Is High Fantasy Just a Lack of Consequences?

You take any classic game system, such as RoleMaster, GURPS, or any OSR system, and put it up against 5E or any of these other modern "high fantasy" systems, and you will hear people say, "The newer games are more high fantasy."

Well, what is that?

High magic? Lots of fantasy races? Pulp action?

Not the "actual definition" but the "today's definition."

I get the feeling the meaning of high fantasy is being lost with D&D being so consequence-free, no deaths, superpowered characters, slap giants in the face, toss a dragon by their tail, planar characters, and godlike abilities. High fantasy is starting to mean something entirely different from the definition I grew up with.

The traditional definition of high fantasy was a world of plentiful magic with epic storylines. That hasn't really changed. I get the feeling that death is so hard (or even short-circuited with an X safety tool), combined with a "everybody wins" attitude, has shifted the meaning of high fantasy to a zero-consequence model and expectation. Safety tools being used to override referee judgments (you kill the guards, okay, you are caught and thrown in jail, X, we are triggered, take that back, no, we aren't) again reduce logical consequences and change the definition of the genre to a very cartoonish and zero-cost style of play.

You can't die.

There are near-zero consequences for your actions.

You have planar power.

You have a safe space to fall back on with your bastion.

No one can kill your followers there. Trip the safety tool, and your pets and followers won't die in the real world either.

Trip the tool again, and any consequences of your actions in the world won't be held against you.

Granted, this is an extreme example, but rules-as-written, this is allowed. No one in their right mind would allow safety tools to be used like this, right? Twenty years ago, if you had told me dying would be impossible in D&D, I would have laughed. This new breed of safety tools will change the game; we just don't know how yet.

With all these mobile game-like additions to the core rules, I really don't know what D&D "is" anymore.

The relative immunity of characters is a feature of epic fantasy, but it is not generally required. I could do high fantasy all the way back in AD&D, with lots of magic, plentiful magic items, and epic plots. Granted, you can do low fantasy with relative immunity, but that really isn't low fantasy anymore.

I can do high fantasy with GURPS or RoleMaster just fine, and the game is still deadly with high consequences to any possible action. In D&D, I feel my hands are tied by the designers to adhere to their style of play.

"Everybody wins" is not high fantasy.

I get the feeling that this high-character-power, zero-consequences, constant-winning, and immune-to-death aspect of D&D is becoming part of "high fantasy" to some, and even the genre as a whole. We lost the historical aspect of the game, too, with modern writers coming in and making everything too cosmopolitan and modern, and traditional high fantasy was one of the staples of the genre, and that seems like it is slipping away into D&D, essentially becoming an adult babysitting game, where there aren't consequences for any action.

Nimble 5e: They Broke a Million

There is something so fun about watching a Kickstarter campaign inch toward a million-dollar goal, especially in the face of all the naysayers and those on the bandwagon of billion-dollar corporations, and watching true gems like Shadowdark and Nimble 5e rise and find an audience.

This is the little guy winning.

This is cool.

I still play "full 5E," but this is just so much easier. Like a 2d6 game, it packs a lot into a small book that does so much; that feeling of infinite adventure in a small package has to be felt to be described. The original Traveller Little Black Books captured that spirit, and many of today's Cepheus games keep it alive and carry on its legacy.

Shadowdark captures that "magic in a small book" feeling and brings endless enjoyment to millions, being the OSR gateway game of choice for many 5E players.

Nimble is this generation's "Savage Worlds meets Traveller" in a clean, fun 5E package for fantasy gaming. It does everything D&D does, but without the whiffs, mystery action types that can and can't do various things, and general endless rules referencing and page-flipping that we have all come to loathe over the last 12 years because VTTs are too good at hiding the true complexity of D&D from us all.

If you want superheroic fantasy gaming, Nimble is the clear winner. It plays fast, satisfies the character builder itch, captures the essence of 5E, all without getting dragged down into the weeds. It is a game more about adventure, less about references to rules, pointless monster stat blocks, and rules interactions that bog the game down. You have all the same character power that you do in 5E, without needing a 16-page character sheet at level 14.

It feels like D&D, without all the problems of D&D.

Nimble joining the "Shadowdark club" is a great thing for gaming and the industry, opening up doors for competition and innovation, and allowing more people to play and expanding the hobby. This is the death of the "network effect" on which the OGL was based; the success of D&D does not foretell the success of other games, and the success of other games does not automatically "feed into D&D" anymore. The death of the OGL was also the death of the "D&D Network Effect."

All we need is the concept of fantasy adventure, and the indies can take it from here.

We have eight more hours, and I hope they can break the million-dollar mark.

Go, go, Nimble.

We are opening the book on a new chapter of the hobby.

...

UPDATE: They broke a million with four hours to go. Congrats, guys.

