Off the Shelf (Almost): Draw Steel

If I could find Draw Steel, I'd revisit it. As it is, this game is lost in my garage. My brother and I loved D&D 4E, so this should be a natural fit. As it is, I bounced off the very dense rules. I never gave it another chance, which makes it feel like Cypher System to me, a game I bounced off five times before I understood it.

I like D&D 4E's design goal: make D&D a tabletop battle game. You are here to kick butt and take names. This isn't "story gaming" or soft stuff; nope, you are all "dungeon killers," and you are here to end trouble, stop the bad guys, say a few catchphrases, and go Duke Nukem on the forces of evil.

That's good stuff, and why we loved D&D 4E. The change of pace from the glacial 3E, with its 15-minute adventuring day, alpha attacks expected, and overly complicated skill point system, was a good one. With 5E, we're back in the mire of story gaming, and there are better games for that these days, such as Daggerheart or the Cypher System. A tight, balanced dungeon-battle game keeps the action on the table and people honest. With games too focused on skills and roleplaying, people get the idea they can skill roll or roleplay their way out of a situation.

In a battle game, the reason why we are here is clear, and the rules can be better balanced for great fights. With 5E, boss monsters go down in a turn and are nothing-burgers many times. The game is nearly impossible to balance, and the splat-book powergaming makes it worse. Some DMs give up on tracking hit points and just fake the boss fights to be "good fights," since doing all that work and fixing the encounter just isn't worth the time, and they will likely be wrong anyway. When the boss monster should die, it will, and who cares if a 300-hit-point boss took over 800 damage, at least the fight was competitive and fun for the table.

Give me a game where the fights are designed to work and be fun all the way to maximum level. Draw Steel and Pathfinder 2 are those games. Part of Draw Steel's problem is that people never give up on 5E or Pathfinder, and it remains a niche audience. Shadowdark also takes away people who want tension and a tight, turn-based, exploration game. There are too many games out there, and the good ones tend to fade. Still, I like 4E's tactical first combat. This should appeal to me.

But D&D 4E let us down hard since the game was barely playtested on the way out the door of Wizards. It took them two tries to fix the monsters, so we ended up with three bestiaries, and the first one was practically unusable with 1,500-hit-point red dragons. Even D&D 5E is approaching that level of math-insanity, where the damage just gets too big, my eyes roll, and the boss monster is vaporized in a turn and a half. In D&D 4E, it went the other way; we would spend 3 hours fighting a boss monster, and by the end, the boss monster was begging for it to end.

D&D 4E was a great game presentation-wise. Everything else was a letdown. The magic items were lists of the same item from +1 to +6. The rules said you were supposed to give your DM a "wishlist" of magic items for your build. I have no clue what drugs the designers were on. Maybe they weren't paying attention and were playing World of Warcraft all day in the office. Some magic items were so broken they were errattaed before the book hit the shelf. They revised this into a "4.5" with the Essentials line, but the books weren't complete and left things like rituals out. The whole game was "designed as they wrote it," and it was a huge mess.

Draw Steel is supposed to be "fixed D&D 4E" with the same design goals, and written by those who loved the game. That gives me hope, and now that I put 5E away, I can give this game a little attention, if only the PDFs, while the hardcovers elude me. D&D 5E is such a huge distraction; now that eight shelves of 5E books are (still) on their way to the garage, I have time for a lot of fun games, and to read some that I have been sleeping on.

D&D does suck the air out of the room when other games are waiting to be enjoyed or played, and it is beginning to feel like the loud person at the party who won't stay quiet so we can enjoy the fun.

The game only goes 10 levels, but like DCC, those 10 levels are all good, and they are more like "power levels" than weaker D&D levels. A good game does not need 20 levels, or 30, just a design that makes thematic sense and uses its math well. Another thing is that games with 20 levels feel obliged to give characters something at each level, and the design gets cluttered and messy. 

Sometimes original D&D with "dead levels" was better design than a game that hands out twenty levels of rewards that eventually need tracking. Ten levels, and get something each level? That's manageable, and a sane reward progression. I would rather have fewer, more meaningful levels than a bunch I will never reach and feel the need to record a dozen more level bonuses on an ever-growing character sheet. 5E's character sheet bloat makes the high-level game unplayable for me.

