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I am not a fan of WotC's D&D. Specifically, the system. It's heavy, clunky, archaic, unbalanced, messy. It's just not fun to use. But I love a lot of things D&D has. The worlds, the monsters, the lore, the adventure. It's a shame it's all locked behind a difficult and frustrating to use system.
I've spent a lot of time looking at hacks and tweaks to make the system more palatable. They often end up causing more problems that need further tweaking, becoming more hassle than they're worth.
But finally, I think there's one that actually gets it right.
There's a Kickstarter happening right now for a D&D 5e supplement that promises to streamline and simplify the game to the point of being actually fun. It's called Nimble.
There's a free PDF sample with a few of the rule changes it will have, which I encourage you to look at. Looking at them has me quite excited. Their changes are actually quite close to the things I've been testing out for my own custom OSR system. I'll go over my thoughts on them in the same order as they're presented.
Attack rolls are removed. You instead roll damage directly.
Rolling a 1 misses, and rolling max damage is a crit, which explodes. This means you add it to your total and roll again, continuing to add more damage until you stop rolling the max value. If you're rolling multiple damage dice, you assign one as your primary die which can miss or crit.
I've been messing around with a system like this myself. Lower dice explode more often, but larger dice are more consistent. Larger dice still do more damage on average. Interestingly, 2d6 in this system would both miss and crit more frequently, while 1d12 would be much more likely to deal normal damage.
Normally when this is done in system hacks, people turn AC into a soak value that reduces the amount of incoming damage by AC-10. So with AC 18, that reduces the damage of all incoming attacks by 8. This ends up making smaller damage dice almost useless, because they need to explode multiple times to do anything. It doesn't happen as commonly as one might think.
However in Nimble, there's some really clever ways to make smaller weapon dice actually effective. For starters, AC is not always active. They instead use a value derived from AC they call an AC modifier, which is AC-8. To get the reduction of incoming damage, they have to spend an action to do so. This opens up interesting gameplay choices to decide between reducing incoming damage or being able to do more on their own turn.
I believe they made it AC-8 because a standard unarmored AC is 10. The AC modifier would then be 2, which is the minimum damage number that can be rolled, since a 1 always misses. This means a lowest level block aligns with a lowest level attack. This demonstrates a good attention to balance.
The other clever trick is how it interacts with the new monster rules. Getting exploding damage allows bypassing armor, basically. Lower hit dice might actually be better against high AC targets, as if the smaller weapons make it easier to find ways to bypass the armor. This gives more consideration to weapon choices rather than simply going for bigger damage numbers.
They've added Pathfinder's 3-action economy into D&D! This alone is a major reason why Pathfinder 2e is so much better than D&D.
Their implementation here isn't identical. It's simplified more than Pathfinder, in a way that feels interesting. It's simpler than D&D's actions too.
Normally you need to track different kinds of actions like your move action, the attack action, reaction, item interactions, as well as how you can spend your action to modify a different action and how those all interact with each other.
Instead with Nimble, you get 3 Action Points (AP) to spend on actions. That's it.
It cost 1AP to attack, to move, or to interact with something. Instead of needing to remember that the primary action can be traded in to double the movement action, you can just move twice. Or you can move three times instead of trying to figure out 5e's half-finished rules about rolling to gain extra movement.
You could also attack 3 times per turn. But each additional attack is done with stacking disadvantage. The first attack is normal, the second attack has disadvantage, and the third attack has disadvantage twice. (Disadvantage is rolled with the damage dice. If you roll a d6 for damage, you instead roll 2d6 and take the lowest. Then 3d6 and take the lowest.)
Due to this, just like in Pathfinder, it's often not advantageous to simply attack 3 times in a row. Players will want to take other actions like shoving and tripping to maximize their potential. This doesn't happen much in normal D&D because damage is always king there. There's simply no room for making tactical maneuvers when it takes up your entire turn. 3 actions opens up the possibility.
Spells are compensated for like in Pathfinder by requiring 2AP to cast, unless it's a spell with a reaction timing. This helps balance out the caster/martial gap.
Martials' bonus attacks are accounted for in this system by having them cost 0AP. Same for any abilities that allow actions to be made as a bonus or free action.
This does seem like it has the potential for damage inflation to possibly get out of control like in normal 5e, but fixing that would require much deeper tweaking of the system. Play Pathfinder instead if you want balance with tactical depth.
Reactions tie in with the previous two rules. AP is refreshed at the end of a character's turn; not the start. Reactions allow spending AP in response to things that happen outside their turn. Doing so means starting their turn with less AP to spend.
Three actions are listed for reactions:
In standard D&D, new players to the system can be disappointed when they can't react to things that happen outside their turn. It can feel like their agency is taken away from them. The system says "No, you don't get to attempt to dodge or block because it's already all wrapped up into an abstract AC and this random die roll gets to decide if you're hit or not." That can feel really unsatisfying.
Nimble opens up the possibility to react in a way that feeds back into tactical depth. Yes, you can block, but you'll have less actions next turn.
Death saving throws are gone. Instead, at 0 HP, you take a level of exhaustion and gain the Dying condition. This condition limits you to 1AP per round, and are susceptible to continue acquiring more levels of exhaustion. If a character reaches exhaustion level 6 while they have the Dying condition, they die.
Exhaustion is simplified from what it is in D&D. Each level of exhaustion applies a -1 modifier to all d20 rolls.
