What happens if you remove magic from D&D?

[Amiel]

So, what happens if you remove magic from D&D. Will it still be considered D&D or will it be a completely different iteration?
Or should it simply not be done? Since it may be deviating markedly from its original premise.
What differences will it introduce? What new imbalances may it create?
Is there a way that it can be done, that is centrally fitting, makes senses and is fun?

[Tinydwarfman]

Iron Heroes. And it is fun.

[the humanity]

well it'd solve those overpowered wizards and druids.

a little too well >_>

it'd be simple really, just play fighters, monks, rogues and other magic free classes.

[Sinfire Titan]

The problem arises when noncasters fight something that is normally incredibly difficult for them to fight. Anything that is naturally Incorporeal, for example, or Air Elementals. Undead like Wights and Wraiths also become much more deadly when you can't remove Negative Levels. And Ability Drain is impossible to remove non-magically.

Hell, even Difficult Terrain is enough to screw some classes outright.

[Cisturn]

you'd have to call is just "dungeons" but except for extended heal time, and maybe a few less monsters i don't see why it shouldn't be fun

[vrellum]

I'm guessing most of those things would probably be removed as well and/or there would be alternative ways to deal with them. Though it is a good point that the DM has to be aware of the limits of the PCs under the no magic setting.

I think it would be fun. I've played games with greatly reduced (though never outright removed) magic and they were great.

[Reluctance]

Removing magic just from the PCs, or removing magic period? Because most "low-magic" concepts I've seen have an awful lot of supernatural bad guys walking around.

Strip magic from everything, and you're throwing out most of the game. It can be an interesting short romp through low levels, but eventually you'll be seeing "impossible" things happening with skills and hit points. 3.5 simply isn't a good base for a gritty game.

Low-magic PCs require a lot of extra work on you as the DM, as you'll have to adjust CRs for a party without the gear or spell backup the rules expect. This goes double when you consider just how powerful magic is, and how carefully you'll have to balance the enemies. It's doable in theory, but in practice there are probably better tweaks to avoid the "casters = gods" than this.

[Satyr]

Well, there is always Serpents and Sewers for all your low magic/high drama needs. I have heard that the author is a descended demigod and a genius, but that might be a bit exagerated.

The problem with D&D is, that mundane characters have too few options by default. Because of the bland, overtly abstract combat system, the imbecile idea of passive defense, and lots of fights which basically come down to "two guys hit each other until one keels over".

Thanks to this actually quite bad game design (magic is an extra. If your system doesn't work or isn't fun when you leave it out, that's not exactly good game design), removing magic from the game would make it even blander, so you'd need some other abilities, mundane, realistic abilities (e.g. hit locations, bleeding, crippling strikes) should fill in the gaps. Thus, it is a good idea to take a set of rules that offer some interesting mundane options, like the already mentioned Iron Heroes, or the somewhat more flexible and less book-keepy Serpents and Sewers.
It's one of the innane ideas of D&D that supposedly a painful injury does nothing to anyone when it is dealt with an ordinary axe blow, but a lengthy good laugh is absolutely crippling, as long as it is magic(tm).

You could also play something else. Gurps does anything D&D does as well, and usually better, AFMBE with the Dungeons and Zombies splat book is very homebrewer friendly, Burning Wheels is a very fun system, and if you can get a copy of Riddle of Steel, you have a really cool system at hand. D&D is not the only roleplaying game, it''s not even one of the better ones.

[krossbow]

A ghost goes from being just a nuisance to being an omnipotent god that will rape every single party member in short order.

[Vitruviansquid]

DnD doesn't have enough in the area of physical combat to hold up well without magic.

I'm sure there are other, better settings you could play if you wanted to do fantasy without magic. I personally use Savage Worlds to play a low magic campaign, but really, Savage Worlds does *everything* well, so I would hardly recommend it if there was a more specialized system somewhere (which I'm sure there is.)

[bosssmiley]

Mechanically: You end up with GURPS lite.
Thematically: You end up something similar to Pendragon (if you like high fantasy) or Barbarians of Lemuria (if you prefer S&S). At least for a few levels.

[ericgrau]

It still ends up imbalanced b/c magic items are responsible for different stats than classes. That and monsters expect higher stats in general. Even then you need to take out any monster that flies, is incorporeal and so on. You can use the thing in my signature to keep it balanced at least.

Or at the very least you need an AC progression to keep up with BAB. You'll still need damage, save and etc. boosts unless you eliminate monsters entirely and only put the PCs against NPCs with class levels.