The art in Draw Steel is better than most games, far above ToV and A5E, and even better than most D&D 5.5E art, which says a lot. The art in these books is very good, and it is not on the eye-bleeding level of some games. They spend a lot of good money on amazing art, and it sets a mood and style that makes me take the game more seriously than many other games. I have had games I have put in storage just because of embarrassing art. Some, like 13th Age 2nd Edition, have middling reviews for the art, and I liked the first edition, so I am staying away. They put a lot of care into the art in this game, which makes Draw Steel a step above others.

The ancestries in the game are different, with a science fiction one and strangely named, similar-yet-different ones. That threw me off at first, but I can ignore the unusual ones or use them as I see fit. I wish they had a few more traditional ones, but I can't complain since I am a bit tired of the "wannabe 5E" games that give us exactly the same everything, and I wonder why I am not just playing 5E.

This time, I hope I don't bounce off.

And I find those books someday.

Winter 2026 Changes

My Star Wars Edge Studio shelf is being put in an upstairs closet. Despite having a ton of "anti-energy" for this game, it never materialized. I read the books and tried to picture what I wanted from it, but Star Wars feels dead to me, and generic hard science fiction appeals to me much more than the "put-on" Star Wars does. The new TV shows and movies ruined the entire universe for me; too much low-quality streaming garbage gave the galaxy a smell and feeling I can't shake.

And I don't have much hope when it changes hands. Honestly, given the D&D 5E model, everyone in the universe needs "force powers" to be an appealing, playable, and high-damage-output subclass. At least the Edge Studio game tries to make non-force users shine, but I don't have good feelings about the D&D version. I do like the Edge Studios "Expanded Universe" game, so it is not heading for the garage. This is probably the best Star Wars RPG we will see in our lifetimes.

Maybe someday I will come back.

Old School Essentials is going upstairs to a bedroom shelf to sit alongside my OSRIC books and other BX books. These have completely replaced 5E and Pathfinder for me. OSRIC is the better game, just because it offers the options I want: phased casting, specializations, a strong fighter, and the classic 1E feel. If I have my choice, I buy OSRIC versions first because I want 1E compatibility over BX, and that puts BX spell compendiums at a disadvantage since they don't include casting times in phases. OSRIC is the "superset game" - write for that, and BX will still be 100% compatible. Those extra bits OSRIC needs are important, and they are a small add-on that covers both games and makes for a better product.

OSE covers your new players, and OSRIC will cover those wanting the original 1E game of 1980. I have given up on the reprints, as they are not open and free to write for. Why should I bother? I support the community-supported game. This is like Linux to me, and it means something. Sure, I can use Windows for a while, but on a deeper philosophical level, I am against it. Playing and supporting the community games makes society and the hobby a better place.

And the OSRIC PDFs are PWYW, with a zero-price option, so anyone can play. The only game more permissive than that is the classic For Gold & Glory, which has a very liberal file distribution policy written into the source document. This is also out, on a shelf, and not going anywhere. If "not forcing others to pay to play" with you is important, pick OSRIC, FG&G, or Basic Fantasy. Stay away from boutique, expensive BX versions, versions without open licenses, or pay-to-play PDFs. I love some of these BX games, but they do get as expensive as a 5E habit, and asking people outside the hobby to play with them is a non-starter.

Shadowdark still stays out. Good game, and this and Nimble are more than enough 5E for me. They are small enough to be non-problems for storage and keeping them out. Small Book 5E is where the fun is in the 5E side of the hobby.

GURPS has been a favorite ever since 1.0 came out; I've loved this game. It never leaves, and it has a place on the living room shelf, so anyone who comes over can see I am a proud GURPS player. For me, this is the best full-featured generic game, and it is like 1E in the generic game sphere. This is the be-all, end-all of generic gaming, especially when you factor in sourcebook support. The only downside is the non-open license. If that matters to you, choose Basic Roleplaying from Chaosium. For me, GURPS has the best character designer in the hobby, and this matters since characters are at the heart of what I do and why I love the hobby.

