Pros and Cons of Nick Nacks

For more experienced TTRPG players, you might already have a good idea of what you like in a system, so this section will (hopefully) be an easy way to figure out if you will like Nick Nacks.

Pros

• Customization - A robust system designed to be played over and over again with characters that feel different every time. Customization with creative character ideas is the number one thing I set out to accomplish in Nick Nacks.

• Balance - The second highest priority I have, that is absolutely necessary in order to make customization possible, is balance. Games that I have played struggle to maintain balance, particularly in the early/later levels and with their magic systems. I pay very close attention to features when they seem particularly powerful and particularly weak, and make adjustments as needed.

• Adaptive - I don't have plans to print anything for this game, and regularly update this website. If a feature ends up a power outlier, or doesn't feel how it should, I will go back and change it to make it better. No longer will you need to wait decades for a new book to come out, contact the developers on twitter or pray your GM rules in your favor.

• Free! - This website doesn't have a subscription and is more of a "pay want you want" via patreon. If you do what I did when I started playing, you can use dice rolling programs like rolz for your dice needs, discord for voice chat and screen sharing and your art program of choice for battlemaps. Personally I make mine in pain tool sai, then share them in gimp because its easier to move layers around. Sai isn't free, but gimp is a nice alternative for making battle maps.

Cons

• Incomplete - As a solo developer who cannot dedicate 100% of my time to this project, you will inevitably find certain classes and spell lists with not as much content as you were hoping. You will also find artifacts of me copy and pasting things, or me making large scale rules changes and not catching every single feature it effects. Everything I start, I intend to finish, but starting things is a lot easier than finishing them.

• Complex - When I make content, I always make considerations to speed up play, but inevitably if you want a robust system of customization, you increase the complexity of the game. This means that you will likely not be able to remember all the fine details of the hundreds of spells, class features and feats the game has to offer. I tried my best to organize this website as well as I could to make the process of looking things up fast, and because you're playing tabletop, you can adjust things to be more convenient on the fly and look things up later if you don't want to slow things down.

• No Game World - One area in particular that will take a very long time to finish that is lower on the priority list is fleshing out a game world. I have introduced several mechanics that have world-building elements built into them such as mana, races and gods. Luckily, most of you probably already have high-fantasy game worlds you like.

• D20 System - For the math nerds out there, this can be a problem. The d20 is exceptionally good a delivering highlights and is quite simple. It is probably the most familiar type of action resolution dice, but as a tradeoff it is not the most mathematically sound. With a soft bounded accuracy system like Nick Nacks, its less of an issue, but there will be times where you reach the extremes of the dice and foil the balance I worked so hard to achieve.