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by Miriable

Nimble is a D&D-5e-alike-but-not-really-but-sorta-but-nah-unless? developed by Evan Diaz and the creatively named Nimble Co. Nimble started out in 2023 as a D&D 5e hack (now known as “Nimble 5e”), but came into its own as a full-fledged system in 2025 (sometimes referred to as “Nimble 2,” though that’s not what they call it themselves). Advertised with the tagline “Slay TTRPG Slog,” Nimble has been much touted lately as a minimalist, quick-playing, rules-tight, semi-drop-in replacement for 5e.

The base game comes at you three books deep: Core Rules, Game Master’s Guide, and Heroes, a.k.a. the classes book. All three books are necessary to play the game. The books are between 52 (Core) and 115 (GMG) pages long, with generous spacing and lots of illustrations. Nimble or not, it’s certainly light on its feet. I don’t own the print version because I’m not made of money, but pics make the books look almost comically thin.

The digital version gives you a big honkin’ heap of files, including the above books (page and spread versions), the 5-panel GM screen, the Quickstart, and action cards, spell cards, item cards, and monster cards, both in color and printer-friendly B&W versions. It also comes with a directory full of Markdown files ready to open in Obsidian, which is a real above-and-beyond gesture. You can supplement all this with a free ZIP file of VTT-ready maps for the adventures in the GM’s guide from their website. Their site also contains several video tutorials narrated by Evan himself.

They really want people to play their game.

[heading]Cracking the Book[/heading]
I am speed

The Core Rules begins with a section literally named “Start Here.” This brief, mostly introductory text segues into a page titled “How to Be a Good Player.” Their advice boils down thus: act heroic, engage with the game, and don’t be a jerk. I mean, I’ve heard worse. There’s also a bit at the end about being nice to your struggling GM, who’s spent hours slaving over a hot table to lay out this nice game for you and yet you hardly show any appreciation. Would it kill you to say thank you every once in a while? You’re breaking your mother’s heart.

Now we jump right into the meat of the matter. Every character in Nimble has four Stats: Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Intelligence (INT), and Will (WIL). Each class designates two of these as their Key Stats. For some class-based calculations, the player can choose either Key Stat to roll with. Stats run from -1 to +5, sloughing off the old 3-18 system which has been increasingly vestigial for years.

These stats provide the baseline scores for ten Skills: Arcana (INT), Examination (INT), Finesse (DEX), Influence (WIL), Insight (WIL), Might (STR), Lore (INT), Naturecraft (WIL), Perception (WIL), and Stealth (DEX). To make a skill check, the player rolls 1d20 and adds the relevant skill versus a Difficulty Challenge (DC) determined by the GM. Gee this sure feels familiar.

Meanwhile, saves use a d20 roll plus the character’s base stat score. Each class has one Advantaged save stat and one Disadvantaged save stat, like for instance the Berserker’s STR+, INT-. When rolling saves, the player would roll the STR with Advantage, INT with Disadvantage, and saves from the other two like normal.

While Nimble has fewer stats and skills than D&D, the way they work is still instantly familiar. Calculating DCs uses the exact same guidelines as D&D. If a published D&D adventure says doing a thing is a DC 12 check, you have nothing to convert. It may not always be the same skill, but it should be obvious which one fits.

The first real quirk Nimble throws at us is how its versions of Advantage and Disadvantage work. Adv/Dis can be applied to any die roll, not just checks. So you could, for example, roll 3d6 with Advantage, which would involve rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest. Adv/Dis can have multiple levels, too, so rolling 2d8 with Disadvantage 2 involves rolling 4d8 and dropping the two highest.

And devil take the hindmost

Hit Points work just like D&D … until you drop to 0. At that point, you take one Wound and gain the Dying condition. Wounds are serious injuries that take extra time and care to heal. A character can take six Wounds before they actually die die. While Dying, actions are limited, concentration is broken, attacking or casting a spell requires a STR check or you take another Wound, and you take more Wounds if you’re hit again. Healing HP is easy (and ends the Dying condition), but healing a Wound requires a Safe Rest away from danger for a while.