The D&D 5e designers kind of designed themselves into a corner when they decided to make advantage and disadvantage basically replace all modifiers. It was done in the name of simplicity, to reduce the amount of math needed. But they are very big degrees of difference with no levels of nuance to work with.
Nimble here is breaking that rule, but it shows how it's possible to use modifiers in a simple and easy way. Honestly, subtracting your levels of exhaustion from your rolls is a lot simpler to me than remembering a bunch of quantifiers and what happens at which level of what to whatever type of roll in which way like 5e doe.
An important consideration is that regaining HP above 0 removes the dying condition, but does not suddenly remove all the levels of exhaustion. Nearly dying continues to carry a heavy toll until you are able to rest.
Spellcasters aren't going to be able to cast most of their spells while dying, since they're 1AP short. They won't be able to cast Cure Wounds on themselves, but they could cast Healing Word. So, Healing Word continues to be the best healing spell for combat.
When a character with the dying condition is hit by an attack, they gain another 2 levels of exhaustion, or 3 if the attack was a crit. This makes it line up quite closely to the number of saving throws a character is allowed in the original system, including the automatically failing when hit. Again, balance is kept in tact.
The important difference is that you can continue playing with Nimble's rules. As they put it, in normal D&D you're stuck in "time out" when you reach 0HP. With this new system, you can still act, possibly drag yourself away from danger or drink a healing potion, or take your last dying action to strike at your opponent. It's risky to stay in combat, but you're given a choice to act and decide if you want to take that risk.
This also prevents the awkward to explain scenario of critical hit point failure. There's a stage between perfectly healthy and unconscious.
The hacks I've seen for this usually are to simply give a character exhaustion after being brought back from 0HP to try and discourage yoyoing in and out of death. Nimble's system feels like a much more complete fix to this, with more satisfying choices, and simpler resolution.
Monsters get a pretty significant change. They do not get the same 3AP as players. Thank goodness, because that would make tracking everything quite cumbersome, trying to remember who starts with how many after spending reactions.
To compensate for the lower action economy, a monster's damage is slightly boosted by having their attack roll by the normal damage dice, then add their to-hit bonus. Any attack modifiers are ignored.
AC also works a bit differently for monsters. It's broken down into 3 categories based on their AC level, which affects how much damage they take. Light armor, they take damage as usual. Medium armor, PCs don't add their stat modifier to the attack, using only their damage dice. And heavy armor, where they only take half the damage from damage dice, rounded up.
If hit by a critical or an attack with a type they are vulnerable to, it ignores the armor altogether.
I believe this means monsters do not get to take the dodge/block action. This is already accommodated for and balanced by the armor's damage reduction.
A DM will probably need to communicate to the players what the armor level is to the players for this to play out smoothly. I think this is fine though, since you're only describing it as light, medium, or heavy armor. These are details a character could surmise by simply looking at what their opponent is wearing, or seeing thick scales. It's less immersion breaking than saying "the monster has 17 AC".
One question I have with this setup is how it affects characters with a negative modifier to their attack. Say the wizard has run out of spell slots and in desperation, is using a candlestick as an improvised club. They're making the attack with Strength, and their Strength modifier is -2. Their attack would normally deal d4-2 damage. But if the monster has medium armor, we're supposed to ignore the stat modifier, which would actually improve the wizard's attack to a flat d4. A simple fix to this is to only ignore positive stat modifiers. I'd like to hear what the designer's thoughts on this situation are.
I'm not usually a fan of having PCs and NPCs work differently mechanically, but I can see the need for it here. It simplifies things significantly for the DM, while still giving players more interesting choices to make.
I really like the inclusion of designer notes along-side the rest of the rules. It's useful for deciding if a rule would be fit for inclusion in your kind of game, and it helps with understanding how to run a game using the rules.
One of the claims of the book is that you can swap rules from here in and out whenever you please, but I question just how modular the rules are.
For example, attacks always hitting, plus monster attack damage being slightly boosted to accommodate their lower action economy, means more incoming damage towards players too. Low level players in particular will be more vulnerable to being taken out fast. To accommodate for this, the system also boosts PC's HP at level 1. It's also expecting that they will be using reactions so they can use the Block action to soak some of the damage. And using these reactions requires using the Action Points rules. It's all pretty interconnected.
Now, since I like most of these changes, I would quite readily bring in all the optional rules at once. I'm sure some of them will work well independently, but it's going to feel better if taken as a whole.
I got a quick peek at some things not covered in the Kickstarter preview PDF. It looks like it will also be adding new systems. For example, sleeping in lower quality conditions has the possibility of gaining complications, which has a table to roll on for the effects.
It's too little to judge it on. Adding more rules seems contrary to the goal of lightening the system, but they look to be things that plug the gaps on things that are missing from 5e. These kinds of rules are likely more modular.
They include the typical replacement of spell slots with spell points. It's calculated a bit differently than normal, but could still be abused with how spellcasters will have access to even more of an easily cheesable low level spell.
If you can, you'd be better off playing a game system built from the ground up to actually be fun and streamlined to play. But if you're forced to play in a 5e game (or worse, run one), this module seems like it will do well to help ease the pain.
I want to see what other tweaks they considered for things like balancing spell saving throws. Why did they remove Constitution? What's the new encumbrance system?
At only $5 for the PDF, it's very reasonably priced. I'm definitely looking forward to looking at it once the full version comes out.