with lower average damage and a 1:6 chance to miss instead of 1:10. And you can dual wield daggers, giving you advantage on your 1d6 roll and damage output which beats a 1d12 weapon in some ways.
These homebrew tweaks turn Assess into a reliable tool for high single-strike damage for small weapon wielders. As an added bonus, smaller weapons, once arguably worse, now have the potential for greater damage at the cost of greater miss chance. That's a fun rules change!
_________
4) A graft: we need stunts! and Hindered rolls! If there is one criticism of Nimble 2e combat actions, it is that they are a fixed menu of options, with less room for creativity than some might like. If there is another, it's that Advantage and Disadvantage have huge, swingy impacts on outcomes (especially on the smaller-than-d20 damage dice). They are a big stick, and sometimes you want a twig. So let's bring in Stunts and Edges/Hindrances.
Graft #1: Stunts are tricks PCs do in combat that make life harder for enemies, but that often don't do additional damage by themselves. See Fighter Mighty Deeds in Dungeon Crawl Classics (easily implemented in 5e), Gambits in Mythic Bastionland, Exploits in Tales of Argosa, and Battlemaster manuevers in 5e (but for everyone). It's freeform combat, and it makes fighters fun, but I like to make stunts possible for everyone (fighting classes just being better at it).
But how to implement a stunt mechanic in Nimble 2e? First option, we can use a cousin of these simple rules from the Old Skull Blog:
A1) If a player crits, they can choose to do a combat maneuver (swing down onto an enemy, disarm them, knock them down, push them off a cliff, etc.). The affected enemy can choose to either take the additional crit damage, or be subject to the maneuver. The GM just makes a reasonable call for the enemy each time.
Alternatively, we can make enemies save to avoid being subject to the maneuver against their will:
A2) If a player crits, they can choose to do a combat maneuver (swing down onto an enemy, disarm them, knock them down, push them off a cliff, etc.) if they forego their critical damage. The affected enemy must make a skill check to avoid being subject to the maneuver, with the DC equal to 5+critical damage.
If you want to get fancy about it, you could give non-magical classes option A2, and magical classes option A1.
And once we graft stunts into Nimble 2e, it's easy to adjudicate their impact. The normal consequences of a stunt could simply be to impose disadvantage on the enemy's rolls next turn, or anything approved by the player and GM. If you want to try to push that goblin off the edge of the cliff, roll for it!
Graft #2: When you Assess to increase damage, the Core Rules call it "Increase the Primary Die Roll against a target by 1." Boy that's a mouthful. Given that we supercharged using Assess for damage above, let's give going up a die size a better name: an Edge.
Numerically, gaining an Edge is a less impactful benefit than gaining Advantage: in our homebrew, going up a die size raises mean damage by 1 and crit chance by 8%. So you could gain an Edge using Assess, or, like advantage, the GM could grant an Edge from good positioning, using a special dragon-killing arrow, etc. If you got two Edges, well, go up the die chain, and count multiple possible crit values (my dagger (1d4) with two Edges rolls a 1d8 and crits on a 4/6/8. Not bad! One possible dice chain:
1d3 - 1d4 - 1d6 - 1d8 - 1d10 - 1d12 - 2d6 - 2d8 - 1d20 - 2d10
What goes up, though, can also go down. Disadvantage is a pretty big whack in Nimble. With a dagger with 1 disadvantage, your odds of missing rise to 44%. If you want to have a smaller negative impact, give the PC a Hindrance.
B) A Hindrance is the opposite of an Edge, you go down a die size. If you crit, you must roll a second crit to confirm it, otherwise you do not explode the damage.
With a Hindrance you do 1 less damage on average, with a greater miss chance. And the odds of critting with a Hindered shortsword blow (d6->d4) are 6.25% (1 in 16), worse than the 16.7% of a normal shortsword but better than a shortsword with disadvantage (2.8%).
Things that are not my flavor of ice cream:
These takes are (even more) my personal taste, so I will keep this shortish. The Hero book is gorgeous and inspiring, and lays out some creative, interesting, and fun classes. As might be expected, they include traditional 5e class equivalents, but there are novel takes on class tropes, coupled with very fun mechanics. And yet, the Hero Book is my least favorite book of the three.
Why? The classes are 5e levels of intricate, very combat focused (there are very few utility spells and out-of-combat powers), and in a couple cases class powers strike me as a bit disassociated/video-gamey (e.g., Taunt: for aggro). But given that this ruleset is trying to woo 5e and PF2e fans, none of that is a surprise.
I suppose my initial dislike for the Nimble 2e classes stems from two sources. First, Nimble 2e nicely boils down the 5e design into four small pages per class, and this distillation made me realize I don't personally like complex, power-crafting 5e-style classes any more. I guess I now want simplicity, coupled with lots of customization options and creative, flexible spells. Honestly, I thank Nimble 2e for the epiphany!
Second, the Nimble 2e classes are relatively rigid and set. There are only two subclasses each, by design. The spell list is small (for now) and you can change up your powers regularly in-game, which means each time I make a Shadowdancer for example, I will use the same pool of powers.
Now, it's absolutely impossible for a single creator to anticipate all the different class visions character crafters want to fill--what they should do is make it EASY for anyone to play in their playground. For example, the GLOG has 100s of class templates because it's a snap to make one. And I salute Nimble 2e's efforts in this direction, with a wonderfully direct and comprehensive free Creator's Kit that outlines class design principles. While I still think Nimble 2e's overall complexity around character powers makes class creation daunting (check out the length of the character-leveling table in the kit), it is clear they are trying to meet homebrewers more than half-way.
To add another personal preference, Nimble 2e has inherited 5e's Red Queen leveling, in that all numbers must go up every level (more math!) so that PCs can keep up with ever harder monsters. Level-appropriate encounters are much easier to calculate in this system, but still a must. I honestly wonder if this game might be just as much fun to play for me if I skip leveling up heroes and monsters in terms of their stats and HP.
To round out my list, the game needs new material, sold not as individual classes or monsters, but in big, reasonably priced collections. I hear a Kickstarter is coming later in 2026, and to paraphrase a fellow restaurant critic, "I am not quite in love with this food: serve me more of it please."
So, do I want to play it?
100%, I want to both play and GM Nimble 2e this year. But I think I will run it as a one shot unless my table revolts and refuses to go back to 5e. Personally, the inner Frankenstein in me wants to bolt the Nimble 2e combat system onto something with simpler (or no) classes, like Knave or Shadowdark or Mork Borg.
But if you find yourself nodding along with me at the critiques in this last part, and don't plan to make an excursion to Nimble-land with me this year, let me close by saying that the Game Master Guide is a good return on your money, even if you never plan to play Nimble 2e: great advice, great ideas, and concise as a blade. I would put it up there with the Mothership Warden Operation Manual as a great beginning GM guide, for any fantasy system.
I wasn't paid for this review by anyone, and if you don't like it, please write an article on your RPG blog about why I am wrong (don't have an RPG blog? Start one!). Or comment below, if you must. Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment