Melee only, no magic campaign

[m149307]

How hard would it be to DM a campaign that has no magic? And by that I mean no casters, no spell like abilities (Supernatural are fine), no magic items, and no monsters that have spells/spell like abilities (Dragons are included).

[Xaroth]

How hard would it be to DM a campaign that has no magic? And by that I mean no casters, no spell like abilities (Supernatural are fine), no magic items, and no monsters that have spells/spell like abilities (Dragons are included).

It'd actually be quite easy. Annoying as hell and tedious in the higher levels, but relatively easy.

Just make a note of everything that's being excluded and if something happens that would involve it, then it doesn't happen or its replaced by something that's not magical.

"Hm, okay, you open the chest and you get inflict mi-wait, no..."
*makes quick changes*
"Okay, you open the chest and a gnome climbs out, kicking everyone in the shin. No, he doesn't roll against your AC."

[m149307]

haha, sounds like it could be fun then. What books should I limit it to so that the players don't just walk through the world without a care in the world?

[Anlashok]

Stuff like ghosts and birds go from annoyances to cosmic level threats to the planet.

[Flickerdart]

It really, really depends on what the DM and players want from the campaign.

If all you're after is a low-level beat-em-up, then things will go pretty smoothly, if somewhat bland (since "walk up to guy and full attack" is what everyone has to do). But a mundane party has precious few options beyond "hit the thing really hard," so non-combat encounters will be extremely challenging for the party to solve. Every time they get damaged, without magical healing, there's a lot of downtime, which they can't spend productively.

Beyond level 7 or so, the capabilities of CR-appropriate monsters start being too much for mundanes to overcome by themselves, especially without magic items to keep them on track numbers-wise. Trading blows with melee-focused monsters will not go well without magical support necessary to overcome flying enemies, exotic forms of resistance (such as a War Troll's regeneration), and so on. Monsters that don't have these things (and that can actually be hurt by the party) will still be doable, but the party will lose members at a dangerous rate because of the lack of magical healing and defenses.

The game will also get more boring, as everyone dumps resources into a progressively narrower specialization. Bull Rushing goblins at level 1 might have worked without any additional investments, but if you want that to fly against giants you're going to have to take Improved Bull Rush, More Improved Bull Rush, Even Better Bull Rush, etc, just to stand a chance. In order to make the mid and late game playable at all, the DM will have to carefully tailor every encounter to fit the party's increasingly limited capabilities, which to me sounds like a dreadful slog.

[m149307]

So it's only good for a low level campaign? I think that is fine since it would be my first time being a DM

[Jeff the Green]

How hard would it be to DM a campaign that has no magic? And by that I mean no casters, no spell like abilities (Supernatural are fine), no magic items, and no monsters that have spells/spell like abilities (Dragons are included).

The world would be run by incarnates and totemists.

[Promises Kept]

You're going to want to be very, very careful with this. I'd advise giving all the PC's something along the lines of a Vow of Poverty Fix (there are any number of good ones on these forums) to make up for not having any magic items, as the CR system is explicitly designed with Magic Items taken into consideration. Your PC's will be vastly underpowered stuck with mundane equipment, and it makes loot sort of pointless. Barring some esoteric ability, your players will also be destroyed when facing Invisible (or, God forbid, Incorporeal) or flying foes. An Invisible Stalker (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/invisibleStalker.htm), for example, would be more or less insurmountable. Without magical support, Grapplers will almost certainly overwhelm the party. Damage reduction becomes a major concern, as the methods of circumventing it are primarily magical.

EDIT: Or listen to Flickerdart and Jeff. The two of them hit the salient points pretty well.

[jiriku]

I really don't see you needing to "limit" book access -- martial classes are among the weakest classes in the game. I'd suggest you encourage them to look at the warblade class in Tome of Battle, and point them towards the special and alchemical equipment in Complete Adventurer and Complete Scoundrel, along with the exotic weapons and armor in most every splatbook. Special gear will be extra important without magic to provide extra options. Since alchemical items can normally only be made by a spellcaster, you'll want to drop that requirement from the Craft (alchemy) skill and review the list of alchemical items to decide if any of them have a flavor that's inappropriate for your campaign. Try to keep as much of that stuff in as possible though.

I'd strongly recommend you consider limited the campaign to level 6, or using the popular E6 variant of the game. As Flickerdart has mentioned, D&D's math assumes magical bonuses at higher levels and parties without magic die extremely quickly in high-level D&D. You may want to consider replacing the standard hit point rules with the reserve points (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/reservePoints.htm) or vitality points and wound points (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/vitalityAndWoundPoints.htm) alternate rules, which will speed up healing. If you're going without magic, I strongly recommend the action points (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/actionPoints.htm) optional rule, as it makes characters more flexible and resilient.