Nimble is Pushing 1 Million

Get ready for the new Shadowdark, because Nimble 5e is pushing one million dollars in its Kickstarter.

Congratulations to the team.

This is now one of the post-crash 5E Kickstarters to approach this level of success. This is actually huge news. I am happy for them. We need these sorts of small 5E book versions on the market, and I hope they achieve Shadowdark levels of success in the future.

Well done, and I am in on this one and looking forward to this in the mail!

Nimble, Shadowdark, and That's It...

Digest-sized 5E really is the way to go.

I love my Shadowdark books, and Nimble 5E is joining that collection as my "heroic fantasy" version of the game. The books do not eat up shelves of space, nor do they require subscriptions and double purchases to function properly and be playable. They do not take up a huge part of my life and sit on a shelf. They are small things, packed with potential, like all games should be.

The books are small, filled with fun, and every page is filled with imagination and inspiration. As much as I love Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E, they are huge games that require digital tools. With these books, I can have 5E, be free of subscriptions, and they play either grimdark or high fantasy, and I have it all in a very small space.

I am done with embarrassing myself with huge shelves full of books I never use, and games that exist in my house solely as bloatware. Honestly, the last "shelf games" I will ever support are GURPS, Castles & Crusades, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. The latter shines particularly well thanks to its special editions, size, and over-the-top attitude. GURPS is a blue-collar game; every book I own works hard. C&C is perfect in every way.

But for my "5E games?"

Give me the small, digest-sized, compact, and fun games I can throw in a suitcase and travel with. I am done with these massive, bloated, wordy 5E implementations, full of confusing action types and 30-minute player turns, character sheets that are dozens of pages long, and just want a game that is small and that works.

I am done with "big book" 5E.

That era is over.

Video: Dead Internet Theory Is Real: Resident Evil Requiem Exposed It

This is very important.

You know I am real since I am often wrong, I have silly opinions, and I have strange opinions, often based on a unique life experience. If you frequently disagree with me, I am a real person. I play GURPS and games no one has heard of. This is why you come back. You know you are reading someone with a soul.

I am not an AI.

Gambling companies are buying up gaming media sites, faking a staff with AI, and directing people to online gambling sites through embedded ads.

Now, do you know why "the officially licensed D&D slot machine" is so bad? They are selling our trust to casinos. They are creating a path from childhood to a life of gambling for children through our games. This is not "just for fun" and "harmless."

It is a complete betrayal.

D&D's "Digital First" Strategy

I heard today that Wizards is embracing a "digital first" strategy for D&D.

I am not interested. This is something that drives me away from the game, since it forces customers to D&D Beyond for exclusive releases, digital-only DLC, and other money-making schemes that remove the game from the tabletop and turn it into an "online only" game.

D&D 5E already has a massive "digital problem": you need to buy the physical books, then a digital version elsewhere just to play the game, and you are locked into a VTT platform. I have even seen this with games like Tales of the Valiant, where I am locked into the Shard VTT for that game.

Forget playing on a tabletop with your friends, maps, and miniatures.

I can still play Nimble and Shadowdark around a table with friends, and these are the 5E versions I support. Other than that, it is either an OSR game or Castles & Crusades that fits the fantasy tabletop gameplay style the best.

Digital first means players last, and heralds the death of the game.

You will never compete with mobile gaming in the digital market.

Nimble 5e: Is it a "Real" Game?

The core rulebook is impossibly thin. I pick it up, and the first thought that comes into my head is, "Is this a game?" It feels more like a mod for a full version of 5E than a full game, like the book is meant to use "with" an established game as a rules hack.

But it isn't.

This is actually a full game. The core rulebook is 58 pages, and very concise. Granted, you pull in a lot of the "how to play" stuff from other games, and a lot of that fluff isn't needed here. In fact, I prefer a game that keeps the "how to play" section light and doesn't tell you too much; many games go overboard in this area and end up helping you plan what snacks to bring. Also, there are so many "self-help" books on D&D on Amazon, and so many YouTube videos on the subject that there is no lack of information on how to play a role-playing game. There may be too much information, and most of it is bad.

In fact, the lack of "how to play" information in the original role-playing games helped develop many of the "OSR tropes" we use today, since many of them were never written down back then. There is an argument to make that "how you play is the right way" and to stop micro-managing gamers who are smart enough to figure this out for themselves. Who knows, maybe the "new tropes" could have been built without all this "how to play" advice, and we are missing out on something?

But at first glance, Nimble 5e feels too small to be a real game, yet it is. The "core rules" of Old School Essentials (minus the classes and spells) are about 60-70 pages long, so it is of a similar length; just the rules needed for in-game play are not all that long in most games. OSE also has a lot of "old school procedures" built in, so it is about 10 pages longer due to the OSR standards for travel, exploration, hiring, and so on. The character's book in Nimble 5e is the primary source of information, and the two books are wisely split so as not to force people to fight over books when referencing class abilities versus game rules.

