From the Game's Introduction:
Nutshell is a "pen and paper" style role-playing game (RPG) of imagination and collaborative story-telling. Participants interact to create an adventurous story. A role-playing game is really nothing more an evolved form of traditional children's make-believe games such as "cops & robbers", "playing house", and "cowboys & Indians", albeit with a more structured set of rules to be followed. Like most other RPG's, Nutshell is not a contest to be "won" by any of the players. The goal is instead for each participant to find enjoyment in ongoing character development and furtherance of plot within the bounds of an interesting background setting.
Game-play in Nutshell is conducted by one player serving as the Game Master (GM) who narrates and moderates the events while the other participants take on the roles of player's-characters (PC's) who are the protagonists of the game's story. The GM has the demanding job of furnishing the background setting and portraying all of the non-player characters (NPC's) whom are the sidekicks, extras, antagonists, monsters, and/or villains with whom the PC's will interact.
Nutshell is intentionally simple and easy to understand. Having been designed for novice and experienced gamers alike, these rules are ideally suited for those wishing their role-playing sessions to involve minimal intrusion from underlying game-mechanics. Due to this fact, many things necessarily fall outside the scope of Nutshell (being left to the prerogative of the GM) and players must be willing to accept their GM's final decision on all matters. It is therefore important to choose a fair and consistent GM of high caliber who is capable of applying logic, sound reasoning, and "common sense."
Nutshell's game mechanics focus on the aspects and capabilities of normal human beings as characters. If it is desired that non-human characters, magic, and/or "super powers" are options available to the PC's, these rules will need to be altered and expanded accordingly. (Supplemental rules covering these often "genre/setting-specific" things may be published at a later date by Nutshell's author and/or others expanding on the Nutshell RPG System!)