Also on this shelf are my "Without Number" games, which are some of the best "I do not need anything else" games ever written. Cities Without Number is a better Cyberpunk game than many others in the genre. SWN can do both Star Trek and Star Wars easily; just change a few ship weapon names, and you are there. WWN is a best-in-class far-future science fantasy game. These games call to me, asking me why I still play others, and the simple, one-page rules summaries make play instant and easy. They are all BX compatible, so you have near-infinite adventures and toys for the system.

If you ever want to use BX as your "generic system," start here and don't look back.

BRP is a classic game, and under the ORC license, it is even better. If you know Call of Cthulhu, you know this system, and it disappears during play, with your character sheet driving the action and not the books. Under the ORC license, you are pretty much free to create your own games with this system, write adventures for it, or use the main book to craft games. This is probably one of the easiest generic systems to get started with in the hobby, and it is well worth playing this as your main game and ignoring most everything else.

Two games are taking the spot BX had in the living room, one of them being Champions/Hero System. There is an argument about why you need Champions and Hero System when you have GURPS. I still love this system; I have memories with it, and it is still one of the best "superhero wargames" you can play if you look at Superhero gaming as a tactical problem and not a roleplaying one. If I want roleplaying superheroes? It's GURPS all the way. For tactical combat and fiddly point-based power design? It doesn't get better than Champions, and the power balance feels extremely fair. Champions also feels like it scales better for hard-hitting superhero fights than human-based GURPS, with buying up defenses and hits easier and more built into the system. If I want my superheroes to feel like BattleTech mechs and wargaming units, Champions can't be beat.

Mutant Epoch joins the living room shelf! Why? It is a fun "rando game" where the system forces me to accept whatever the character creation dice hand me. Every character, I have no clue what to expect, and even my starting situation is random and unpredictable. This is one of the best post-apoc games for me: unhinged, silly, deadly, and completely random, with some excellent solo-play support. This is a cross between the classic Aftermath and 1E Gamma World, with a little classic Palladium TNMT thrown in. This is also only a half-shelf of a game: dense, packed with fun, and off-the-wall insane fun.

You can start with the core book and have enough for years of play. When you start to add the massive rules expansions, the options multiply into the trillions of character builds (or more), and the dice control your starting situation and fate. You will be challenged to play characters completely outside your comfort zone, indentured farmers to full combat cyborgs, holographic AIs to psychic cannabis plants; you have no clue what you are going to be, and that is such a refreshing change from 5E, where you walk in the door with your idealized character concept, the game hands it to you. You sit there bored with the "what's next" feeling in your gut.

I want to be forced outside my comfort zone so completely that my mind is changed about what roleplaying can be. Few games do that, and they have to be these "random start" games like this, DCC, and a few others. Goodman Games is far enough away from the OSR now that they are their own thing, and the dedication they put into preserving the classic era and artwork continues to amaze me. They also have a robust convention ground crew game, which keeps them popular and relevant in the hobby.

If you want to see what the OSR could be, and the new ideas that could be injected into the hobby, DCC is a great place to start. What I love is that the classes have "built-in fun" without adding too many rules, and the mechanical design feels strong and gives everyone a reason to be in the party. There isn't a class or race-as-class choice in here that I wouldn't be happy to have along, and that says a lot.

Palladium and my Goodman Games books are staying out; these are either solid memories for me or expressions of myself that replace today's mainstream power-fantasy games and challenge me. Palladium is still a great system, overly confused and page-flippy when it comes to character design, but they have some of the best and most flavorful non-D&D classes in gaming, and the entire game is an answer to AD&D, sort of saying, "we can do this better," and they pull it off wonderfully. Each system of magic is different, not commoditized into a bland, flavorless, and generic framework - but each system of magic in Palladium is its own mini-set of rules and spells. Some are not "combat casters," yet they still fit into the framework. The game lets bards be bards, and doesn't force them to be killers.

Palladium is a great system, a completely different viewpoint and philosophy on gaming, fantasy, and magic. When D&D gets stale, come here and experience a new point of view on fantasy gaming. Too many games copy D&D to the point where modern fantasy feels like the same freeway in a different state. If a game just copies D&D and its assumptions, I'll play the original and not have to learn anything new or have my assumptions challenged. I am not interested in big-box commercial games that restate others, outside of open and community gaming where preservation and sharing are why we play.

Off the Shelf: The Mutant Epoch

I pulled the Mutant Epoch game out of the garage today.