5E can't be this compact, can it? Shadowdark proves it can be, and the core rules of that game are only about 10-12 pages, last I checked. 5E does not have to be the game that takes up a shelf. It can be small, tight, focused, and just as expressive as a set of rules the size of a set of encyclopedias. All it takes is a better design team and a company that does not pay by the word.

Design matters. Concise rules are a highly desirable feature. We can demand better.

One of the issues with the core set is a two-subclass limit to the core classes, but that should improve with the expansion and the subclass additions in the zines. The monsters are being massively expanded, too, and that is a welcome change. All the standard fantasy tropes are here, plus a bunch of expansion roles, races, and modern fantasy standards. This is more of a modern fantasy game where "anything goes," but that is the current state of fantasy: random shapes gather with random roles, and everyone figures out a way. Classic fantasy has more established roles: tanks, healers, damage, rogues, and so on.

Tales of the Valiant is still an excellent "companion game" for Nimble 5e. Anything Nimble needs, monsters, magic items, spells for rare scrolls, potions, gear, and other random bits, ToV can fill in. Adventures can be pulled from any 5E source, but Kobold Press also publishes excellent adventures that directly port into Nimble, and that modern adventuring feel is present here.

Nimble needing other games is what made me think Nimble isn't a full game, but as time goes on, Nimble gets better and better, and these things get filled in and Nimble-ized. Magic items, potions, runes, and unique spell scrolls, I would love to see come next. Having 200+ monsters fills in a huge gap in the game.

ToV is excellent on its own, but it is still "full 5E." Nimble is something else entirely, not rules-light, but rules-fast. I like systems that get out of the way of my imagination and character sheets that are not 12 pages long. Nimble can do everything ToV does, but with an open 3-action system that encourages fast and imaginative play. If I want to play "adventure heroes," I will reach for Nimble before I do a full 5E implementation, just because 5E is too much game in most cases, designed with a clumsy mix of modern storytelling and old-school sensibilities that don't always work great together.

Nimble? The closest we are getting to OSE in 5E outside of Shadowdark, without the grimdark.

If you want the gritty old-school feeling, play Shadowdark.

If you want that freewheeling, anything goes feeling, play Nimble.

With these two games, there is very little reason to pick up a slow-playing, big-book version of 5E ever again. Why am I wasting time and money on online character creation tools and printing out character sheets dozens of pages long? If I can get the same experience from a single-page character sheet, that is what I have always wanted from a 5E game, so I will play that.

Nimble started as a 5E mod, but it slowly became its own thing and remains side-grade-compatible with everything in 5E, which is a very smart move. Nimble feels like the BX version of 5E, moddable, easier to play, faster, and far less complicated than the original game, but that simplicity is freedom and expressiveness to try new things, focus on stories, and break away from the chains of rules and limited, pedantic action types limiting your ideas and playstyle.

5E's action economy sucks, and telling players, "you can't do that cool thing because of this rule," kills the game for many. D&D 5E's action types mutated into a horrible, terrible, slow, and confusing game, and it never should have been that way. They redid the game in 2024 with 5.5E and never fixed the worst part of the game. The broken D&D action economy is the first thing Pathfinder 2E fixed, and there is a reason for that.

In Nimble 5e? Three actions. Have fun. This is the way it should be.

The fact that Nimble is math-compatible with 5E and that monsters can be ported directly is a huge help. This means we get all the 5E adventures directly usable with the new rules. Nimble looks at piles of 5E rulebooks, shrugs its shoulders, and smiles, saying, "Come play this with me and stop slogging through endless rules and incompatible action types."

Why am I spending my time in an online-only character sheet program and being forced to buy digital books to access character features? Why am I buying books twice to play the game? Why am I being forced to play on VTTs? Why do I have to care about the difference between standard actions and bonus actions, and what can and can't be done with either?

Again, everything I dislike about 5E is fixed in Nimble. I can just play. I am not bogged down in rules or character sheets. Part of why I like Numble 5e so much is the parts I dislike about full 5E. I have to stop myself; every time I talk about why I like Nimble, I begin talking about how I dislike 5E.

It is a vicious cycle. If all you see Nimble as is "how much you hate 5E," then yes, Nimble is not a "real" game to you. The only thing that defines it in your eyes is your dislike of another game. Nimble is its own thing, worthy of standing on its own without 5E hanging over its shoulder constantly.

Nimble is what 2024 D&D should have been. This is the superheroic fantasy version of 5E, like Shadowdark is the old-school version.

Stepping back and looking at Nimble, how I look at Shadowdark, then, yes, Nimble 5e is a "real" game for me.

And a really good one.