If you are new to D&D, you should be warned: there are enormous differences in power between the various classes. Looking at the nonmagical and supernatural classes:
Top dog: warblade, swordsage, and crusader (ToB) and the totemist (MoI) are really good
Honorable mention: the feat-variant paladin and ranger (which get extra feats instead of spells) and rogue are ok, as is the soulborn and incarnate (MoI)
Not so hot: fighter and monk aren't that great
Poor: samurai (CW) soulknife, and , about on par with the NPC expert and noble classes (DMG)

You may notice that all of the classes and class variants that are even halfway good are from expansion books. Magic of Incarnum (MoI is also a pretty rare book and a complex, badly explained system that may be intimidating for a new DM.

[m149307]

It seems like a lot work then lol. Not a good idea to do for a first campaign?

[jiriku]

You might do better to start simple with just the regular classes and the core books only. Are your players also new?

[Flickerdart]

first time being a DM
Aha.

Ahaha.

Stop right there.

The game's balance is precarious as-is. Making changes without knowing exactly what you're doing is not going to end well. Allow me to explain.

There are two factors in play here that will ruin your day. The first is something called Challenge Rating (CR) - a metric that's supposed to determine what level a standard party needs to be to fight that creature and expect to win most of the time. The problem with CR is that it's nearly always wrong, but it's impossible to tell the direction in which it's wrong without examining the monster carefully. Something like a Monstrous Crab (allegedly CR3) will utterly wipe a standard 3rd level party, while a Gelatinous Cube (also allegedly CR3) is no threat at all if you can make the easy Spot Check to notice it. Then you have monsters like the Sea Hag (CR4) which are a joke for their level, but if they do happen to land one of their attacks (in this case, Evil Eye) then the results are way disproportionate compared to the level of the creature. And finally there are "puzzle" enemies like Trolls - easy enough to take down if you have the answer, but when nobody in the party can fireball it, it suddenly becomes an unmanageable threat.

The second factor is something called Wealth by Level (WBL), which a lot of new DMs miss because it's buried in the middle of the DMG. WBL is a guideline for how much money a character should have at any given level, so that he can equip himself with the magic items that the game assumes he has when determining what threats he's supposed to be fighting. Characters who are not able to spend their WBL on magic items are not as powerful as they should be, and should not be facing monsters of the normal power level, but there isn't a guideline anywhere for how to adjudicate that within the CR system.

So what you're left with is no way to determine what monsters your players should be fighting without essentially comparing the numbers on each one with the numbers on each one of your players' characters to figure out what they can actually handle and what will utterly destroy them.

In a video game, this would be less of a problem - run in, see that you're taking hard hits, run away. But in D&D, especially at the early levels, this isn't really possible. Most monsters are faster than a PC (especially an armoured PC), and if they're winning, usually don't have any incentive to let the players go. Thanks to Attacks of Opportunity, they're also "sticky" - if you try to disengage, you get hit. If you try to Withdraw, the enemy just Charges you, and you still get hit. The slow turn cycling also plays a role - combat is usually over in 3-5 rounds, so there isn't exactly a lot of time to do anything about it if you're the losing party, because in 18-30 seconds of in-game time, you're all dead.

[m149307]

Jiriku, Yes and no. Some have played for at least a couple of years, while for others this is their second campaign.

[m149307]

Flicker, I know the WBL (I would add a bit more since it seems on the low end.) and about the CRs. It would be a trial and error though to get the right monster to fight the party and give them a good fight without being too weak or outright slaughtering them. And I hadn't thought about how magic items influence CR... good point.

[jiriku]

If there are no power-gamers in your group, you could probably do OK just running a general low-level campaign with only the core rulebooks, say from levels 1 through 8 (or less), granting xp slowly so that you have time to get a feel for things before the players gain new abilities. Using core-only doesn't help balance, you understand. It just keeps things simple so that you have less to learn and less work to do. Once you feel comfortable building encounters, judging encounter difficulty, telling a story, and doing all the good stuff that DMs do, you can then reboot the game in a low-magic or no-magic setting. The experience from your first campaign will give you the confidence to open up a few more books and subsystems and depart from the vanilla D&D experience.

If you have it, I really recommend taking a look at the Tome of Battle. It's the best thing that happened to martial classes since the invention of the sword. The warblade class in particular has a fantastic gritty-fantasy feel to it that calls the best Conan stories to mind.

