Nimble TTRPG: An Overview, Part Five
Game Master’s Guide
You can’t have your pudding if you don’t have a GM
All right, entering the home stretch. The GM’s Guide is the longest book in the Nimble trilogy, so this may be the longest part of this review. Sorry ahead of time. Let’s go!
GMing Nimbly
The GM’s Guide pops right off with a chapter about Starting as a GM, gently reassuring newbies, at the first sentence, that GMing isn’t that hard. So after that lie, they move on to the rest of this section.
The advice they give is decent, actually: read the rules, get your friends together, and play the friggin’ game. Roll with the players’ actions and let them be creative. Stop as little as possible to look up rules. Don’t just straight up say “No.” Give everyone the spotlight. Be generous with information and telegraph danger. Do as much as possible to avoid the appearance of cheating. This section is only two pages long but it creates a healthy mindset for new GMs to carry into the game. I sure wish some of my GMs in the past had read this.
The next section, Advanced GM Tools, gives some extra tips and tricks for people who’ve GMed a few times. These include things like telling players things that their characters don’t or can’t know, like describing a foreboding figure watching them that their characters don’t see, or telling them what their characters could know but don’t. The example given is walking toward a goblin camp, blowing a Lore check, and telling them, “Gee, too bad, you might have known that goblins always set traps around their camps. Oh well. Make a DEX save.” How much the players are willing to buy into this kind of narrative shift depends on their tastes and tolerance, of course. The author seems pretty enamored with the idea though.
What they’re really hot for, though, are character vignettes. Two full pages of this section are taken up pitching the introduction of each character with a brief one-on-one RP sesh, with multiple examples showing how to tailor them to the characters’ backstories. I mean, it’s kind of a neat idea, but I dunno if it’s two pages neat, you know? Luckily it’s all optional. And maybe it tickles some enterprising GM’s imagination the right way.
Adventures
We segue into a chapter about Making Your Own Adventures. One thing that immediately stands out here is a tip I’ve more often seen in narrative-forward games: create problems, not solutions. The players will (the book says) come up with more creative solutions than you can, so let them cook and the chips will fall where they may. This feels oddly progressive for a game that has so much D&D in its bones. I don’t mind the sentiment, but some of my contemporary grogs may raise a brow.
Everything else here is more standard fare. Have bad guys to fight, cool places to explore, people to influence, traps to disarm, lore to consume, treasures to loot, all that. This isn’t an adventure generator or anything like that, just guidelines and suggestions.
The chapter ends with a page of what to avoid: dismissing things with “it doesn’t matter,” punishing curiosity, letting the players adjudicate game stuff, ruling too hard, rolling too much, talking too much or not enough (a balance found through experience, mostly), and cheating except when absolutely necessary. You know. Wink wink. Nah, I’m joking. *shakes head subtly*
Adventuring Rewards
This part is structured as a combination of theory and practice, with a small section about a certain game concept, then a few items which exemplify that concept. A couple of for-instances:
Release Valves: You might want to give a party a way to escape a possible TPK. Here are three magic items that do that in different ways: a Gem of Escape to physically leave the area, a Glacier in a Bottle to stymie nearby enemies briefly, and a Phoenix Helm to give a glorious resurrection to the person who dies wearing it.
Story Items: You may need an in-world way to give the players some info. Presenting: The Grimoire of Truths, a sentient book which knows much about the history of the world but secretly wants to lead the characters astray, the Hear-ring, which allows wearers to communicate across great distances, and the Pocket Cauldron, which can brew a potion that allows the user to see the past or the future.
The next section is a page of Secret Spells. Turns out the school spells presented in the Core Rules aren’t all the spells out there, and the GM can introduce some of these new ones if they wish. These spells include Revive (Tier 3 Radiant), which can bring the dead back to life within 10 days; Speak with Dead (Tier 4 Necrotic), bidding a corpse to answer three questions; and Hearth & Home (Tier 3 Fire), which conjures an inn for 12 hours where the party can take a Safe Rest. Most of these spells have been made “secret” because they can unbalance a campaign in slight ways, so their introduction is left up to any GM that doesn’t mind letting a genie out of a bottle now and again.
We get a list of how much gold a character should have per level and what to do if they have too much of it, as well as a small table of Lodging Boons. These give characters temporary perks for spending extra money on luxurious rooms, like healing extra Wounds, a little temp HP or Speed, inspiration (reroll one die once), and the other sorts of advantages you’d expect from having stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
The chapter ends with a page about Boons. Rather than giving them stuff they can lose, the GM can just imbue PCs with permanent abilities directly, usually as a quest reward or a magic buff. Minor Boons are mostly just +1 bonuses, added to initiative, max mana, skill points, etc. Major Boons are bigger and better: select a second Ancestry Trait, gain +2 Armor, heal extra HP every time you’re healed, learn a cantrip in a school you don’t know, etc.