It’s been in a box with a couple of other post-apoc things that never really earned a permanent spot. Most of the 5E is already heading out or already gone. When something comes out now, the question is simple: do I still want to look at it, or does it go back?

This one still feels different from the Gamma World stuff I already know. Mutant Future is still the cleanest version of that old feel for me, the one that plays nice with Labyrinth Lord and lets me drop old material in without a fight. Mutant Crawl Classics gets the scaling right and treats mutations more like the charts I already like in DCC. Aftermath still sits in my head as the gonzo military toolbox that can start with scrap and end with power armor. This book does none of those things.

McAusland’s game is its own thing. Character generation still feels like the old Gamma World sessions, where you roll and see what you get—pure stocks, mutants, ghost mutants, cyborgs, bestial humans, the rest. Castes, skills, a pile of mutations, implants, relics, encounter tables. The art is all his, and it does a lot of the work of making the wasteland feel like a specific place instead of generic ruins.

It is a solid, one-man-show, great game. Where D&D 5E feels exploitative and 2026 corporate-slick with live-service strings attached, this reminds me of the hobby's early DIY days. I'd rather have honest, single-creator, small-shop games on my shelf in 2026 than something that feeds the NASDAQ or forces others to pay to play. Any anti-corporate types that still play D&D are fakers and posers. Play Pathfinder, people. Support the union shop, and the management that recognizes it.

And indie games like Mutant Epoch are cool, worthy, and worth supporting.

The game loop is excavation teams. Small groups go into the old ruins in the mid-27th century, trying to pull out usable stuff while dealing with mutant beasts, robots, raiders, cultists, and the environment. Barter forts and whatever’s left of humanity try to hold on. It doesn’t start you as a savage clawing your way up. People are already trying to rebuild, and the characters are the ones willing to go back into the wreckage for the pieces.

It doesn’t ask to fight DCC or Palladium for the same nights. Those two already have the shelves and the time I actually want. A third fantasy set on the wall starts to split attention I don’t have. Post-apoc isn’t competing for that. The Hub Rules are one book. The Expansion is the big second volume with more character types and more of everything else, and that can stay in the box until the core earns its keep. I don’t need the whole library out to see if the core still works.

In fact, the Quick Start rules are an entire week or two worth of play. This is a very generous volume and inexpensive, given that most games cost many times as much; you need three of them to play.

Traveller is back in the room, so the science-fiction chair isn’t empty anymore. Star Wars is going in a closet. Too many painful, cringeworthy quotes from the new movies and TV shows ruin it for me. The Edge books were always their own thing anyway. Too many times I start to play Star Wars, and someone says "they fly now?" or "the power of one..." and I feel nauseous.

Cepheus-based games and Stars Without Number are still around, but they aren’t the only options for nights that aren’t pure fantasy. The Mutant Epoch isn’t pure science fiction either. It’s the ruins of one. That might be close enough some nights. It might not.

The test is the same one I’ve been using on everything else that comes out of the garage. Can I sit down with it, generate a character, and have thirty minutes of actual play before it starts to feel like work? That 30-minute test: Cipher System passes with style; I will sit down to play that, and 30 minutes feels like 2 hours, and I am very satisfied.

For now it’s on the coffee table. The art is still good. The random tables still produce weird, specific people instead of optimized builds. The excavation loop is still something the other post-apoc books don’t quite own. Whether it stays out or goes back is the same question as everything else this month: does it still feel like a game I can get into, or is it another set of books waiting for a game that never shows up?

Yeah, it's Nimble 5e

I am keeping Nimble 5e. The rest of 5E is going in the garage. I still have adventures I want to run. I just do not have room for the library that comes with them anymore.

I want books the size of an OSE core. One set that does the job. No twenty volumes open on the table. No character builder. No chasing the latest broken build. I am done with that. Give me a damage track I can balance against, a sheet that fits on one page, and a game that starts and finishes in the time I actually have. It should still feel like 5E when I open one of the old modules. It should not feel like 5E when I am prepping or flipping pages in the middle of a fight.

Nimble does that. You do not roll to hit. You roll the damage die. A 1 misses. The highest number explodes, and you roll again. Armor reduces damage instead of setting a target number. Three actions a turn, spent on whatever matters. Four stats. Skills that map well enough that a 5E adventure still runs. The books stay thin. Core, Heroes, and a Game Master’s Guide. That is the set: a nice box with the books and a map.