Also, when you get to the point that you can start to see/feel the balance issues in the game, be aware that there are many homebrew fixes you can use here, or people who will give you advice on doing so yourself (some of the advice is even good!)

[Flickerdart]

If there are no power-gamers in your group
The presence of power-gamers is far from the only factor that results in divergent effectiveness among party members. Players, especially new players, are likely to stumble into an effective combo simply by picking abilities that seem like they're related to one another, and are equally likely to make absolutely terrible characters that contribute less than the fighter's trained dog. Also, they might just put build resources towards a specific type of problem that never comes up.

[Anthrowhale]

I would suggest removing supernatural abilities as well. With them, a shadow is an apocalypse threat while without them they are more of a curiousity. This also gets rid of DR/magic or good which is difficult to overcome without magic.

In a higher level mundane campaign, characters must address several challenges.

For healing, look at troll-blooded feat, feral template, mul race.

For flight, there are race options plus the unseelie fey, half-fey, and dragonborn templates. Not everyone needs to fly, but the party needs to, preferably at a high speed.

For damage, ranged weapons can be good-if-tedious against monsters which lack range. A party also needs some way to lay down high damage in a short time at short range. Note that hitting can be challenging. Sneak attack, poison, charge attack, iajutsu focus, and master thrower touch attacks all help.

For grappling, there are some helpful skill tricks, that ameliorate but do not fully solve the problem.

Skills become radically more important. In a magical campaign Ug-the-orc can have weaknesses covered up by magic, but without magic Ug is very limited. Tumble, iajutsu focus, spot, listen, sense motive, diplomacy, intimidate, hide, move silently, swim, etc.... can all be very important. Characters without a significant Int will be at a great disadvantage.

So, if you want to do it, careful design of a party seems pretty essential.
Someone(s) who can carry the rest of the party and fly fast.
Someone who can intimidate.
Someone who can diplomacy.
Someone who can scout.
Someone with poison use.
Everyone with long ranged weapons.
Someone who can dish out high damage against high AC
Everyone can recover hp in nonmagical ways within a day

[Red Fel]

I would go completely the opposite direction. What you are proposing would add complications, making DMing more challenging than it needs to be (particularly for a first-time DM) and making the game duller than it needs to be for the players.

I would follow the Keep It Simple method. Just play out of the PHB and DMG. Limit your books and your classes to what's in those. No Completes, no Races, no MIC or any other Compendium. Just those two.

And that's the extent of your exclusions. No home rules, no modifications, no limits. Keep it simple.

Are you worried that your players more experienced than you are? Are you worried they'll pull some magical shenanigans? Ask them not to. Good players may know a lot of tricks, but not all of them want to DM; scaring off a new DM is a great way to ruin future games. So if you ask nicely, explain your inexperience, I'm reasonably confident they'll help you out.

Are you worried about CR? That's a fair concern. You don't want to overwhelm them. My advice, if you're just starting out, is to estimate on the low end, at least at first. If your players can handle a slightly lower-than-expected CR, increase the challenge slightly. Your goal is to have them at a level where they're using a quarter to a third of their daily resources on each encounter (assuming a 3-4 encounter day). Start low, and work it up to a reasonable level. Eventually, you'll get a feel for their play style, and what is or isn't an appropriate challenge.

Starting out is all about keeping things simple, and then learning your players' play style so that you can provide them with a reasonably challenging, but satisfying experience. It's very much a growing process. But if you start out with strange rules or modifications, you're only going to stunt your growth and risk turning yourself or your players off of the experience.

[HunterOfJello]

So it's only good for a low level campaign? I think that is fine since it would be my first time being a DM

Horrible idea.

This is an opportunity for you to have fun while learning the game itself. You can encourage the players to try out melee classes for now, but don't go around banning things in a game until you know more about it.