Topping the list are EPIC Boons (capitalization from the original), like Epic Defense (Shields have +3 Armor), Epic Stamina (rolling 4 or higher on a Hit Die during a Field Rest also heals one Wound), Epic Criticals (when rolling crit damage, replace on die with a d20), etc. They’re all, to coin a phrase, pretty great. Every class gains an EPIC Boon at level 19, too, so that’s neat.
Monsters
Now, at last, someone for the PCs to push around. This chapter is divided into five main parts.
Running Monsters: a discussion of monster armor (Medium armor uses just the dice of an attack without stat adds, Heavy armor halves the amount from Medium armor); Flunkies and Minions (Flunkies can’t crit, and Minions are taken out by any attack and all Minions attacking one target are combined into a single attack for Defending purposes); and monster stats. Stats in this game are boiled down to the absolute bone. By default, every monster has sensible defaults: medium sized, unarmored, speed 6, reach 1, and rolls 1d20 for saves. The monster listing only shows one of these stats if it varies. So for instance here’s the entire stat block of a standard Goblin:
How fast is a Goblin? Well, that’s unlisted, so 6. What’s its various saves versus PC stuff? Not mentioned, so 1d20. All we get, and all we need, is its variant stats and abilities. All monster statblocks are formatted similarly. For most of them, you’re lucky to get even a single line of description. Nimble expects you to have a baseline understanding of fantasy monster types, and doesn’t stray far into anything esoteric. (At least until we get to Legendary Monsters; see below.)
Combat Encounter Guidelines: This section dives hard into balancing combat. Generally, the GM will base combat difficulty off the party’s combined levels, so e.g. four level 2 heroes will have a combined difficulty of 8. Fighting a group of monsters with an equal combined level of 8 would be a tough but fair fight (according to the rules, anyway). So they could be fighting two level 4 monsters, 3 level 1’s and a level 5, 24 level ⅓’s, however the numbers shake out. Less than this guideline will be an easier fight, going above will be tougher, and going way above would only happen if the GM did their level best to signal danger and the players stuck their noggins in the bee hive anyway.
A fair combat pace is ~2-3 combat encounters per rest, typically a couple of easy-to-middling ones (50-75% player level totals) and one hard one (100% level total). The rules do admit that combat isn’t always necessary, especially if the group is enjoying their role-playing and/or problem-solving.
For variety’s sake, the GM is encouraged to give a minority of monsters the equivalent of Medium or Heavy armor here and there, like a random Kobold with a shield or something. These little nuggets of extra resistance are expected to be somewhat uncommon but not immersion-breaking.
Fine Tuning Difficulty: This builds on the previous section. The first bit just advises to start easy, since it’s easier to increase difficulty in the middle of a fight than decrease it. The book goes on to talk about general tactics to change difficulty on the fly, like targeting the squishy characters, moving around which monsters act first, and how many minions is too many. Some good conversation here.
Unique Encounters: These two pages contain a trove of almost 40 different encounter ideas, from ambushes to puzzle fights to environmental catastrophes. The rules suggest saving most of these ideas for set pieces rather than feeling like you have to pick one every battle. Sometimes you just want to fight some skeletons.
Monster Builder: A nearly full-page chart of suggested stats for baseline monsters of all levels, which you can build on, add to, or subtract from to make something unique. There follows a page of Flavorful Monster Abilities which you can sprinkle on your custom darling, like Burning Aura (creatures adjacent to them take 1d6 damage), Flying (immune to opportunity attacks), Shifty (can move after being attacked), etc. There’s a lot of “feel” here, since loading up a monster with a bunch of extras can move it into a higher difficulty bracket. It’s not presented as an exact science, just … you know, be careful out there.
Bestiary
Smells like a zoo in here
The next section outlines almost 70 monster statblocks in Nimble’s super-terse style. They’re divided into categories: Kobolds, Goblins, Bandits, Snakemen, Dungeon Denizens (Stirges, Mimics, and Oozes), Hill & Field (Gnolls, Worgs, Hill Giants, Trolls, etc.), Undead (Skeletons, Zombies, Ghouls, Specters, etc.), Forest Denizens (Druids, Duskprowlers, Basilisks, etc.), Cultists/Horrors (Cultists, Stenchlings, Fiends, and Glabrezu), and Underground (Spiders, Cloakers, Worms, and Umber Hulks).
Most but not all monster types have a small list of recommended encounter mixes per level, plus loot. The loot section gives an interesting insight into what the different monster types might accumulate, with potential story hooks tossed in. A Kobold nest, for instance, may have balls of twine, shiny objects, and a poorly but lovingly executed painting of a dragon. A Bandit camp may have some highly valuable item that someone else wants back, or a stolen wagon loaded with bales of wool. It’s not quite as fungible as a loot table giving out exactly 57 gp and a Potion of Dingleberries, but it does give a bit of inner life to the critters you just murdered.
