The Forum @ Rules Light RPGs

Firstly, a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks for this fantastic forum and set of goodies.

My son wants to try a TTRPG with a medieval setting, possibly without magic. I know there are lots of games out there that serve this purpose but if it can be done, I'd like the challenge of adapting/cropping one of the ML games. So: can it be done? Which version would be most suitable or would it be a case of taking any of them and simply not including magic?

Sorry if these are daft questions. My knowledge and experience are probably lower than other forum users here.

Hi!

No daft questions here! Or maybe they're just all daft questions, how would we know the difference?

I think it would be arguably easier to adapt Microlite to remove magic, at least compared to a number of other d20-based games (including the Usual Suspects). The basic magic system in m20 (powered by HP) means that magic-users already start with a similar level of endurance as other classes.

The only thing you might want to keep an eye on is damage output of non-magic wielders versus the HP of enemies, especially at higher levels. I recently ran an m20-based campaign where there was no "magic" as such, although the party did have a chemist that could do some magic-esque things. There were also options for the "fighter" do up damage using something like martial feats, and as a result I found I had to toughen the enemies up quite a bit to challenge them. But if you're planning on sticking close to Purest Essence I could see it going the other way as well. If you have nothing but "vanilla" fighters doing 1d6-1d10 tops each round, make sure your enemies don't have hundreds of HP they'll need to hack through.

Otherwise m20 should give you a great chassis for a magic-free game, IMO.

Thank you quaffeine, I think I am going to give it a try. I did find some non-magical medieval RPGs online but they are about 30 dollars, which is more than I want to pay for something I will have to print and study, then possibly play for ten minutes and then decide it's not working out.

I think Microlite20 and Microlite2020 are ideal to develop without magic. I have created a number of different games that do just that. In fact I had to add magic to provide more flexibility. I think the Microlite system is ideal for just such efforts.

I can attest that the game @squirewaldo mentions worked well both with and without the magical elements.

Here is a game I made about a month ago that does not use any magic (link to free download):

https://squirewaldo.itch.io/small-survi ... coYgPmo0Vw