Minim
Minim is a complete, universal, light-weight tabletop roleplaying system that requries only common six-sided dice and can be used to play any game style or genre. In this repository you will find:
- The Minim rules, a short booklet focusing on dynamic, fun-and-fast rules for your gaming sessions;
- Ready-to-print character sheets for players to use;
- The Minim companion, a web application that helps run sessions with minimal pre-planning and handles as much (or as little) dice-rolling and tracking as you want it to - speeding up the game and letting players focus on creating great stories together;
- A few other tools that advanced game-masters may find useful.
The documents are provided in portable format, which any web-browser should be able to open but to use the originals you will need an office suite (such as Libre Office or Google Docs).
Contact and support
To discuss the game rules, the Companion software or just to say thanks, join the Minim community on Discord!
The Minim role-playing system
Minim is the minimalistic role-playing system and it tries to offer as much potential as those other systems that come in expensive books with hundreds of pages of rules. It leaves a lot of work to the imagination of players and GMs alike but it does so while providing an established foundation which you should be able to easily expand upon and derive your own ideas from.
The system has been put to use and tested with a variety of scenarios and groups of people and holds up to the task fairly well in any situation. It will never be as detailed for fantasy games as D&D is, for example, with decades of excellent work put into it - but it doesn't try to! It focuses on letting the story flow fast and for interesting situations to always appear during a gaming session - and not on deciding only between your attack hitting or missing or the exact composition of a wizard's spellbook, down to the very last level-zero cantrip.
Due to its minimalistic design, Minim games are very fast and simple to prepare for and run - a lot of it being intuitive and hence easy to adjucate on-the-fly mid-session. A group of brand-new players should take around 10 to 20 minutes to learn enough rules to create their first characters and start playing.
The companion web application
The Minim game companion takes a system already designed to be simple and fast to play using physical dice and brings it to the next level by automating most of the basic game tasks and actions such as keeping track of scores for both player and non-player characters; rolling and tallying up dice; applying modifiers... to provide the most friction-less roleplaying game experience possible.
The companion itself is fairly simple to learn and even features a brief introduction to its functions via the "Help" button - give it a try (or continue reading for more information on its design, utility and purposes)!
Players don't need to commit to doing absolutely everything (or nothing at all) with the companion. It can be used only for more demanding scenes (such as quickly rolling for group initiative or perception and tracking combat scenes, for example). Other groups may want to take advantage of its speed and simplicity to perform most game actions but then leave the more critical rolls of a session to actual physical dice to enhance the dramatic moments of their games.
How the Companion helps reduce game preparation
One of the biggest strengths of the Companion for the game-master is to reduce game prep as much as possible: with it by your side you don't need to flesh out all the details of every scene before you can even start playing. Once your group enters an encounter, all you have to do is add-in the appropriate units and it will only ask you about specific stats (skill levels, gear, current damage)... when absolutely necessary, remembering that information later and never bothering to ask you for numbers that will never come into play.
This can be a great help also for GMs who want to try improvising part of their games, as it's easier to just enter the relevant numbers into the program on-the-fly using your best judgement than to keep track of all that data as the game progresses later on (and any great game-master will tell you that improvisation is half of any roleplay session). When improvising, it's crucial to "guesstimate" appropriate information over relying on pre-planned data and the Minim Companion is built to enable exactly that!
We'd all love to have more time to prepare our games but the Companion makes it easier to pick up the slack so that you can focus on the meaningful things when you're writing your adventures and not on game mechanics and blocks of numbers. It also helps quickly and gracefully deal with unexpected scenarios where improvisation might be required.
What the Companion is not
The Companion is not a replacement for coming up with awesome adventures for your group, great dungeon designs, terrific and creative monstrous foes, tactical combat encounters and memorable figures to populate your game world - all it tries to do is take care of the mechanical parts of a game session so that everything else can progress as smoothly as possible.
The Companion also makes no attempt at managing the players' special abilities, willpower pools, equipment... these should be simple and important enough that they will want to manually track it themselves - letting the Companion focus instead on GM tasks or those that involve more active dice-rolling, like combat.
Tables galore!
The Companion also provides many hundreds of built-in tables, ranging from entire adventure and character generators to setting-specific content and miscellanious tools like weather calendars. These can be incredibly helpful or entirely ignored, depending on the GM, group and play-style.