Quote from: rawma;816765One issue you would face is that D&D is not really designed for no-magic, even if "magic" is viewed as in most fantasy RPGs as an add-on and not an intrinsic quality of the world, and people who want to play D&D generally want magic.

Um. Have you actually ever played D&D? Because from nearly the get-go people have been playing in low to non-magic settings with D&D. TSR even put out some campaign books geared to that.

3 or 4e may be the exceptions. But O, A, 2e, BX+, all could handle it.

You might need to make some slight adjustments but depending on just how NON your low to non setting is then it is certainly playable.

Now if we are talking about low/no magic only pertaining to the players. But all the regular D&D monsters are still there. THEN you may well run into some severe problems. You have to adjust everything accordingly.

If I am in whats been presented as a low or no magic setting and all of a sudden I am fighting a whatziz hit only by +1 weapons then I am likely going to be pretty irked if we have nothing to deal with that. Or something only killed by a lightning bolt, frost, whatever and no alternatives.

Its up to the DM to use some common sense with encounters then.

Quote from: Omega;816848Um. Have you actually ever played D&D?

Yes.

QuoteBecause from nearly the get-go people have been playing in low to non-magic settings with D&D. TSR even put out some campaign books geared to that.

If you depend on the vagueness of "low magic" (from Will's comments in another thread, my current game apparently is "low magic" or at least pretty close to it), then, well, anything is low magic.

OD&D has over a third of its pages taken up with spell lists and magic items, which would be meaningless in a no-magic world. A lot of monster descriptions hinge on magic (either the characters needing it to deal with them or the monsters using it; depends on the campaign whether the player characters could ever ally with magic using monsters). Aerial combat in a medieval campaign with no magic is not likely to happen.

People adapted OD&D to all sorts of genres, just because there weren't very many RPGs then. But the popular part of Chainmail was the Fantasy Supplement.

Obviously, if it's a low magic setting, you wouldn't use the monsters that the players would have no chance against.

If there are no magical weapons at all, you wouldn't introduce an enemy that can only be hurt by magic. Because that presupposes the existence of magic in a setting without it, so why is such a monster there?