The next two pages blast through the rules for Range & Speed, Concentration, Cover & Hiding, Grappling, and Conditions. There’s nothing really odd here for a 5e player, just pared down to their essence. F’rex, the Speed rules fix everyone’s movement to 6. Six what? Six spaces on the map. Are those meters or five-foot increments or what? Who cares, just go 6. Don’t have a grid? Measure from your thumb to pinky. That’s about six inches. Good enough.

Shaka, brah

[heading]Combat[/heading]
The bigger they are, the harder they hit

I just want to break in here and mention that the rules started on page 5; we are now on page 13. Nimble doesn’t mess around.

Tactical combat is where things really diverge from 5e. For one thing, characters get three Heroic Actions per round, Pathfinder-ishly. On their turn, they can spend these actions to Attack, Cast a Spell, Move, or Assess. (There are other situational actions too, often class-based.)

Here we learn the One Big Takeaway about Nimble: there are no to-hit rolls. When you Attack a foe within range, you roll damage dice and apply the total directly to their HP, unless you roll a 1, which is a miss, or the die’s maximum value, which is a Crit. If you’re rolling multiple dice, the die that lands to your furthest left is the Primary Die used to count these misses and crits. Crits explode as long as you keep rolling max values, and ignore monster armor too.

Now this isn’t the first RPG to go to-hit-less; Sentinel Comics, Into the Odd, the various Bastionlands, even classic Tunnels & Trolls forgo separate hit rolls. This is the first D&D-alike I’ve seen that goes this route, though. I would even posit that it’s closer to D&D’s classic rationale that Hit Points are an abstraction of fatigue, little cuts that gradually bite deeper, etc. than D&D itself gets. HP here are essentially padding before you start taking Wounds and really get hurt.

Characters can spend multiple actions to Attack more than once per turn, though each additional attack gains one level of Disadvantage. They can also Move repeatedly, so that 6-space move can become 12 or 18 if they need to book it. Spells have an action cost between 1 and 3, and may also cost Mana.

The Assess action allows the player to make a DC 12 skill check to do one of three things: ask the GM a question about the current situation which they must answer honestly, create an opening against a foe to gain a bonus to attack them, or anticipate danger, which reduces all dice rolled against the character by 1 point until their next turn. The skill you use for the Assess check depends on what you want to do. Assessing whether there are hidden enemies nearby would be a Perception check, while a sneaky character who wants to anticipate danger might roll Stealth and use shadows to make themselves a poor target. This injects a little environmental forwardness into the game mechanics, which I think is neat.

After a character’s turn ends, they immediately get all three of their Heroic Actions back. This allows them to use them as Reactions when it’s not their turn. Basic reactions are Defend (reduce one incoming attack by your Armor score), Interpose (push someone in danger out of the way and take the hit for them), make an Opportunity Attack (attack with Disadvantage if a foe moves away), or Help (give an ally Advantage by taking some kind of action within the story). Unlike Actions, you can only perform each type of Reaction once per turn. So a character could both Interpose and Help in their off-turn, but they couldn’t Help twice. Also, each Reaction costs one Heroic Action, so e.g. someone who Defends will only have two actions left to use for their next turn.

At the beginning of a fight, the GM asks players to roll Initiative. Everyone throws a d20 and adds their initiative bonus (usually DEX). If they roll a single digit number, they only get one Heroic Action on their first turn. If they roll 10-19, they get two actions, and all three on a 20+. No matter how many actions they have to start with, they get all three back after their turn.

There’s no dice-driven initiative order. The PCs almost always go first in a round, unless they’re caught completely flat-footed, and they (usually) all act before the monsters get their turn. The first player to act is the one who’s ready to go first, and then play continues clockwise.

And that’s it for the basic combat rules. We’re now on page 16, taking a one-page diversion to discuss rest and healing. There are two types of rest, Field and Safe. A Field Rest can either be Catching Your Breath (take 10 minutes to regroup, rolling your Hit Dice to heal up a little) or Making Camp (similar deal, but takes eight hours and gives you the maximum value of your Hit Dice without rolling). A Safe Rest has you going to an inn or other safe haven for several days, restoring all your HP, mana, and Hit Dice and healing one Wound.