It reminds me of Dragonbane, in a way, a compact, fun, and fast game that does what it says it does. This is a game I can travel with, and it goes where I go.

I am not saying it is better 5E. I am saying it is small enough that I can still use the 5E material I want without the rest of the library coming along. The adventures stay. The character options, the software, the twelve-page sheets, and the optimization chase do not. Encounters are easier to read and easier to adjust because the numbers sit on a tighter track. Once it starts, it moves like an OSR session. The classes and the spells still read as 5E to the people at the table.

Maybe I will grab a hardcopy SRD; it is a good resource with plenty to play with. Just skip the characters and use everything else. Magic items, spells for scrolls, and a ton of monsters? It all works. Use it.

That is the trade. Plenty of 5E left in the modules. Almost none of it left in the rules library. Nimble is a few thin books that let me keep one without the other.

Nimble 5e: Second Edition?

I got a Nimble 5e update today:

Ok, so maybe it is Nimble: Second Edition…

I've fought it for as long as I can, but I think you all may be right. While I didn't intend on this "reprint" growing to become a full on Second Edition, enough changes and improvements have accumulated that I think… it does warrant the new title.

I never intended for this to become a Second Edition, but it has, and I want to do right by the community that has supported and encouraged me so much. Thank you all for your patience, your faith in this project, and your continued support. 

This game and company are so generous; we got updates on the upgrades to the remaster (now second edition) game's crowdfunding:

Free Upgrades

That said, this Kickstarter was pitched as a simple reprint and expansion. I set up the pledge tiers with the goal in mind that backers would not need to repurchase their existing books and I want to honor that. Existing backers have already been sent the updated digital files, but I wanted to go a bit further than that. 

For anyone who has backed the Expansion Boxed Set, you will be upgraded to the Complete Boxed Set for free. You'll get everything you originally pledged for, plus print copies of the Second Edition Core Rules, Game Master's Guide, and Core Heroes.

To not leave out anyone who backed the Complete Boxed Set or at the All In tier, I wanted to show my gratitude by giving you an extra copy of each of the Core and Expansion Heroes, so you can more easily have 2 of the same hero at your table without them needing to share as well as an extra copy of the Core Rules book for easier referencing at the table(and to keep their grubby mitts off your Special Edition books!).

Build Your Own Bundlers will get whatever single upgrade that is reasonably closest to what is listed above.

Wow. This is a very generous company with some amazing books. The game is great, too, and I can easily run all my 5E adventures with this "OSE-like" ruleset, which gives me what I need without all the fluff and distractions. Do I need generic magic items, monsters, and spells to fill a few missing parts to make it feel more like a traditional D&D game? Sure, why not? Grab the 5.1 SRD, and you've got it all.

What I love about Nimble 5e is that it is small. One box is not a shelf of books. Where A5E is three shelves and ToV is five, this is one small, OSE-sized box. If you have a printed SRD copy, that is more than enough to run a years-long campaign. The adventures I have for 5E take up a shelf, but the core Nimble 5E books are small, concise, and easy to understand and teach.

The one thing I love about Nimble 5E is that the math is locked into one fixed point in time and balance. Once, a level 5 D&D fighter doing 30 points of damage in a turn was great. These days, that's up to 80 points of damage or more in a turn - and it keeps going up as books are released. Old content now feels weak, and monsters are blown through easily. If you have ever played an MMO and felt the math was way out of control at low levels, this is what Wizards is doing to us with D&D.

It sucks.

Nimble? They did the math, locked it down, and everything scales and is balanced beautifully. Old adventures are still playable and provide challenge. I am not forced to buy the new "balanced for the current game" adventures that continue scaling hit points and turning the game into a high-numbers slog, and invalidating entire series of adventures and bestiaries.

People want to "defend 5E," but I will challenge them to tell me what they are defending. The original and balanced 2014 books? Good choice. The current game with the latest books? Not so fast. The fact that most people can't tell me what they are saying is their ideal game, or even define it, is a problem.

Nobody on D&D YouTube covers this outside a few optimizer channels.