Learn about the game with magic for yourself and build up your own opinions on things. Then go and try to slowly consider putting in houserules.

~~~

If you want to know what some good houserules are, then go check out one of our many houserules superthreads. Look at the posts and if you don't see a rule mentioned by at least 5 different people, then don't consider it for a beginner game.

[JusticeZero]

Right, falls under the rule of "You're not as clever as you think you are". I disagree with core only though, because core is a horrible wreck of bad balance. Definitely restrict the material available, but some of the stuff that needs restrictions the most are in the PHB.

[Red Fel]

Right, falls under the rule of "You're not as clever as you think you are". I disagree with core only though, because core is a horrible wreck of bad balance. Definitely restrict the material available, but some of the stuff that needs restrictions the most are in the PHB.

Oh, without question, core is home to some of the most broken stuff in all of 3.5. But two things to consider: It's simple. If you limit it to two, three books tops, you can familiarize yourself with what's going to be in play. You can limit the madness. And that will give you a chance to get used to everything - monsters, spells, mechanics, everything. The problem is that it's hard, as a starting DM, to ban PHB - so much of the basics can be found in there. Yes, it's broken, but it's simple and fundamental. If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. If you can handle the broken elements of core, you'll not only learn the fundamentals, you'll learn how to deal with broken, overpowered and underpowered material. You'll learn how to make judgment calls. You'll learn what is or isn't a dangerously game-breaking or game-ruining idea. Sometimes, being exposed to the broken stuff early - and understanding what makes it broken - is better than avoiding it at all costs throughout your career.Of course, if you later decided to ban PHB, I wouldn't blame you in the slightest.

[Sylian]

If you're doing this, you should probably restrict the monsters to humanoids, since other monsters are balanced around the assumption that the party has magic items.

[ericgrau]

If you're doing this, you should probably restrict the monsters to humanoids, since other monsters are balanced around the assumption that the party has magic items.
This and/or limit the campaign to level 7 at the end. Encourage alchemical items for unusual low level fights.

[sideswipe]

a better idea would to be just banning any caster class that gets anything above 4th level spells by level 20. (maybe 5th level so keep dusk blades)
and then ban any magic items over, say 10,000 gold unless you think it should be allowed.

you then get paladins, rangers, maybe duskblades and the likes as the powerful casting types. the ones that are normally the attitude that "meh a few spells are nice".

and the emphasis is then mainly on mundane.

or allowing the clerics and wizards but giving them rangers casting progression. so that they eventually learn level 4 spells.

this would mean there is still some magic. as some things just cannot be overcome without it. but still very little.

[fishyfishyfishy]

It's really way too much hassle to try to balance things around a "low magic" setting. I suggest trying another type of tabletop RPG system that actually does this well because 3.5 was made for high power magic super heroes. Especially after level 7 or so things start to get really crazy.

[Actana]

If you're dead set on a no magic campaign, you should try to locate a copy of Iron Heroes. It's a modified 3.5 that is made for low-magic settings and is balanced (as much as 3.5 can be) for martial characters. There is more class variety and combat options within the classes themselves than in 3.5 outside Tome of Battle.

[ace rooster]

There is a lot that could be done with this, especially at low levels. As mentioned, the biggest problem you will come across is recovering hit points, so avoiding losing them at all is important. All characters should carry a bow or crossbow, keeping out of melee range if at all possible. Tanglefoot bags and smokesticks become very useful, and somebody who can use a net becomes a strong debuffer. DR can be bypassed by alchemists fire, or oil, so these thing should start to become more important as well.

Ac will be hard to come by, so melee is not a good idea against enemies with an attack of more than about +7 or 8*. Fighting defensively a combat experties PC can get his ac to about 26ish, but that is about as high as they can get it. Against a +12 enemy for example, 26 is getting hit 1 time in 3, which is going to kill you fast, or at least do enough damage to put you out of action for days. For ranged attackers a +7 could kill a lightly armoured PC pretty fast, so don't go overboard.

* The exception is probably a mounted combatant with ride by attack, who can skewer to his hearts content.

A party which consists of a rogue with a crossbow (scouting focused) in a bush, a defensive fighter with nets on lockdown, and a paladin on horseback doing damage can function quite well against fairly powerful creatures.

In general terms this is viable direction, but will not work even at mid levels. All mid level defenses in 3.5 are magic based, so combat gets progressively more lethal. At low levels the best it has going for it is that the tactics will not be standard, so that your players will have to come up with their own tactics to be effective, leveling the playing field.

I would say just go for it. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't work well and you decide to try something else, a little wiser, and probably knowing a few imaginative tactics that are not based around build. At best it works well and you will get a better knowledge of the way mundane effects can be used, which will still work if you move to a system with magic. As a first time DM you will make mistakes all over the place no matter what system you use, so if you want to avoid magic for simplicity, then do it.

[JusticeZero]

Here's the other problem.