Safe Rests can also involve downtime activities like shopping, working, mentoring, etc.

[heading]Building Character(s)[/heading]
The measure of a man

The character sheet is as compact as you’d expect. The normal version fills up only half a page, though there are other versions that take up a full page in either portrait or landscape orientation. You wastrel.

Character creation is about as quick as everything else.

1. Select your Class, and take note of which stats are the Key Stats for that class. Classes are touched on very briefly here, but not fleshed out until the Heroes book. So equally briefly, here are your choices, along with which D&D class they’re wink-nodding:

Berserker: Barbarian
The Cheat: Rogue
Commander: Warlord (welcome back, buddy)
Hunter: Ranger
Mage: Sorcerer
Oathsworn: Paladin
Shadowmancer: Warlock
Shepherd: Cleric
Songweaver: Bard
Stormshifter: Druid
Zephyr: Monk

None of them are exact 1:1 comparisons but they all carry a heavy fog of familiarity.

2. Choose an Ancestry and Background. That’s the subject of the next chapter, but all the classics are there, as well as some … interesting exotics. Your ancestry choice may alter some of your starting scores. Apply as directed.

3. Use one of the following arrays to fill in your Stats: Standard (+2, +2, +0, -1), Balanced (+2, +1, +1, 0), or Min-Max (+3, +1, -1, -1). Also find your Class’ Advantaged stat and mark a little arrow triangle printed at the top of the stat box as a reminder, then mark the bottom triangle for the Disadvantaged stat.

4. Fill in the skill boxes with the numbers from their respective stats, then add four extra points between them.

5. Write in your Max HP and Hit Dice (provided by your Class), number of Hit Dice (equal to your level), Initiative (default DEX), Speed (default 6), max Wounds (default 6), and inventory slots (10 + STR).

6. Either equip up with the standard loadout given to you for your class and background, or take 50 gp and go shopping.

7. Choose your languages, mark down any other weirdness that comes from your life choices, and you’re ready to roll.

Leveling up involves rolling your Hit Die type with advantage for more HP, gaining another Hit Die for rests, adding one skill point, and picking up new class features. Every new level in a class gives you a new ability to play with. No leveling doldrums here.

Spoiler from a future book: Leveling in Nimble is milestone only.

[heading]Ancestries and Backgrounds[/heading]
Who is your daddy and what does he do

The list of Ancestries (a.k.a. races, heritage, folk, whatever term satiates the wolves baying at the door) reads like a hybrid of half a dozen other games’ race rosters smashed together. All the classics are here, as well as more exotic types like Bunbuns (small rabbitfolk who get one 6-space leap per encounter), Planarbeings (people not from this dimension, who can mark off a Wound to phase out and avoid all damage for a turn), and Wyrdlings (small critters full of wild magic, who allow nearby spellcasters to roll on the Chaos Table).

Optionally, a player can choose from a page of adventuring motivations. You’re trying to get home, you were betrayed by your bestie, your king sent you forth for some reason, you want to see what’s at the bottom of all these deep holes, whatever. These are mostly hooks for the GM to yank on at opportune times, but they can help with roleplaying too.

[heading]Equipment[/heading]
I got a rock

Equipment must be important in this game, since this chapter is eleven whole pages long. Woo.

This section has your typical tables of monster mashers and glimmering gewgaws, interspersed with just enough equipment rules that you can’t really skip reading it. Here we find proficiency rules (proficiencies come with your class, unproficient weapons don’t crit, and Defending with unproficient armor costs two actions), dual wielding (wielding two light weapons gains you one extra die on one of them), unarmed strikes, improvised weapons, etc.

There are a couple pages of magic items here, including a Weapon of Many Hands which gives you two extra arms while you wield it, a Pocket Cauldron which can brew potions that let you see into the future or relive a past memory, and the ever-popular Ball of Spiders which generates a carpet of illusory bugs which skeeves monsters out. We also learn about scrolls and wands which allow even non-mages to cast spells (with a DC check, of course). There’s not a whole lot of stuff here, but it’s enough to get you started. If you want a huge list, you can convert them over from The Other Game.

