Lacking Natural Simplicity

Going back to Axel Wolfric, one of the example characters for Advanced Fighting Fantasy 1^st Edition, he has spells despite being a sorcery-hating barbarian. This works in AFF 1E because every Hero and adversary is assumed to be wearing appropriate armour. If they remove their armour then all rolls on the Damage Table against them adds 2 to the roll. (See Dungeoner, p. 163 and 164. That's also where it talks about shields.) So any character can put points into the Magic Special Skill (at the cost of reducing their SKILL characteristic by an equal amount), so anybody can have magic.

I've always liked fantasy RPG systems where anybody can cast spells. (Thanks, DragonQuest!)

Unfortunately, this doesn't work as well in Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2^nd Edition. AFF 2E allows anybody to put points into the MAGIC characteristic (similarly reducing the number of points that can be allocated to other characteristics), but casting spells in armour requires additional magic points, the better the armour the more magic points must be spent. (See Advanced Fighting Fantasy, 2^nd Edition, p. 72, bottom of the 1^st column and the top of the 2^nd column.)

I wonder how much it would affect things in a game if I just ignored that rule? I'll have to try it sometime.