Recently, my players and I got kind of bored with the fact that Pathfinder relies heavily on magic items than martial prowess for fighting classes. I realize and accept the fact that spellcasters are more powerful than petty sword fighters in Pathfinder, but my players usually prefer fighters, rangers or rogues not spellcasting classes.
So, we came up with the idea of playing a low-magic campaign. Here are the terms;
- No spellcasting classes for players. This includes paladins, rangers, bards etc. But archetypes that replace spells(such as skirmisher archetype for ranger) is ok.
- No magical items except for very rare and powerful artifacts that
will serve a specific purpose. - There will be spellcasters in the world, but, again very rare and they will probably be the villains of the story.
- Alchemy exists, as well as special materials such as cold iron, mithral etc.
- There will be magical creatures, such as undead, demons, devils.
The main purpose here is that, I want my players to feel competent when they kill a horrific creature, I want them to feel they killed it because of teamwork and tactics, not because they had the right magical item combinations.
Of course, with this comes several concerns on balance of the game.
- How should I handle healing between encounters? Refilling 30 hp can last a long time, even with the help of Heal skill.
- How should I balance encounters? Challenge Ratings assume access to magical items and magical items improve at an exponantial rate so maybe treat the party level as -1 for every four levels they have(against the magical creatures or those rare spellcasters of course)? Example; Party level 1-4 = -1 Effective party level, Party level 4-8 -2 Effective party level etc when determining Challenge ratings for "magical encounters".
- Without magic, Armor Class does not scale, however attack rolls do. At some point, attack rolls will be automatic hits and I don't like that prospect without magic or healing to aid the players. This will make fighting defensively, or feats like Dodge or Combat Expertise more important but I feel, they won't be enough. How should this be handled?
- And finally, without magic, everyone will be a fighter of one kind or another. What are your thoughts on replacing Fighter-level Requirements on feats like Weapon Specialization with Character level?
P.S; The question may be too broad and not have only one definitive answer from one person only, but every idea helps and I will combine those ideas while creating the campaign.
Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
It will take some work, but it's perfectly doable.
Enemies with special defenses
The players won't have access to see invisible, flight, magic weapons, or ghost touch. Therefore, if you include enemies that can fly, or have DR/magic, or are intangible, these will be huge challenges, and may be downright impossible. The easy solution is simply to not include such enemies, but the more interesting way is to treat them as nigh-invulnerable enemies that the heroes will have to figure out how to defeat. In a normal Pathfinder game, a ghost is a normal critter with a +2 CR template pasted on top, and requires some minimal preparation to defeat. In a low-magic Pathfinder game, a ghost is a mystery: why did they become a ghost? How can you persuade them to pass on, or at least let the party pass by peacefully? Can you persuade the local priest to perform an exorcism, and will it even work? Instead of "find monster, insert fireball," these types of encounters are now role-playing challenges, because they can't be solved any other way!
Alternatively, you can simply strip out the special defenses from enemies. Pathfinder assumes you have level-appropriate counters to special abilities anyway, so by removing those special defenses, you aren't going too far from the original intent. Adjusting the CR is left as an exercise for the GM, because it's going to take a fair amount of trial-and-error to determine what the right balance is.
Fixing armor class, and other numbers issues
Pathfinder assumes that both attack bonuses and defenses will be augmented by magic items. This partially balances out if the players don't have magic items, but consider giving everyone a +1 bonus to AC and all defenses every four levels. Don't make them pay a feat for it, just give it to them.
While you're at it, give your players bonus XP for the monsters they defeat, by calculating the XP as if the monsters were a higher CR. Since they're operating without magic, every encounter is going to be harder than what the DMG "expects" when it calculates XP per CR.
What will they do with their money?
Your players won't be able to buy gear that personally enhances their ability to make things dead faster, or grant them new solutions. If you keep to the normal loot rules, then the party will have far, far more money than they know what to do with. You have two options here: give them less money, or give them something to do with that money.
Let them invest in mercenary companies or land holdings. Let them become influential in the church, or their hometown, or even their country as their economic might and donations in the right places give them power that they would never be able to take with a sword. Favors in high places give characters some very powerful options.
Recovery after combat
This will require explicit house rules; you'll need to accelerate natural healing (heal a percentage of HP per day instead of a flat amount?), allow Heal checks to do much more than they normally do, grant the local clergy some extremely localized healing powers (they can heal people brought to their church, but not outside of their place of worship), and/or make this a political game rather than a hack-and-slash game.
If everyone's having fun, then it's a good game. It doesn't matter if the characters aren't optimized: as long as they feel like they're making a difference in the world and they're enjoying the game, then you're doing it right. The characters will be balanced, more or less: they all don't have access to magic, so intra-party balance isn't as much of a problem. You'll see that the players lack all of the magic-based solutions that you'd expect in a normal Pathfinder game, and you'll select the enemies more carefully, but things will work out fine. Let your players know that things will be a bit different than normal, and your players will go along with it; they requested this kind of game, after all.