[heading]Spells[/heading]
Bibbidy bobbity boo-wah

There are six main schools of magic in basic Nimble: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Necrotic, Radiant, and Wind. Each school contains a couple cantrips, seven combat spells, and three utility spells. That’s it. That’s all you get. (Barring hidden spells … shh …)

The various classes gain access to a limited selection of schools. Mage gets Fire, Ice, and Lightning; Oathsworn gets Radiant; Shadowmancer gets Necrotic; etc. Some of the schools get multiple dips, so for instance Shepherds also get both Radiant and Necrotic. This is mitigated by each class’ other features, so it’s not like Shepherds make Shadowmancers obsolete.

Spells have Tiers, starting at Cantrip and rising through Tier 9. They also have an Action cost from 1 to 3, and many have a Mana cost as well. Generally, spellcasting classes start with all the Cantrips of their school and gain one Tier every few levels. Utility spells are chosen one at a time by the player as the character reaches certain levels.

There are no spell slots. The main limit to casting is Mana, which is acquired differently for each class. This book doesn’t go into any detail and so neither will I (until we get to the Heroes book, anyway).

Most spells, including Cantrips, can be Upcast once you reach a higher Tier. This costs extra Mana but gives each spell a unique powerup, like extra Reach or damage.

So, about that relatively small number of spells. Players who enjoy picking from a huge list of funky spells may balk. Nimble, though, takes their spells and massages them into something unique with class features. You’ll … have to trust me on that for now. You’ll see what I mean when we get there. GMs might have to make the same case to skeptical players who’ve only read to this point.

[heading]And the rest[/heading]
Altered states

The last couple of sections discuss optional rules and edge cases, like multiclassing, knocking people off cliffs, playing dead, healing multiple Wounds during Safe Rests, customizing weapon dice, and such like. There’s a page with illustrations about how to measure areas of effect, cones, and lines on a grid, then a glossary, and then we’re out.

[heading]Thoughts[/heading]
The story so far

The Core Rules don't waste any time at all to give the reader everything they need to know about how the game runs. Without the companion books, though, it's an empty framework full of good ideas but no way to execute them. The good ideas there are really good, though.

I’ve done some research to see what other people think of Nimble. The response is varied. The people who’ve played it (almost) universally love it; those who’ve read it but haven’t played it think it’s intriguing; and those who haven’t done either are SUPER skeptical of the no-roll-to-hit mechanic. Most of the latter trot out all the other no-hit games and what they did wrong, and therefore this system must have the same problems and ugh no thanks I read a review of Into the Odd and it’s not for me.

But I think concentrating on that one aspect of Nimble buries the lede. What it actually does, quite well I think, is give players agency even when it’s not their turn. The Action/Reaction three-action economy allows players to shove allies out of the way and take hits for them, give their friends advantage, reduce the rolls of enemies targeting them or their buddies (increasing the chance of a miss and making it impossible to crit), force the GM to answer one question honestly, and a whole bunch of other things, on demand, any time. You don’t roll your dice and then sit on your hinders watching your friends and enemies bumble around for half an hour.

Nimble also has a lot of fun dice mechanics. I know that’s a shallow compliment, but it’s true. Rolling a bunch of clicky-clacks for Advantage or Disadvantage is fun. Counting dice from left to right is unique and kinda fun. Exploding dice is always fun.

Anyway, back to the no-hit thing. HP in Nimble aren’t the be-all end-all. Reaching 0 HP does give you the Dying condition, which is bad, but any amount of healing fixes that. What you really need to keep track of are Wounds. If someone gets boofed to 0 HP away from the group, they’re not dead, but they’re SUPER vulnerable to more attacks that will kill ‘em quick. The rest of the group has to make Sophie’s Choices to either fix their friend or squirrel them off the battlefield.

It's hard to recommend a trilogy based on only one book, but taken as a whole, Nimble is one of my favorite takes on D&D-style heroic fantasy. Definitely worth checking out.


This review was originally published (by me) at https://ccxp.info/nimble-ttrpg-an-overview-part-one/

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