The community is silent on the game's math and the MMO-like power increases we have seen. It is almost like they are afraid to cover this, since the only way out is to change games or stop using the new books that are many channels' bread-and-butter view sources. The Algorithm strikes again, and it is killing D&D's math and balance.

Where are you, people?

The math in modern D&D is out of control and scaling up to an insane degree. This will end with pleading for sanity and calls for a 6th Edition. The only way to fix it will be a reset, and that is by design. Wizards did this to both 3E and 4E, and TSR did it with 2E. The games were so broken and overpowered by the end of those editions that they became unplayable unless you limited books to the originals.

Nimble 5E?

The math is fixed in one place and won't change. Sanity is here, and it is in a few tiny books. This will be the last version of 5E I keep in my library, and I'll happily play Nimble 1E until my 2E books get here next year.

The Worst Version of Yourself

There is a saying out there that the modern Internet makes you the worst version of yourself. I hear stories of YouTube creators who get pigeonholed into clickbait and outrage videos, and they are fundamentally unhappy because the Algorithm forces them to talk about the same thing day after day, or they lose the Algorithm's blessing and fall off people’s recommendations.

Creative content? Positive? Useful? Thoughtful?

Forget it. The Algorithm demands outrage, hate, narcissism, and the worst versions of ourselves to survive.

This is happening in gaming, too.

I am totally divorced from 5.5E just from the vibe of those books. They have zero to do with heroism. Look at the art in the 2024 Player’s Handbook: characters are rendered bright and flamboyant, often smiling or posing, with reviewers describing the overall effect as superhero-like or almost Fortnite-bright. The grit, dirt, fear, and hardship that used to sit on the page are largely gone. Adventurers look untouched by the world they are supposed to be risking themselves in. That is not wonder or discovery; it is a catalog of cool, self-reinforcing portraits.

The rules push in the same direction. The rules moved ability scores off species (formerly races) and onto backgrounds, so any species can optimize any class without friction. Species lost the cultural and mechanical packages that once gave them weight. Critics have called the result “humans with decorations.” The character sheet process removed traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. The system declares identity up front and reinforces it, rather than earning it through sacrifice or discovery. Heroic Inspiration (the renamed Inspiration) lets you reroll any die after you see the result, and some class features hand it out on a schedule. Outcomes feel predetermined because the design goal was fewer decisions, smoother progression, and more consistent player power so characters can show off their abilities.

History, culture, and heritage—once huge selling points of a setting or game—are gone or made optional. The Player’s Handbook reframes orcs as nomadic explorers with family depictions rather than the classic threat; the new Monster Manual no longer gives them dedicated entries. Instead, the game intends for orcs, drow, and other humanoids to use generic NPC stat blocks. The Monster Manual condenses lore entries into shorter, more utilitarian blocks. Monsters become less interesting and more interchangeable stat blocks, leaving their uniqueness up to the DM to invent. The game is primarily designed to make its designers look good and to sell you the idea that if you aren’t playing D&D, you won’t look good either. Even the love of the game and hobby feels missing, and the entire presentation feels like a fast-food restaurant at a turnpike rest area. If you put “the worst of the hobby” into a set of rulebooks, they would be D&D 5.5E, as the game reflects the worst parts of ourselves: the self-centered reinforcement, the refusal of real stakes, the erasure of inherited texture, and the constant demand that you perform the current approved version of yourself.

I am buying another shelf-top Christmas tree this year and keeping it lit and on all the way until Christmas. Why? It is what my family did. What does this have to do with the previous part of this article? It is a statement of “I am who I am,” as Popeye used to say. This is me. This reflects my values. This breaks the Matrix. Every day, when I walk by and look at it, it tells me there used to be a better time in my life, and in gaming, too.

And I reject games that appeal to my worst nature. I can be better than this.

Why am I clicking on YouTube to inject anger into myself today, or learn how the latest optimization and rules expansion “totally breaks the game”? Why am I letting people I don’t know tell me I am running the game “all wrong” and that I'll fail unless I listen to them? YouTube is becoming a classic cesspool of toxic negativity designed to break down your self-confidence and personal experience. The Algorithm demands compliance and consumption.

I am done with it.

