I want you to look through the core rules and see how much of it you’d have to remove to reflect a non-violent, non-magical setting. And at that point, why are you still using D&D?
EDIT actually on second thought the Arcana stat and related checks you’d either have to scrap or get creative about repurposing.
Huh? The answer to this is actually literally zero.
Just tell your players they can’t choose spell casting classes, make a decision on whether half-casterish classes like Ranger have spells that are magical or could be explained through nonmagical means, and tell your players to expect no combat.
Just tell your players they can’t choose spell casting classes
In other words, remove those classes from your game.
To play without magic and combat, you’d need to ignore most of chapter 2 (only human); most of chapter 3 (only 3 classes get first level non-combat, non-magic features, and two are spellcasters); half of chapter 5 (no weapons or armour); half of chapter 6 (no combat feats); chapters 9, 10 and 11; and most of the appendices. I did a quick check, and you’d use less than 100 pages out of the 318 in the rulebook.
susaga@sh.itjust.works You know that picking and choosing which parts of the game to utilize is fairly standard practice, right? The rules are just frameworks for systematically determining outcomes that you’ve decided you don’t want to know in advance. You can choose which subset of conditions those outcomes occur under.
Just because you paid for all of the rules doesn’t mean you’re in any way obligated to use them all. Even the parts that have the most pages dedicated to them.
You also aren’t obligated to play D&D. You can play something else where you don’t have to ignore 70% of the game to get what you want. If you just want an action resolution system, play Kids On Bikes. Or Gumshoe. Or Genesys. Or flip a coin, heads you succeed.
If you’re going to buy a system just to ignore most of it, D&D is one of the most expensive to pick.
You also can just use the rules everyone is already familiar with instead of spending the first couple sessions with everyone learning a whole new system
I want you to realise that most systems, including the ones I mentioned, are simpler than D&D. It will not take multiple sessions to learn the rules. For the love of god, you are spending more time arguing against learning new systems than it would take to just learn the new systems.
Most of my DnD campaigns have combat maybe like 1 in 5 sessions even in a fairly vanilla DnD setting. Even though there are a lot of rules for governing combat, I don’t think it’s fair to consider them half of the game.
I always like playing in magic settings so tbh I’ve never really played without it, but I do know some settings like Cyberpunk have magic it’s just rebranded as tech themed.
I want you to look through the core rules and see how much of it you’d have to remove to reflect a non-violent, non-magical setting. And at that point, why are you still using D&D?
EDIT actually on second thought the Arcana stat and related checks you’d either have to scrap or get creative about repurposing.
Huh? The answer to this is actually literally zero.
Just tell your players they can’t choose spell casting classes, make a decision on whether half-casterish classes like Ranger have spells that are magical or could be explained through nonmagical means, and tell your players to expect no combat.
In other words, remove those classes from your game.
To play without magic and combat, you’d need to ignore most of chapter 2 (only human); most of chapter 3 (only 3 classes get first level non-combat, non-magic features, and two are spellcasters); half of chapter 5 (no weapons or armour); half of chapter 6 (no combat feats); chapters 9, 10 and 11; and most of the appendices. I did a quick check, and you’d use less than 100 pages out of the 318 in the rulebook.
So much for “literally zero”.
susaga@sh.itjust.works You know that picking and choosing which parts of the game to utilize is fairly standard practice, right? The rules are just frameworks for systematically determining outcomes that you’ve decided you don’t want to know in advance. You can choose which subset of conditions those outcomes occur under.
Just because you paid for all of the rules doesn’t mean you’re in any way obligated to use them all. Even the parts that have the most pages dedicated to them.
You also aren’t obligated to play D&D. You can play something else where you don’t have to ignore 70% of the game to get what you want. If you just want an action resolution system, play Kids On Bikes. Or Gumshoe. Or Genesys. Or flip a coin, heads you succeed.
If you’re going to buy a system just to ignore most of it, D&D is one of the most expensive to pick.
You also can just use the rules everyone is already familiar with instead of spending the first couple sessions with everyone learning a whole new system
I want you to realise that most systems, including the ones I mentioned, are simpler than D&D. It will not take multiple sessions to learn the rules. For the love of god, you are spending more time arguing against learning new systems than it would take to just learn the new systems.
I guess in my mind the core rules are things like the stats and how ability checks work, and I’d describe classes as something like “core content”.
If that’s how you’re measuring it, then about half of the rules are about combat or magic. If you play D&D without that, you are playing half a game.
Most of my DnD campaigns have combat maybe like 1 in 5 sessions even in a fairly vanilla DnD setting. Even though there are a lot of rules for governing combat, I don’t think it’s fair to consider them half of the game.
I always like playing in magic settings so tbh I’ve never really played without it, but I do know some settings like Cyberpunk have magic it’s just rebranded as tech themed.