Beyond rank-and-file foes lurk Legendary Monsters. Legendaries are meant to be fought solo unless the party is greatly overleveled. They have multiple Actions to choose from, which change depending on how many HP they have left, and they take turns after each player.
Legendaries can appear in boss battles as soon as level 1. They also don’t need to be “solo” as long as all units add up to a similar number of HP and actions:
There are several Legendaries listed in this section, most with a big full-page image to go with their statblock. The art in Nimble is already pretty good but these pages are just *chef’s kiss.*
This whole part of the book provides a sparse but thoughtful cross-section of the kinds of foes you’d encounter in a fantasy realm. If you want more, a later chapter discusses converting monsters from a certain RPG which I’ve already named repeatedly but won’t here for some reason.
Adventures and Campaign
Monstrorum delenda est
Most of the remainder of the book is taken up with ten (!) different adventures. The first three are related and will take level 1 characters to level 3-4. The rest are for levels 3 to 5, except one that jumps to level 14 to show off what a more challenging adventure looks like.
All the adventures include some variety of dungeon crawl. Even the outdoor ones take place in a group of clearings connected by corridor-esque chokepoints. This isn’t exactly a criticism, except maybe of the genre as a whole. If you want something revolutionary, you’re looking in the wrong place.
The adventures are, in a nutshell:
- A Tiny Rescue (level 1): Goblins kidnap a town’s good-luck fairy, get her back
- Goblins of the Crystal Crag (level 2): Goblins came back and stole something while you were doing the first adventure, get it back (and learn that the plants in the area are getting violent)
- Greenthumb’s Base (level 3): Nature itself attacked the village, go find out why and kill it
- Vermin’s Vengeance (level 3): Rats are ransacking a city, go find out why and kill it
- The Hidden Honey Cavern (level 3): A weird bug druid is making suspiciously good honey, the heroes are hired to go find out how (but not necessarily kill it)
- The Lost Temple of Heytet-Seqat (level 5): A temple is unearthed in the desert, the heroes are hired to rescue someone who was exploring it
- The Vanishing Caravans (level 4): Thief attacks are increasing on caravans in a mountain pass, the heroes are hired to find out why and kill it
- Raid on the Royal Nest (level 4): Snakemen descend on a Birdfolk hatchery, intending to eat the eggs; the heroes are asked or hired to defend them
- The Hag’s Legacy (level 4): A powerful hag has
married Travis Kelcedied and several forces swirl to fill the power gap, go sort things out - Beyond the Crimson Veil (level 14): A blood-red fog full of fiends is descending on nearby lands, go find out why and kill it
Along the way, we’re introduced to bits and pieces of the Valley of Hope, the default game setting. This green and pleasant land has two main settlements, smallville Merivale and metropolis Farhope, a.k.a. the Last Harbor. Surrounding the valley are an astonishing variety of terrains: swamps, hills, mountains, glaciers, forests, wildlands, deserts, oceans, Mordor, even a flying island. Wow. Quite the geographical marvel.
The adventures are passable (and it’s nice to get so many); the campaign world, utterly generic. It’s Fantasy RPG Setting A: That One Place Where Adventures Happen. It has some good detail in spots, but it’s like detailing a bucket of paste. Like the most finely crafted Bic pen. The hot dish of game worlds. It works fine as narrative glue, don’t get me wrong, but if any part of it blows your mind then you’ve never interacted with a fantasy franchise of any kind, ever.
5e Conversion
The book ends with a couple pages discussing how to convert content from the current version of D&D. It’s mostly about which of the old stats and skills map to the new ones, how to convert monsters, and how to pull your favorite spells over if you really want to. Quick and methodical. Hard to joke about. Very sad.
The Book Overall
Nimble’s Game Master’s Guide stands toe-to-toe with D&D 2024’s, and improves on it in some cases, while being about a third the length AND including what is essentially Nimble’s Monster Manual. Not only does it have a lot of good advice about all aspects of running the game from sessions to campaigns, it also highlights the game as a narrative back-and-forth between players and GM.
Since it’s so reduced, it does lack some of the more in-depth things, like the chapters on bastions, magic items, lore glossary, etc. There’s also not a lot of advice on playing non-combat scenarios beyond “it may be fun sometimes.” That, I think, is probably due to combat requiring more adjudication, and therefore more rules. The game is more than capable of letting players roleplay or think their way past a scuffle, but the briefness of the rules doesn’t allow for a lot of discussion. It doesn’t push combat but it doesn’t have time for much else.
The GM’s Guide is a good introduction to gamemastering and a very useful reference for all skill levels. The bestiary makes it essential. The ten different adventures are an unexpected bonus. Works for me.
Next time: Closing arguments