The games I have out? The ones with real memories behind them. Why would I hold my nose and play D&D 5.5E when I have things here my brother and I loved and played every week? It is a false replacement for what I can actually hold and touch. I have Palladium, Champions, GURPS, OSRIC, and a dozen other great games that still work and aren’t infected by marketing, Internet-ism, or corporatism.

Like my Christmas tree, those games are part of me.

And they reflect me saying “not anymore.”

I won’t be the worst version of myself anymore.

Off the Shelf: Nimble 5e and the Goodman Games 5E Books

As the rest of the 5E books head into the garage, these are the ones staying out.

I have been clearing shelves. The official 2014 and 2024 material is already boxed or going out; the third-party piles that never quite justified the space are next. What is left of “5E” on the wall has to earn its space by being the thing I will actually open when I want to run one of the adventures I already own. Nimble is the system. The Goodman Games 5E books are the adventures.

Nimble is a full game that still speaks 5E. Modules, monster books, and the adventures I already paid for still work. The core is short enough that I can read it again without budgeting an evening. Character options live in one Heroes book instead of a dozen. When I sit down, I don't manage a stack of class engines or hunt for the latest subclass PDF. I open the box, pick up the books, and start. Three actions instead of the action/bonus/reaction patchwork. You roll damage; a 1 misses, and a max hits. Armor reduces incoming damage instead of setting an Armor Class you have to beat. Four attributes, a mana pool, and classes that fit on two pages. None of it is revolutionary on its own. Together, they mean combat doesn't spend most of its minutes on the same roll-and-miss loop I had already decided wasn't worth the library.

Weaknesses? The "soft and roleplay" spells aren't present, but you can always pull them in as scrolls or rituals. Again, for those of us used to 4E, this isn't a problem, since that game minimized the "game-breaking" spells like reading minds, scrying, and detecting lies. If characters are supposed to be combat-focused, let them be combat-focused. These plot-breaking spells have always been an issue in D&D, and I am not sad to see them go.

Detect lies by using your wits and intuition. Charm someone by smooth-talking them. Spy on someone by sending the sneaky rogue. You have the roleplay skills to pull this off; make it an ability score roll, and stop looking for a spell to play the game for you. Sometimes I get tired of the "built-in BS" of D&D, and these spells are one of them, along with the institutionalized "anti-DM" use they introduce into the game.

A game that just focuses on adventure and combat? We have to figure out the problems ourselves? Roleplay still matters? Sign me up.

The Goodman Games books do the other half of the job. Fifth Edition Fantasy, the Original Adventures Reincarnated editions, and the Compendium of Dungeon Crawls volumes—these are the dungeon crawls and classic-style adventures that don't require me to manage a character-option wall before I can start. They work with the 5E rules I still know, and they work with Nimble. When I want to run something, I pull one of these, and the rest of the edition stays in storage.

I have said before that if the lore changes in 5.5E pushed me out, Nimble was one place I could go. That still holds. The practical version is simpler: when I want to run one of the 5E adventures I already have, I keep these books out. The rest of the edition is too much game for the nights I actually get. Too many books, too much time spent on builds and options that never reach the table, too much attention split away from the two games I already like more.

Nimble 5e feels like D&D 4E to me, a game my brother and I loved. We picked it up during a rough stretch and used the tactical fights as an escape: miniatures on the table, positions that mattered, and turns that felt like solving a puzzle together rather than waiting for the next miss. The three-action economy, the way armor reduces damage instead of setting an abstract target, and the emphasis on choices that actually change what happens in a round bring back some of that same tabletop-first energy, without the later-level HP slogs or the library that came with it. It isn't 4E, and it doesn't need to be, but the nights we spent moving figures and thinking about the fight still sit under the surface when I open the box.

It is not exactly 4E, but tactical and fast. It works with my 5E adventures. They won't go to waste. That is a win in my books, especially if the price is the tiny space one box takes up on a shelf. A small game commits far fewer sins than one that takes up an entire shelf.

That keep-test is winning right now. Small enough in practice that it doesn't compete with DCC or Palladium for limited table time, compatible enough that the adventures don't need rewriting or abandoning, and fast enough that 30 minutes of play doesn't require 90 minutes of setup. The rest of 5E can go into the garage. Nimble and the Goodman Games books stay out so I can still play the material I already own.

It is a choice not to let a few beloved books and adventures go to waste.

Small game, easy choice.