Or, ya, you play another system. D&D hinges on magic.

[Lycanthromancer]

Every party in existence would need a crusader, since they have the only way to heal that is [Ex]. Otherwise, everyone needs either fast healing or regeneration, or every single fight would need to be less than half the standard CR, and would still require a week or more of downtime to recover from.

[Eldariel]

D&D hinges on magic.

Does not. Monsters as written do. As long as you don't deal with incorporeals, and ignore CRs (which you should do anyways), you're fine. Though you might want to homebrew something on healing unless you want long periods of healing. WP/VP system makes no-magic games work great though.

I'm playing one right now and it's great fun, so I'd say that alone is a testament to everyone saying it can't be done being wrong.

[awa]

A low magic game can work but you cant take cr at face value like has been mentioned incorporeal foes are vastly more dangerous as is something like a troll. You will need to be careful fights don't devolve into two guys standing next to each other taking swings at each other. Interesting battlefield can do that to a degree such as fighting in a burning building with the fire spreading round by round forcing players to think about the terrain and even get the opportunity to use it such as trying to force enemies into the fire either by pushing them or just blocking their movement.

Edit their is the reserve point variant rule that would help alleviate the hit point problem but i would agree the fights will need to be weaker both becuase you cant recover from fights as quickly and becuase you are less powerful.
As someone else mentioned some kind of level based defense for all characters is really a necessity if they arnt going to have magical ac boosters.

[Starbuck_II]

Extraordinary becomes the new magic (they can bypass laws of physics).

[Lycanthromancer]

You could remove core casting classes easily enough, but if you want to remove magic altogether, you'd be best off trying another system altogether if you don't want to restrict the game to the point where there really aren't many choices that either DM or players can make.

[awa]

in the grand scheme i agree that just removing magic is probably not the best choice. outlawing the specialized casters can work with little difficulty outlawing all classes with magic works less well but removing all magic items is a bad idea with out heavy home brewing, becuase the game assumes they have them things like ac are very magic dependent and your basically going to have to throw out the normal cr system becuase damage reduction and similar things becomes much more powerful but if you willing to spend the effort it can be rewarding.

[grautry]

Well, removing magic entirely might not be a bad idea, but it would be a *very* different game altogether.

If I went with this, I'd remove almost all magic but leave the creatures that have innate supernatural abilities and some rare, legendary magical items.

Anyway, in such a game confronting a ghost(the staple of incorporeal creatures) would be more like Call of Cthulhu rather than D&D.

Direct confrontation is suicide - you can't hurt it and it very well can hurt you. So you resort to a different technique - perhaps you set right what once went wrong and therefore, resolve the reason for the ghosts existence.

Alternatively you could chase down the legends and the stories of a legendary weapon, forged in cooperation between the greatest blacksmith of the era and imbued with a part of an essence of the ghost of an Emperor(see? one of the cool things about it is that every single magical thing becomes magical, with a history all its own, while in any other game it would be just a boring ghost touch weapon or even just a +1 weapon) to destroy the spirit once and for all.

Also, in such a game almost all supernatural creatures will invariably have to have a history. There will be no Troll #24 or Vampire #36, there will be the Terror of the Woods, Ula-Tek, he who terrorizes the country. The vampire instead will be Lord Blackwood and an entire story will resolve around searching for the scraps of hidden lore and forgotten weapons in order to finally arrive at a method of killing him.

Anyway, it wouldn't be such a horrible idea as long as you don't mind a vastly different game than normal D&D is, but, there are probably better systems to use for such a game.

[Optimystik]

I have to agree with Lycan, Sinfire etc. It strips too much out of the game to really make it D&D anymore.

It's Dungeons & Dragons. Are we removing them too?

Not to mention aberrations, outsiders, elementals, even planes...

[Roderick_BR]

Depends what you want to do. Removing full casters puts the game's focus on warriors and magic items (and half-casters, if you keep them). Removing magic at all, as was pointed out, makes the game turn into Gurps lite, with it's "realistic" system, where fighting a single lion is a whole campaing, and fighting anything supernatural is simply impossible. And healing becomes very important and slow.

Healing could be dealt with:
* Armor Damage conversion (wearing armor makes lethal blows less dangeous) (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/ad...Conversion.htm)
* Injury (makes attacks be either deadly, or harmless, regardless of magic healing or not) http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/ad...ing/injury.htm
* Reserve points (technically, you have twice HP that is healed twice as fast on a daily basis) (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/ad...ervePoints.htm)
* Tome of Battle's HP recovery maneuvers.
* Non-magic healing items (there's some in some books around)
* Having half casters (paladion, ranger, maybe bard) that can still handle healing.