I've played a few games where you wander around, then you see a monster and go into combat mode where you just automatically go into an animation while you and the monster's health go down slowly. Combat is dull.

If you're a mundane, that's mostly all combat is for you on your character alone. The cool stuff you can do to liven stuff up comes from cracking magic items and the like. The caster has lots of options, of course.

[Hecuba]

If you're willing to throw out magical enemies as well, it's workable.

I certainly don't recommend it, however, for your first foray into DMing.

The CR system is already somewhat off, but it will be entirely useless for such a game.
You would need to manually balance and vet the difficulty of each encounter, which can be both time consuming and difficult.
My best advice would be to ask yourself "How many of these opponents would be an 50/50 match for a single PC?"
That gives a first approximation for an equal CR encounter for a party of 4 or 5.
Before you actually use such a monster, however, I suggest you try playing both sides of an couple encounters with it to fine tune your ranking.

I highly recommend you retain alchemical items: while craft(alchemy) technically requires a caster level, the items created are non-magical and significantly broaden the range of what can be accomplished without magic.

[Flickerdart]

Complete Warrior actually has a lot of advice on this specific topic.
WotC admitted that when they put out CWar they still didn't really know what they were doing, so I would take any advice out of that book with a grain of salt.

[TSED]

D&D does not translate to low magic settings well at all. You're better off looking at other games with low-magic settings built into the rules.

D&D works better the MORE magic there is. If you instead made everyone be a full caster, it'd work just fine and the only advice anyone would have to give you is "make sure you are adapting to the players' expenditures of daily resources so you don't spring a big bad boss battle when they're running on empty."

Note that all of the non-casters that are well-received tend to be pretty 'magical' themselves. Sure, a warblade isn't explicitly supernatural in his capabilities, but his maneuvers are pretty similar to spellcasting. Incarnum classes are absolutely magical. Psywars are literally oozing the stuff. Factotums can break space/time by outsmarting the Universe at a rather low level.

Meanwhile, rogues are blowing all their ill-gotten gains on UMD-magic and fighters are a two level dip.

[Ashtagon]

WotC admitted that when they put out CWar they still didn't really know what they were doing, so I would take any advice out of that book with a grain of salt.

To be fair, those comments about CW not working too well were in the context of taking it to be a fragment of the whole game. Which kind of assumes a fully magical setting. When taken in the context of a low/no magic game,

for this purpose, low/no magic game means no psionics, no incarnum, no ToB, no ToM, and no classes capable of casting 5th or higher level spells. For reference, based on this post (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=1002.0), that gives you the following classes:


Tier 4: barbarian, ranger, rogue, marshal, scout, hexblade (CW)
Tier 5: ninja, swashbuckler (CW), expert, samurai (OA), fighter, monk, paladin, knight
Tier 6: samurai (CW), aristocrat, commoner, warrior


Now, for a game balanced around this low/no magic point, the new base classes introduced work just fine. The same goes for the prestige classes (although some of those presented in that book don't work in this low/no magic context).

The no-magic paladin and ranger variants are underpowered. A single feat does NOT compensate for losing an entire spell level worth of casting. They each probably drop a tier. However, it is worth noting that with the class list noted above, the paladin remains the only class that has any ability to heal allies at all. That's possibly the only thing that keeps the no-spell paladin in tier 5.

The epic rules supplement in that book falls flat. But to be sure, epic rules fall flat across the board.

The new general feats are neither exceptionally good nor bad. The book introduced a couple of new feat categories, which deserve individual commentary.

Divine feats are powered by turn undead uses. The ones presented are reasonably balanced, although the concept would later expand to cover divine metamagic, which is pure game breakage. In a low magic context though, what's presented in CW for these feats is not really abusable.

Tactical feats were an early attempt to grant warriors something to do other than "I hit him hard. Again. Rarrr." Unfortunately, they were typically at the top of feat trees, forming a feat tax that required fighters to specialise with their feats to get them, and the times when they could be used were highly contextual, limiting their usefulness. The idea didn't really take off.

Weapon Style feats were an attempt to get warriors to pick something other than a greatsword (statistically the best weapon). However, these suffered from massive feat trees. Again, the feat trees kind of made them irrelevant.

I have no idea what they were doing when they came up with Perform (weapon drill).

Chapter four has some good stuff, including early rules for volley fire and military campaigns (later to be seen in Heroes of Battle) , and combat games (jousts, arena combat, archery contests, etc.).

The organisations are kind of bland, and late-era supplements did that better. Same for the new deities presented.

CW ends with some new weapons (very good), a paragraph on primitive weapons (bland), and detailed rules for handling improvised weapons (essential reading if your campaign goes towards bar-room brawls).

I'll be the first to agree that a low/no magic campaign will have severe issues with "level appropriate" monsters from level 6 on up. GMs will need to pick monsters carefully (or just make it a humans and humanoids campaign, and keep actual monsters as being near-uniques), or accept that the CR system is useless for such a campaign. However, that simply means that CW doesn't match the kind of game that the rest of 3.5e is. But on its own merits as part of a low/no magic campaign, it does actually stand up rather well.