Remember that natural healing, while slow, is still useful. A character recovers 1 HP for each character level/day, twice that with full day rest, and twice that with treatment. So a 2nd fighter with treatment (heal skill) can heal 8 HP (4 for each character level) everyday. To go from 1 HP to 20, it'll be 3 days, nearly half a week.

Ah, ability point damage can be healed with treatment too, but not status (a -4 penalty to strength instead of 4 points of strength damage)

[Optimystik]

Removing magic at all, as was pointed out, makes the game turn into Gurps lite, with it's "realistic" system, where fighting a single lion is a whole campaign

This line had me LOLing Why would I want to play a system like that? It would probably be less trouble to go out and fight a real lion!

[Knaight]

Depends what you want to do. Removing full casters puts the game's focus on warriors and magic items (and half-casters, if you keep them). Removing magic at all, as was pointed out, makes the game turn into Gurps lite, with it's "realistic" system, where fighting a single lion is a whole campaing, and fighting anything supernatural is simply impossible. And healing becomes very important and slow.

Hardly. Mundane animals remain fairly easy to drop once you get to high enough levels. A party of warriors could take down a single lion by level 2 or 3 if optimized, an elephant by 7 or 8. Once you get into the 10+ levels you can take down entire hordes. Healing time is just extended. Even in GURPS Lite, a lion isn't that huge a problem. Ganging up is much, much nastier in that system, as are weapons, and the Lion is pretty mortal too. Sure, it probably won't be easy to fight a lion in one on one, but it is doable.

Were I to remove magic from D&D, I would make a few other changes as well.
1) Use E6, if going for anything even resembling realism.
2) AC needs serious changes. A bonus at the very least.

That said, I would probably end up doing this with another system. Gurps, Fudge, and Savage Worlds are all decent generics for this, although Savage Worlds has some major issues.

[krossbow]

holy $#@*; monks might actually become useful

[Knaight]

Nah. Unarmed Fighters are still better, and TOB continues to blow them out of the water. Not to mention armed Fighters, Rogues, and such.

[Satyr]

Removing magic at all, as was pointed out, makes the game turn into Gurps lite

With a lot of wishful thinking, at best, but more likely a slight case of hybris.

Gurps will always do a better job in replacing D&D than vice versa. Including Gurps light.

[Starbuck_II]

This line had me LOLing Why would I want to play a system like that? It would probably be less trouble to go out and fight a real lion!

A guy did that with his hands in Africa. Killed the thing by pulling out its tonque. Was very manly.

[Greenish]

A guy did that with his hands in Africa. Killed the thing by pulling out its tonque. Was very manly.

Ha, so that's the secret weakness of lions, their tongue! No wonder I haven't managed to kill any yet.

[Optimystik]

Were I to remove magic from D&D, I would make a few other changes as well.
1) Use E6, if going for anything even resembling realism.
2) AC needs serious changes. A bonus at the very least.

Why would you remove spells AND go E6? I thought the point of E6 was to put the casters more in line with everyone else.

[Set]

Monsters with unbeatable abilities (incorporeal) need to be removed, or tweaked so that they can be beaten (although it doesn't have to be easy!).

Non-magical enhancements to the current healing rules need to be added, such as a use of the Heal skill that allows one to repair a limited amount of hit point damage per day (perhaps points per day per subject equal to your ranks in the Heal skill, and perhaps even simply converting lethal damage to nonlethal damage, as opposed to making wounds just 'go away'). No one person can be healed in this manner more than Con mod + HD hit points per day, so if the whole party has 4 ranks of Heal, they can't take turns and pass bandages around until everyone is healed.

Mundane skills should have some higher levels of effect. A master weaponsmith should be able to create a MW weapon that does +1 damage, or a suit of MW armor that confers a +1 armor bonus, at even greater cost than the usual MW weapons or armor, representing the closest thing the Mundane Realms have to 'magical weapons.'

There are 'tiers' of 'removing magic,' as well.

1) All magic gone is one level.

2) All magic becomes slow ritualistic stuff usable by NPCs (or PCs with a special feat) to perform various 'plot' things (less D&D, more Call of Cthulhu, or Conan, where PCs won't use magic, save as the story calls for it, and nobody 'casts spells' in battle).

3) Spells don't exist, but alchemy does. Alchemist's Fire becomes the new 'fireball.'